hosting in USA

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:48:23AM +0300, Gadi Cohen wrote:
> Hi, sorry for joining in late... but I'll add my own experiences in US
> hosting until now, to add to what everyone else has written here.  *See
> also my end point about speeds from Israel*
> 
> 1) unixshell.com; this is where I started off, it was a VPS running of
> Xen.  Was great for over a year until my VM neighbours started doing
> some weird shit and the thing became unusable.  Being dependent on my
> neighbous to watch their iowait and otherwise play nice didn't suit me. 
> Their sister company tektonic.net running virtuozzo claimed that it
> handled iowait better, but I decided to get my own dedicated server.

I've also started there. At around that time that company mostly gave up
on being "the cheapest Xen provider" and switched to Virtuozzo (with the
name Tektonic). Other providers proved to be more stable.

> 
> 2) server4you.com; was very happy there also for over a year, until I
> had problems I couldn't fix myself (i.e. on their side).  Traffic simply
> stopped coming in on my primary IP.  We exchanged many emails, their
> response time was appaling, and every time they said it was fixed it
> wasn't.  Eventually after TWO WEEKS they told me I was blocked on their
> providers routers because someone tried a DDoS against my IP, although
> it's hard to know since they "conclusively" told me the problem was a
> number of other things.  Kitzur, I had migrated all my data and was up
> and running on another server at another company long before they
> "fixed" the problem.
> 
> 3) serverbeach.com; this is where youtube was hosted before google
> bought them.  Their tagline is "by geeks for geeks" which I liked,
> because I hate dealing with stupid people.  Been here for over two years
> now I think.  It's a bit more expensive then I was used to, but I'm
> happy to pay more for quick response time and people who know what
> they're doing.  Problems when they arose were sorted out very quickly
> (including a hardware failure).  What I also love is that whenever they
> have a problem, even it only affected some users, they post a report and
> post-mortem analysis -- what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what
> steps they've taken to ensure it won't happen again, including on issues
> related to customer satisfaction.  That responsibility sold me aswell,
> because a lot of other providers like to pretend the problem is on your
> side, or doesn't exist, etc.  Lastly, they're partnered with peer1.com,
> one of the US' big first tier backbones.
> 
> Also wherever you go make sure you have good tools to e.g. reboot your
> system, AND access a recovery mode, etc.  I got a cheap VPS in Israel
> for VPN use, and was amazed that I had to call an after hours number and
> physically ask someone to reboot the machine for me.

I've used a number of Xen-based VPS hostings, and all of them provided
similar abilities (remote console - with most, but at least the ability
to order a reboot). Naturally this is something you should check before
you buy.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
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