| Posted by hostseeker, 11-30-2010, 10:34 AM | |
I have narrowed my search for a cloud host to vps.net and gigenet. They seem like they have similar plans and prices so I am looking at the other factors now.
I am soliciting feedback from anyone having experience using the above hosts. Especially if you have used both of them and can directly compare.
I am currently hosted on a 6 year old 2.4 celeron dedicated machine with 1GB of RAM, while still adequate, has probably seen it's better days. I am looking to move to cloud hosting for the same reasons as everyone else is, flexibility, scaling, pay for what you use, etc.
My server currently has about 200 accounts that I host for a certain industry, small static sites, plus their low volume email requirements. Monthly transfer averages only 20GB. Total current disk usage is about 25G. I use Cpanel/WHM.
So with the above in mind I am asking about my concerns and solicit your opinions:
1. Reliability/Uptime. How is it with either host? Both seem to say they have 100% up time and the sites are automatically loaded from another machine if one fails. Does it really work that way or have you experienced downtime?
2. Network speed. Do your sites load speedily as you want? As speedy as a dedicated server? Which provider is faster? I am in the USA and all sites are directed to the USA market.
3. Support. While I don't need management help because I will be using Cpanel, I sometimes need support if something goes wrong. How good, fast, and pleasant are the support staff with either provider?
4. Billing. Is their billing easy to understand and mistake free? Are you convinced that you are only billed for what you actually use?
5. Cloud countrol panel. What you administer your resource allocations and build your VM's with. Is it reliable and easy to use?
Anything else that might help me make the right decision?
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| Posted by HostXNow_Chris, 11-30-2010, 11:19 AM | |
You will never get TRUE 100% uptime every year, well not with the right provider anyway, as they have to do maintenance now and again, etc. But you will get much better uptime with Cloud VPS and Dedicated Server hosting compared to standard Shared/Reseller/VPS hosting.
To me, Cloud VPS speeds seem the same as Dedicated.
As for USA Cloud VPS hosting providers, I don't know of any.
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| Posted by hostseeker, 11-30-2010, 11:23 AM | |
Thank you for your reply. Don't the two companies I am considering, Gigenet and VPS.net have datacenters in the USA? According to their websites they do.
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| Posted by IGobyTerry, 11-30-2010, 11:30 AM | |
VPS.NET has multiple cloud locations in the United States; Atlanta, Georgia at 55 Marietta & 34 Peachtree. Chicago, Illinois, in the Continuum & Dupont Fabros datacenters, and then Salt Lake City, Utah in the C7 datacenter.
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| Posted by fancypocket, 11-30-2010, 01:15 PM | |
We have great experience with Gigenet so far.
The only downtime we had was 3 weeks ago (planned maintenance) for around 10 minutes.
Gigenet has a great network. People seem to complain about disk IO with cloud hosting, but I notice Gigenet cloud is even faster than my dedicated server running on SAS drive RAID 10.
Support response time is around 5-10 minutes.
They only display hourly credit/cents. I hope they include hourly/daily deduction on their billing history.
Cloud panel is easy to use and very basic. Easy to understand. I hope they can provide nice cloud panel like Voxel
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| Posted by fancypocket, 11-30-2010, 01:16 PM | |
You may want to consider Voxel as well. They have nice network & free CDN, but slightly more expensive.
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| Posted by hostseeker, 11-30-2010, 02:00 PM | |
Thanks for the responses, keep them coming.
As I said they appear to have similar plans and similar costs. I do see that VPS.net includes one IP address with their plan without extra charge, while with Gigenet you have to buy an IP block of 4 IP's for $4 per month, but you can only use one of the IP's, that does seem sort of strange.
On the other hands Gigenet gives you more disk space on their 2 node plan (40GB vs 20GB) so I would have to purchase extra disk space at VPS.net so that is about a wash.
Again, uptime, speed, support, ease of use of the cloud portal, and billing simplicity and accuracy are my primary concerns now.
