16 Oct, 2008, Darva wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
I tried to sign up with VPSland before i tried swvps, but they refused my credit card, and wouldn't tell me why.
16 Oct, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Darva said:
I tried to sign up with VPSland before i tried swvps, but they refused my credit card, and wouldn't tell me why.


OH im glad i am not the only one that has had trouble with them. VPSland rejected my account application because they deemed me to be a fraud risk because i accidentally left the 1 in the country code, +161 instead of +61 for Australia. They had enough smarts to notice that i used the wrong country code, but not enough to remove the 1 and make a phone call to confirm my details. + i had already sent them a scan of my drivers license and credit card to confirm my identity as was asked for by another sales person. In the end i called them myself to get to the bottom of things and to find out what was going on. I would not recommend this company to anyone because of this.

While i have not used swvps, i did email them asking a number of questions regarding their service and the reply was speedy, plus there have been a number of followups from their sales staff to see if they can help me any further. Seems like a company that is on the ball with basic sales service. You would be surprised at how many companies do not even reply to a sales inquiry.
16 Oct, 2008, Vassi wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
The_Fury said:
Darva said:
I tried to sign up with VPSland before i tried swvps, but they refused my credit card, and wouldn't tell me why.


OH im glad i am not the only one that has had trouble with them. VPSland rejected my account application because they deemed me to be a fraud risk because i accidentally left the 1 in the country code, +161 instead of +61 for Australia. They had enough smarts to notice that i used the wrong country code, but not enough to remove the 1 and make a phone call to confirm my details. + i had already sent them a scan of my drivers license and credit card to confirm my identity as was asked for by another sales person. In the end i called them myself to get to the bottom of things and to find out what was going on. I would not recommend this company to anyone because of this.

While i have not used swvps, i did email them asking a number of questions regarding their service and the reply was speedy, plus there have been a number of followups from their sales staff to see if they can help me any further. Seems like a company that is on the ball with basic sales service. You would be surprised at how many companies do not even reply to a sales inquiry.


See,

Whereas I didn't have any problems at all. I think it's like all things, your mileage will vary. My order went through promptly, my VPS was up in three or four hours, and every support ticket I've put in (some with dumb questions) was answered in a reasonable amount of time - about thirty to fourty five minutes. I think there was one that took almost three hours, but I had marked it as low priority so it didn't bother me in the slightest.
16 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
Hmmm, seems pretty militant to require scans of your driver's license AND credit card. That's the level of hassle I expect when I buy a car, not an online service that's around $20/month. Now, if you were paying $2000/month for a business class hosting service where you expected to have World-of-Warcraft or Google type bandwidth usage, maybe. :)
16 Oct, 2008, elanthis wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
I HIGHLY recommend Linode. I have used a range of VPS services over the years, and by far Linode is the best of the best for their price point.

The only complaint I have with Linode is that they do not offer large amounts of disk space, even if you're willing to pay for it. I guess that's what services like Amazon S3 are for these days. I've got 20GB total, which is a bit low for my needs, but absolutely huge for a server used just for a MUD and its supporting web site.
16 Oct, 2008, Vassi wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Hmmm, seems pretty militant to require scans of your driver's license AND credit card. That's the level of hassle I expect when I buy a car, not an online service that's around $20/month. Now, if you were paying $2000/month for a business class hosting service where you expected to have World-of-Warcraft or Google type bandwidth usage, maybe. :)


It was probably because he was from outside the country.
16 Oct, 2008, Cratylus wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
Is paypal a problem in international transactions? Seems like it would
resolve such issues.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the comments. I poked around and determined that
for me, the price/performance sweet spot was swvps's deal of 20g disk,
768M ram, and 500gb traffic for $20 a month.

I must have caught them at just the right time, as that particular
deal doesn't seem easily found on their page now.

Anyway, it's been an interesting experience. Though I'm not normally
a fan of Ubuntu, apt-get is pretty great for just this sort of barebones
thing. I've been able to install pretty much all the utilities I needed
without a lot of fuss.

The service itself I'd call adequate. I haven't had a service emergency
yet, so really the jury's still out. They took paypal, and I was up
within six hours of signing up on a Saturday night.

I discovered that apache is a bit of a resource hog in its default
config…I did have to customize that a bit to avoid its consumption
of hundreds of megs just to idle. Also, the networking on this VPS
is a bit strange. The hocus pocus they use isn't something I care for,
really, but so far it's not a huge problem.

