Hosting: Looking for a good VPS-Speedymac

Hosting: Looking for a good VPS

November 13, 2007 · 6 comments

My attempt to use Media Temple’s Grid service went down in flames.

They were polite, but for technical reasons the Rails container didn’t let me setup their testapp, as documented in the knowledge base.

Now I am back in search for a good VPS provider.

Despite having a rack of XServes and Mac Minis at my partner company, I really want to explore the VPS world.

Burstable scalability is increasingly important in the blog-driven world. Where a single Digg can bring your application crashing down in flames.

For the past year I have been running several sites over on Amazon EC2, with good success. Only once did the server soft reboot and everything came back up perfectly.

The major drawback of Amazon EC2 is server instances have no permanent storage. If it goes down hard, you lose everything on the virtual disk.

It is fairly simple to rig up semi-permanent storage or backups by linking up to an S3 bucket, but performance and costs take a hit.

If anyone has any recommendation, please drop them in the comments.

I placed an order with Slicehost.com, but it is 2 weeks until I can get in there.

6 responses so far ↓

1 Bert Armijo // Nov 13, 2007 at 07:41 PM

Have you looked at http://www.thegridlayer.com?
2 Arman Zakaryan // Nov 13, 2007 at 10:59 PM

Hey Lon, I'm not sure if you're referring to the KB article on mongrel_cluster for the (dv), but if that is the one you are talking about, it was recently corrected and re-published: http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=279 Sorry to hear you had troubles, maybe you can contact me and we can work out what ever the issue may have been? Best, Arman Zakaryan (mt) Media Temple, Inc.
3 slicematt // Nov 13, 2007 at 11:32 PM

Thanks for trying us out, I am sure it will be quicker than 2 weeks, we're moving pretty quickly through the waitlist.
4 Lon // Nov 14, 2007 at 11:51 AM

Bert - Thanks. I will take a look. Arman - I was trying out the Grid Service. I am going to wait and check out Slice host. I did consider moving from the Grid to the DV, and may do so for an upcoming client, whom needs some custom software on their servers. Slicematt - Thanks! I am looking forward to trying out your service.
5 Andy // Nov 14, 2007 at 10:11 PM

I use tektonic.net. I'd love to hear your comments on them.
6 Lon // Nov 15, 2007 at 12:18 AM

Andy - Thanks for the referral! I just got started on SliceHost and will post my thoughts. This winter I may give a few more VPS providers a try to see how they stack up.