CPU units, RAID, and uptime questions...

[November]

I think I understand correctly that the CPU units listed in your plans are proportional and the actual CPU time will change based on the current load from all the VMs on the server. I am curious, though, how many VMs do you run per server? Or maybe a better way to put it would be: What is the total number of CPU units on each server?

Let me do a little math here... The RAM is guaranteed physical RAM on the machine. Your machine specs say 4Gb on each server, so if I figure right, the best case scenario would be 4096 CPU units per server (since RAM and CPU units are equal in your packages). This is of course assuming no overhead. I'll make another assumption and say you are using Opteron 244 CPUs at 1.8Ghz. With dual processor systems, this means that if I purchase the 512 package, I'll get consistent performance equivalent to a half of an Opteron processor (again minus overhead of the Xen system), which is not bad for that price. Am I on the right track here? Sorry about that... I was going to ask a simple question, and got all carried away. I'll try to do better.

Also, what level of RAID are you using?

What is your normal response time for handling hardware issues? One of my previous hosts had a hard drive failure on one of their systems, and it took several days to get it back going (should have been a few hours at most). I understand that you don't offer support for software configuration, etc., and that is not a problem, but I would expect reasonable response time for hardware issues.

My final two questions: How long does it take to set up once I place an order? Are there setup or cancellation fees (I didn't see anything in the TOS, but better make sure)?

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings and answer my questions. I hope to be doing business with you soon.

[matta]

Your observation is correct. There are a total of 4096 units on each host (in theory). In reality about 256MB of RAM is used for Xen/dom0 overhead and if a host starts to experience performance problems we will not fill it all the way. With the Xen overhead total units that can be sold is 3840.

As far as the 512 plan, let's assume 4096 units per host. 4096 / 512 = 8. In this scenario you would be guaranteed at like 12.5% of the total system CPU power. Really though I like to keep our focus on high performance VM's and if a server is getting killed I will move accounts (as shown on previous threads here).

You can check the forums as far as our hardware response. We haven't had any major outages in quite a while. Sometime we receive a bad motherboard/RAM and then we migrate those clients to a spare host. We use HotSwap RAID so if a disk goes bad we can swap it out without rebooting the host server. For monitoring we have nagios on a dedicated monitoring server that checks ICMP/SSH services for all hosts every minute to ensure we know as soon as possible if there is a problem.

We are currently using RAID-5 on most servers and RAID-10 on some. We may be switching all new servers to RAID-10 -- it does perform quite a bit better and the RAID-5 config is actually based on a 6GB RAM server for when Xen supports 64-bit/PAE. I am finding now that 4GB is a nice number as that is about all the disk I/O hardware can handle.

Our cancelation policy is easy, just submit a ticket before your account is set to renew. There are no fees to cancel. No setup fees.

Setups are normally a few hours although sometimes depending on other tasks it may take a little longer.

[November]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll have to figure out which server I want to move for a trial run, and what plan I will need for it. I should get back to you within a few days. I am anxious to try out your service.

[matta]

Are you moving a dedicated server or another VPS? Moving servers is fairly easy using rsync, although we do have a special network config inside the VPS (yes, also mentioned on these forums).

[November]

Actually I think I'll start with a very simple server and install what I need from scratch, learn a little about your system, and then go from there. The first VM will be a teamspeak voice server (no web). After that, I'll set up a test/development system on a seperate VM, to better evaluate Apache/php performance, etc. I'll probably move one of my low traffic sites to this system via FTP (site is currently on a shared server with no shell access).

I'm fairly new to web servers and configuration, though I've been programming for some time, so my biggest concern is getting everything configured correctly, especially mail and dns stuff. I have virtually no experience in that area, so I'll be learning as I go. When I get that all figured out, then I'll consider moving my primary site. In short, I'll mostly be using the system for testing and learning to start with.