All in all, "not bad". Thanks again for your replies.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
16 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
Just FYI, aptitude is a pretty nice interface to apt that doesn't require a GUI beyond the terminal.

As for Paypal, I imagine that they want to establish not only that you can pay now, but that you'll be able to pay in the future. Getting some kind of credentials from you would let them establish you as a "real person" that they can go after if payments default or something. Just thinking out loud…
16 Oct, 2008, Guest wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
Is paypal a problem in international transactions? Seems like it would
resolve such issues.


I've had a scant few international customers before who paid through Paypal. It was never a problem as far as I could tell. The payment notices all looked the same on my end regardless of where they originated. I would assume as long as you can get past the hurdle of getting the Paypal account, using it isn't an issue for places that take it.
16 Oct, 2008, Brinson wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Out of curiosity, do they limit your CPU use, or do they monitor it and charge you if you exceed a certain amount?

I've not dealt with VM systems enough to know how flexible they are. I know I'd prefer to have it throttled so it just looks like a slower CPU on my end, rather than having a surprise bill because of some obscure race condition that only happens when 3 players kill the same kind of mob in 3 different places, while it's raining and the moon is full, and all three corpses rise up as the same kind of undead. :)


Heh, okay, well, here's the thing.

My linode was running on a dual processor quad core system. There were like 20 accounts per machine if I recall correctly. Do you realize the insane amount of load required to make a mud server use even above 1% on what is essentially an octo-core computer?
16 Oct, 2008, Vassi wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
Brinson said:
Do you realize the insane amount of load required to make a mud server use even above 1% on what is essentially an octo-core computer?


That depends on who wrote it =(
14 Apr, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
I'm sorry to say that the verdict is in for swvps and it's a no-go.

I switched over to them for my "production" stuff in february, and
it's been really a drag. The amount of ram for the price is ubersexy,
but I'm averaging one or two hours of downtime a week. And that's
just the downtime I notice.

The service is rather slow and tends to gimme non-credible stories
about the outages (another ddos! we'll get those criminals, be patient!),
and while I'd really like to just work with them, at this point I'm not
sure it's worth the effort. And it looks like I'm not the only one with a poor
opinion of em these days.

Just thought I'd share my experience for those also deciding a vps host.

I'm going to try some of the suggestions posted here, and see what
works ok.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
14 Apr, 2009, Hades_Kane wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
I'm going to try some of the suggestions posted here, and see what
works ok.


I don't think you'd be disappointed with Quantact.com

3+ years without any major problems on my end. A combined total of maybe 3 hours downtime over the entire time I've been with them.
14 Apr, 2009, Kelvin wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
Slicehost is by far the best I've used so far. You can grow or shrink your VPS on demand, re-image it with all kinds of different operating systems, or even add entire new VPSs (slices) to your account if you require more than one server. They may be added or deleted pretty much instantly on demand as well. Slicehost is built for people with an administrative/development background, so they're not going to hold your hand through basic tasks. However, they do have a few great backup/restore things, and they even offer a single user mode through their secure web panel if you really manage to mess stuff up.

Quantact was also OK. I don't like the OpenVZ VPSs at all. The custom kernel and the really janky modifications they made to work with shared memory really screwed with some of my stuff. On Xen or some other virtualization systems, you can upgrade and install just about anything. The few extra bucks a month some of the hosts charge for Xen is definitely worth it!
14 Apr, 2009, Zeno wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm still with CheapVPS and it's been fine.

As long as I stay below the Boost RAM thingy, I don't have problems.
14 Apr, 2009, tphegley wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
I've really enjoyed linode these past 4 months. No downtime at all on there end.
14 Apr, 2009, Davion wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
17:56:05 up 424 days,  3:36,  3 users,  load average: 0.52, 0.38, 0.36


VPSLand :)
14 Apr, 2009, elanthis wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
Bragging about high server uptime is pretty dumb. All that means is that you're not patching security holes in the kernel, which are pretty critical on any kind of multi-user system, even with VPSes (especially with them, honestly, given the number of VPS-related exploits that were announced last year alone).
14 Apr, 2009, Guest wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
Well. They've been patched, but obviously we haven't rebooted to make them active :)

I think the main point there was to show that VPSLand hasn't caused us any problems with downtime in 424 days and counting.
14 Apr, 2009, Brinson wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
I absolutely loved linode.com when I had an account there.
20.0/45