A Distorted Reality.

I am always looking for a better deal, more features, whatever: my most succinct abbreviation would probably be the age-old statement of a desire of ‘more-for-less’. Free-market competition does have it perks, it would seem: I have changed hosts often just for the thought of a more beneficial business arrangement. I’ve been with (for A Distorted Reality) Dream-Hosting.co.uk (who currently still host starveinheaven.com), HostGator.com (with whom ADR is current hosted) and CheapVPS.co.uk (with whom we were hosted for the last 20 days or so, and a couple of times before). CheapVPS is my most recent complete experience, so I’ve decided to review my time with them for the benefit of others out there.

Price

Let’s face it: price is very important. It always will be: this is an investment of a medium-term, so it has to be tenable. Here, CheapVPS live up to their name most aggressively: 128MB RAM, 10GB of space and 150GB of bandwidth per month for a mere £4.75 per month, with discounts at 3-month, 6-month and 12-month renewal intervals of 5%, 10% and 15%. Elsewhere, it’s practically impossible to find these prices. DirectAdmin can be added at £5 per month and cPanel at £10 per month.

5/5

Range of Features Available

For the price, you get everything that you could ever need. There are OS installation templates for several flavours of Linux; namely CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Fedora Core, Gentoo and OpenSuse. There is also an option of a pre-installed control panel with the CentOS template in the form of LXAdmin, which really seemed more than adequate from my dabblings with it. As is expected from an unmanaged VPS, everything was configure-it-yourself; which suited me fine.

The VPS itself is managed through HyperVM: a rather feature-complete control panel. The option to non-destructively re-install the OS-templates is also useful for those moments where you touch something that you shouldn’t have. It did, however, seem a little bloated and slow.

4/5

Uptime and Reliability

The only real let-down from each of my 3 experiences with CheapVPS is the reliability of their service. I got emails stating that Apache had been restarted far too often for my liking: on my own servers, I had never had Apache go down at all. Ever. Each time, I always ended up with some awful connection problems with one service or another, usually SSH and FTP. As much as support would tell me otherwise, I would swear that the problem was node-side, not a problem with my VPS’ configuration: reinstallation of all software and disabling of the firewall would not help me in any way, shape or form. To the credit of CheapVPS, I never had the VPS go completely down: I could always ping it.

2/5

Support

The support team was wonderful: every question that I asked would be answered within minutes, and they seemed to have no issue with me running a Tor node from a ToS or technical point of view. Each time that I had difficulty, action would be taken swiftly, as soon as they had all information that they needed to know that any fault was not due to my wrongdoing. Support claims are even often answered by one of the company’s bigger cheeses, in the form of Rus Foster.

4/5

Overall: 15/20

Aside from the technical flaws with plagued me, my times at CheapVPS were affordable and well-supported. If their reliability could be worked on, it’d definitely be a complete, permanent winner.

Though, I suppose that prices would rise if that did happen.