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| Posted by eming, 11-30-2010, 02:09 PM | |
That's probably because Gigenet assigns every client a full vlan. VPS.NET runs OnApp where you can share vlans across accounts and still not worry about sniffing or security because of the OnApp firewall setup. That way you can assign IP's as needed with no minimum.
D
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| Posted by vamsi4u, 12-03-2010, 12:32 PM | |
I am using vps.net since 3 months and they are really good..( No downtime ) and they offer good support ..
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| Posted by hostseeker, 12-03-2010, 12:57 PM | |
Thanks for everyone's replies. I really think either provider would be good, they are mostly pretty equal on features, pricing and the reviews here.
Since everything did look pretty equal I decided on Gigenet due to them offering phone support as well as ticket and email support.
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| Posted by pvakr, 12-04-2010, 09:47 AM | |
which one is better in terms of speed?
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| Posted by AviZ, 12-04-2010, 09:17 PM | |
i never really got the just of a cloud i assume that a cloud is just another vps so to speak
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| Posted by fancypocket, 12-04-2010, 10:09 PM | |
Most of them are, but gigenetcloud, vps.net & voxel are not.
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| Posted by cAPTAIN^k, 12-07-2010, 03:56 PM | |
What about Amazon ec2?
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| Posted by Tyl3r, 12-07-2010, 08:47 PM | |
FWIW, we moved away from VPS.net after about 15 outages.
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| Posted by WireNine, 12-12-2010, 06:33 PM | |
Where did you move to?
I'd also like to hear more responses from people who have had experiences with both companies.
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| Posted by snickn, 12-12-2010, 06:36 PM | |
I suspect you're get very little feedback on WHT - it's not exactly our target clientele, but twitter or our forums are quite active. We're over 5000 clients strong..I'd say there may be 5 or so on WHT.
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| Posted by elvis1, 12-21-2010, 10:42 AM | |
care to explain or link a thread if you had made any please?
thanks in advance
EDIT: lame question : does any provide managed support included ? how about ddos protection?
Thx
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| Posted by Tyl3r, 12-21-2010, 10:43 AM | |
http://status.vps.net/
It's pretty obvious, refresh that every few days and you'll see new complete site outages. We moved to linode, which is no "cloud" and our servers haven't been down since.
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| Posted by elvis1, 12-21-2010, 02:59 PM | |
thx mate, any idea about this?:
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| Posted by IGobyTerry, 12-21-2010, 05:48 PM | |
We're on pace to launch 30,000 VMs in 2010; that's no excuse for the struggles we've had, but going off of a simple status page when you're uninformed of our size isn't very reliable. Any provider that has the large amount of complex infrastructure we have is going to have frequent updates, especially when they're as transparent as we are.
I think the fact that our growth rate has continued to climb, while our churn rate has been nearly cut in half, despite a decrease in marketing expenditures shows that a large percentage of our clients are extremely satisfied with the services we offer, and are recommending their friends to signup with our services.
Regardless, you have a valid point - every provider needs to continuously work on the stability of their services provided. It's why we're constantly re-investing our profits into upgrading our infrastructure, rather than using it towards marketing. In the past 90 days we've invested nearly 100k upgrading aging infrastructure, while continuing new cloud build outs for the sake our clients, like the addition of a highly requested Amsterdam location.
For those that like pretty datacenter pictures, here's a little treat with a picture of our 4 new SAN units in our Atlanta location - http://www.screencast.com/users/snic...9-a488a87bbfdd
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| Posted by RyanD, 12-21-2010, 05:56 PM | |
Thats some real fine photography
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| Posted by gone-afk, 12-21-2010, 06:06 PM | |
Pretty
OP: FWIW I used VPS.net for a couple of months just recently and only canceled because I switched to a colo machine, didn't have any outages with VPS.net, liked the control panel, etc.
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| Posted by RyanD, 12-21-2010, 06:07 PM | |
Gordon,
What location were you in?
