Two weeks ago, I signed up to Zenpipe VPS hosting. It’s a local hosting company run by quite a well known figure in the local development community. I currently using slicehost and webfaction for my hosting need and to me they are the best so far in VPS and shared hosting business respectively. The only thing they lack is something that out of their control - latency. Two weeks ago latency to international link from .my was really bad. It jumped up 600-700ms, unacceptable for most sites hosted outside of local Internet link. Things back to normal now (300+ms) but we don’t know when it would happened again.
Zenpipe offering is quite expensive compared to what Slicehost can offer, though I got some better deal it still bit pricey. First thing is OS choice. With Slicehost, we can choose from a wide range of OSes. Even Archlinux is available if you really need it ;) Zenpipe only provide Centos 5.2 for their VPS. I’m more an Ubuntu user these days and getting into Centos world after leaving Redhat 6 years ago feel like going back into time. Centos might be great for a server setup but not for a low end VPS. Low end VPS is more like shared hosting, it just truly isolated from other users. We don’t care about LVM or RAID support. We just need some tools to help us manage our websites and Centos is far from that. Packages scattered around individual ftp site, I just couldn’t understand that for an enterprise class operating system. I hope they could offer more OS choices in the future.
Second issue is extra tools/features to help us manage the server. With slicehost we got simple admin panel to shutdown/reboot the server, monitor bandwidth usage, manage users, change root password, manage dns record etc. But with zenpipe, we got nothing. It fully un-managed VPS hosting. You got the plain server with root access, go as you wish.
The real advantages of zenpipe over slicehost and other foreign vps provider are support and latency. The latter is the exact reason why I was interested in them in the first place. Slicehost, how good they are cannot beat the limitation in law of physics. Latency to international link from most of .my ISP is known to be very bad and it was so bad at the time I decided to try zenpipe. Things has back to normal now but as we all know, it could be bad again as usual, anytime. In term of support, they’re quite good. I got prompt reply from support ticket within a reasonable time frame. Amran even call me two days ago asking whether my passwd problem has settled or not. Thumbs up for that.
Performance wise, 512MB VPS is not much different than 256MB I have at slicehost. I never test it for real usage so not much I can say about the real value of that extra memory you have. Every bit of memory is valuable in VPS and that was 2 times what I have at slicehost. I really want to put it under heavy strain in real world usage but after few days tinkering with the server setup, I realized that I’m more “shared-hosting” type person. Too much work need to be done and I’m not a sys admin. The ‘shared-hosting’ of course need to be at par with what webfaction can provide.
To conclude, zenpipe VPS is good if you really need a VPS within local data center. They provide better latency and you get more personal support from their team. But you really need to get your hand dirty to fully setup the server. I’m not that type of person so for now I would stay with webfaction and get along with the latency issue.