So, 24 hours of using Virpus, and here’s my review. I’ll be frank here, I use Ramnode, love Ramnode, and have nothing but good things to say about them. I also use Cirrus Tech to host a Windows VPS. But I’m not one to put all of my eggs in one basket, especially with so many businesses relying on my hosting, so I signed up with no expectations for one of the Virpus Linux Seattle-based VPS’s, adding cPanel.
Since signing up, I’ve been able to considerably drop the load from one of my main VPS’s through this new VPS.
It was provisioned instantly, but looks like the IP address wasn’t automatically registered in WHM/cPanel’s system (maybe because I did it after hours?), so I had to wait for that and run a few commands to both install and register WHM… no biggie, it’s self managed, you get what you pay for. After getting it all set up and running, I moved over about 25 sites and swapped DNS IPs to see what it would be like load-wise. Support was quick to respond, even after-hours (not quite as fast as Ramnode but still very prompt and courteous).
Seems very stable, speeds are good, and I ran some hard disk tests which were comparable with Ramnode – almost exactly on par.
The server virtualization technology in use is Xen – which has pros and cons, like me having to patch my own kernel if there are security vulnerabilities, but not having to request second level quotas to be enabled. Also Xen is more flexible from a memory perspective, whereas Ramnode bites the big one when the server gets overloaded by requests due to the technology used: I can expect my clamav, spamd, and mysql services to need to restart daily – thankfully they do this on their own.
Now, I’m a server admin and web developer by trade, so I tend to know my stuff, so don’t take my ease of setup and use as what your experience will be like, but as far as I’m concerned the cost vs the features is well worth it. None of my mission critical sites are on it at this point, until I give it some break in time, but I’d be quite happy setting up clients on here if it continues with this level of responsiveness.