tech notes and general nonsense
I had a major database problem in one of my sites the other day (more on that later). Though I was able to rectify that with my backup, I wanted to restore my VPS from it’s daily backup using the control panel of ComfortHost. Unfortunately, I cannot access the main site and neither the panel site. That’s odd since my VPS is still up. Since the control panel is down, you cannot raise any ticket.
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After the unfortunate incident last week with NordicVPS, I decided to look for a new VPS host. As usual, I went to lowendbox and get the reviews in webhostingtalk. It’s there where I stumbled upon a promo from SpotVPS. As it turns out, SpotVPS is a low-cost VPS offering of ComfortHost.NET.
And who are they? Here’s what they say about themselves.
ComfortHost.NET have been here since 2004 offer high quality web hosting solutions. All SpotVPS nodes are fully owned hardware and are colocated. All servers used by SpotVPS have been bought with internal cash. Our only monthly cost for these servers are the actual colocation. We are financially healthy and profitable since day one. We are NOT going out of buisness any time soon. We are in it for the long run!
ComfortHost on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1110770
Here’s the plan that I got.
$6.99/mo Ultimate Plan
Memory: 2048mb (2gb)
HD Space: 50gb (50,000mb)
Bandwidth: 1,000gb (1TB)
Monthly Price: $6.99/mo
Setup Fee: FREE!
FREE GIGABIT PORT – FREE WEEKLY BACKUPS – FREE HARDWARE RAID
Location: Orlando, FL at DimeNOC
Test IP Address: 72.29.87.105
2GB RAM for $6.99. That’s sweet. Want to try it yourself? ORDER NOW
Word of caution,though. This plan (and all other dirt-cheap vps that I know of) comes with very limited support. You are usually given your VPS, IP and OS install and you have to do the rest. I installed mine with NGiNx, PHP, MySQL and it’s already up and running for 7 days straight now.
Here’s the result of the test I made on my VPS.
[root@vps ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.9939 seconds, 71.6 MB/s
[root@vps ~]# wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2011-11-24 18:10:35-- http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'
100%[==============================================================================================================================>] 104,857,600 66.8M/s in 1.5s
2011-11-24 18:10:36 (66.8 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]
I’ll try to come up with a review together with my other hosting providers. 
I’m a long time client of NordicVPS and it is really sad that their service level is going down the drain lately. First, it was the billing and payment issues. Lately, the unscheduled downtimes.. and now 4 hours on, the whole nordicvps site is down. For the month of November, I already experienced at least two long downtimes (5 hours and more). Sadly, a few of my money sites are hosted on my vps with them. Apparently, they have problems with their German servers.
However, speculations is rife that the reason the servers are down is because NordicVPS hasn’t pay yet. Here’s a screenshot of one of the posts in Webhosting talk.
I really hope that it’s not true.
My friend, Crixus, experienced more than a week of downtime and his tickets still unanswered. Admittedly, his site is up now but he’s planning to move elsewhere. He already paid 6 months in advance.
I’m thinking of moving to another unmanaged VPS hosting, too. It’s a painful process again given the number of domains I have in my NordicVPS account. I think I still have some credits with them, too. I’ll try to do it slowly. My concern is, most of the sites I host there have pagerank and if I move it to another server, the PR will be gone.
Sad, really sad.
**** UPDATE ****
Server is now up!!!!
However, the train has left the station. Time to wind down this server. 
I wish Sean and his team good luck.
As the year 2010 ends, I’d like to review the hosting that I’ve been with for the year. This is the year that I started my baby steps into hosting my sites in VPS and there certainly a lot of things I learned. The purpose of this review is not to bash the companies but to remind me of what was my experience with them when our paths cross again.
Plan : RapidOne
Disk Space: 5GB
Bandwidth: 100GB
Ram: 128MB / 4GB
Support : Unmanaged
CPU: 400MHz / 8GHz
Setup : CentOS+Apache+PHP+MySQL
Price : $19.95
Status : Account Closed
Shared Hosting : $35 annual
Status : Account Closed
Officially, this is the company that helped me introduce VPS back in mid 2009. It was the same time when I was busy doing unix shell scripting in my day job. The knowledge surely helped, of course. But their service went downhill for some reason and stopped offering shared hosting. Though the support is awesome (Rick, the founder, even attends to your tickets), he can’t really do anything if the problem is a hardware failure which became often at one point. I think that was the time when they moved to another data center.
To be fair to them, I’m renting a low-end VPS plan so I shouldn’t be expecting much. I have some online friends who are renting dedicated hosting with RapidVPS and they are quite happy with them. Actually, they are with rapid for more than a year already with very few hiccups. I really wish the guys behind RapidVPS to succeed and I know they will.
I moved on because some of my sites on my shared hosting is growing and I need to move them to a VPS. It just so happened that a competitor is offering a better deal.