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| Posted by elvis1, 12-21-2010, 06:11 PM | |
inogenius a front mug shot would have been a killer.. loved the piccie though
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| Posted by gone-afk, 12-21-2010, 06:42 PM | |
West coast I believe, but it doesn't say on the invoices. I only used it for testing purposes so just chose anything.
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| Posted by Patrick, 12-21-2010, 06:50 PM | |
Two well known and respected companies; I've never used VPS.NET, but I can tell you that if you go with Gigenet that they won't shut down your service if you use what you paid for. I know, you're thinking that's a silly thing, why would someone do that? Perhaps you haven't been following the news, but the parent company of VPS.NET (UK2) shut down a large customer known as SimpleCDN for effectively using what they paid for, leaving thousands of their own customers stranded. It was a rather low thing to do, so keep that in mind when you consider anything UK2 ... can you risk losing everything if they decide you're using too much? I can't.
Reference:
http://admin.simplecdn.com/
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| Posted by Tyl3r, 12-21-2010, 06:52 PM | |
10char.
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| Posted by gone-afk, 12-21-2010, 07:00 PM | |
Whoops didn't realize vps.net was a UK2 company, I'll stop recommending them.
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| Posted by ameen, 12-21-2010, 07:55 PM | |
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co...sting_company/ about a month ago..
SimpleCDN is not the first to have it happened too.
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| Posted by JSCL, 12-21-2010, 08:21 PM | |
Gigenetcloud of the two
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| Posted by Tyl3r, 12-21-2010, 09:10 PM | |
On the other hand, Gigenet doesn't respond to DMCA requests at all We've sent them several in the last few weeks without them responding. Not to say you'll ever need to send them a DMCA request, it's just scary knowing their abuse dept is useless.
Therefore, if you HAD to pick between the two providers, I'd go with gigenet.
/theend!
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| Posted by elvis1, 01-03-2011, 10:25 AM | |
I had asked a while ago sales about one of their services and the type of feedback I got was very vague and was answered by someone who seemed not to know much of his/her stuff.. IIRC staff was ukranian or russian ( talking about vps.net )
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| Posted by IGobyTerry, 01-03-2011, 12:32 PM | |
Hi Elvis1,
We do have an office in Lviv, Ukraine, however we also have multiple sales agents located in the United States, and the United Kingdom, who work closely with our clients that have especially technical needs requiring an innovative cloud vps arrangement. If you're still interested in our services, I would encourage you to open a new sales ticket and direct it to my attention so I can make sure it receives a response with the care and love that it deserves.
We do also have a fairly easy to use feedback system that is directed directly to our management team. If you receive a great response, you can easily click on the smilie face in the ticket, and it'll let our management team know to reward our staff. If you receive a response that was unsatisfactory, you can click on the unhappy face, and our management team will immediately be notified via their blackberry's that something was not handled appropriately and that it needs to be escalated.
Regardless, I do apologize that you did not receive a response up to par with what you expected from VPS.NET. We're constantly evaluating ourselves through a number of different metrics, and addressing the various deficiencies we find. It's part of the self-improvement process every business needs to go through to continue to innovate and push the industry forward, and that is always our end goal.
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| Posted by jhadley, 01-03-2011, 12:39 PM | |
I tried vps.net for a bit and the features were great but the performance was pretty bad. It might have just been my VPS..
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| Posted by IGobyTerry, 01-03-2011, 12:42 PM | |
Do you remember which cloud you were on? We've made a lot of improvements to our SAN, and network setup over the past 90-120 days, which has resulted in much better performance.
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| Posted by jhadley, 01-03-2011, 12:50 PM | |
It was UK-based and about 3 weeks ago.
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| Posted by IGobyTerry, 01-03-2011, 01:02 PM | |
Could you contact me so I could find your account? I tried under qualityservers and didn't come up with anything. I would like to research the issue so I could see what caused you to have a less than satisfactory experience.
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| Posted by elvis1, 01-04-2011, 01:50 PM | |
IGobyTerry : many thanks for that kind reply .
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