Update 2023: the landscape has changed considerably over the last 13 years, a lot of the companies mentioned in this post have died, I’ve removed dead links
After some not so pleasurable experiences with the previous VPS hosting provider I started my search for some other one. This time not only google was involved but also aardvark and some of the “top XX best hosting providers” sites. Two results kept showing up. server4you and tilaa. Which one to choose then ? I wanted to give both of them a chance.
server4you. I really tried to buy a VPS there and I failed. Lots of forms to fill and no instant money transfer available. I entered my credit card details only to receive the email after a day or so stating that they were unable to process my payment.
tilaa. What caught my attention there was that clean website of them. I like such a design style, as you can also see it here. Not so cheap, I must admit, but definitely easy to buy. Payment transfered and after about a minute I had a full access to the VPS. That’s how I like things to work. I am using tilaa’s the most simple VPS plan since then and I am pretty happy with it. Here gathered are some things I like or don’t about its services.
- friendly, responsive staff
- 2x RAM amount of swap space - seems great compared to no swap on other VPSes
- KVM- and qemu-based, you get full control of your system
- good overall system responsiveness - I experienced occasional lags when using OpenVZ virtualization before, there’s no such thing here
- they work fast - the day the new Ubuntu 10.10 was released, they had the VPS image ready !
- their motto “We try to be good open source citizens” just convinces me
- the only disadvantage is the price, it’s 8.95 euro net montly, it’s also easy to miss that info on the site
As I already have a safe place to tinker with my system the real work on the server configuration begins. Stay tuned for the next episode.