Plan : VPS.One
Space : 15GB
Bandwidth : 500GB
Memory : 198MB (recently upgraded to 256MB)
CPU : Equal share
Dedicated IP : 3
Support : Fully Managed
Setup : CentOS+Apache+PHP+MySQL
Price : $17.97 monthly
Status : Active
This is the most reliable hosting I’ve been with. As of posting time, the uptime of my VPS is 302 days. If not for the maintenance that they did early in the year, the uptime could have been easily 100% for 2010. That’s not an easy feat. However, uptime is just one thing to consider. Another one is the speed. And what would you expect on a VPS with that specification? Well, it’s not fast. It takes several seconds to be able to connect via ssh. Not really a problem since once you are connected, you can do what you need to do. But you’ll also ask yourself why it doesn’t happen on other VPS you rent from other companies.
Another thing that I like about them is that they pre install security patches on your VPS and it already comes with Apache, php and mysql. You can be sure that your VPS has already gone through initial security hardening. So basically, the VPS is ready to go when you receive it. However, you must take note that they are using a modified CentOS so you should be careful on upgrading/installing libraries.
Overall, I like JaguarPC. I’m with them for more than a year already and will stick around for the foreseeable future. But it doesn’t mean that I won’t jump to another hosting company if I find a better one. I mean, if there’s another company whose uptime is on par with Jaguar and with better speed and specs at the same or lower price, then I’ll bite that. But for now, I’ll stay with them for at least a few more months.
Plan : U-Basic
Disk Space: 50GB
Bandwidth: 100GB
Ram: 512MB / 2GB burstable
Support : Unmanaged
Dedicated IP : 2
CPU: 400MHz / 8GHz
Setup : CentOS+NGINX+PHP_CGI+MySQL
Price : $5 monthly
Status : Active
For the price of $5 for a VPS with that specs, you would say that you should not expect anything. Surprisingly, they are better than what I expected. However, I had numerous downtimes for the past year and the past week has been specially painful. I have three money sites in my rented VPS with them and the 4 days downtime between Dec 24, 2010 and Dec 29, 2010 is too much to bear.
Their support people reply within minutes to acknowledge your ticket and advise you on the status. However, the resolution is usually slow especially if the problem is on the network. That is my current problem with them but I can’t really complain because I’m paying just a few dollars. And I’m not really expecting anything but I guess I need to move on. Anyway, that’s really the plan. I’m testing nordicVPS and volumedrive right now. VolumeDrive is the hosting company that powers BlackHatWorld.
Plan : Freedom Plan
Space : 50GB
Bandwidth : 500GB
Support Type : 24/7 email & chat support
Setup : Shared Hosting+Cpanel
Price : $8 monthly
Status : Account Closed
This is another hosting service that has an impressive uptime. Actually, I think I only experience one scheduled outage and even then, the downtime is very minimal. Their server is fast and the support is superb. My tickets are answered within minutes and issues/requests solved or granted in a very timely fashion. WPWebhost is highly recommended for those wanting to dabble with the shared hosting.
I left primarily because I want to use WordPress multisite with the release of WP3.0. If I wanted to enable multisite on my account, I should upgrade my plan and the price would already be steep. Also, I don’t have a dedicated IP Address and it would cost me more if I want a dedicated IP. On top of all these, I’m not hosting my money sites there(the original plan is to move one money site there) so the price is no longer appealing. Add the fact that there are cheap VPS with 2 IP addresses and 256MB memory for the same price.
But then again, it was never WPWebhost’s fault. If you want reliability and high uptime for your website and don’t want or don’t know how to setup a VPS, then I would recommend WPWebHost shared hosting for you.
When choosing a hosting company, the plan you are subscribing to is just one part of the equation. VPS specs is not be all end all. Price, uptime, support and network speed all need to be considered in deciding which company to choose. You should do a research on how well the company handles the support of their clients and how good their service is. It has been bittersweet experience for me as I would have earned a lot more if I chose the better hosting. But that’s the price I paid to be able to learn to manage my rented VPS.
It must be also noted the price doesn’t translate to better uptime and support. There are plans that are priced higher because of the features included (no of IP addresses, free domain registrations, Tier1 support, etc., etc.) that has nothing to do with the performance of your VPS. For newbies like me, it would be advisable to get a semi-managed plan or at least a one-month Tier2 support. Luckily for me, JaguarPC has this Tier2 support free for the first month.
The company’s support forum is also a big help. Don’t be afraid to ask questions though it is recommended to search for similar questions first. Webhosting talk is also a big help. Most hosting companies posts there and a lot of people are posting their experiences in the site. It is actually a good starting point in doing research.
Disclosure: JaguarPC links are affiliate links. That means I get a commission if you sign up with them using the links I provided.
If you encountered this error, you are not alone. I’ve encountering this on my VPS too often that I decided to use FireFTP for a while until I found out that it’s a settings issue.
Here’s what you need to do to solve this.
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