I’d like to share my experience with VPS.net. I’ll cut to the summary right now: cutting edge can be dangerous!
Back in February of 2011. Our WordPress managed hosting company Wurv.com was growing at a steady pace, and we found ourselves with some clients that had been kicked off their old host for “high resource usage” well, we have some pretty beefy servers so we were confident that we’d be able to handle the loads. (I’m speaking of two clients in particular.) Not long after bringing these online and integrated with our other shared servers we began to see frequent MySQL and PHP issues on these servers. We needed to move these high traffic sites, and fast.
Fortunately I had been playing around with VPS.net, which is easy with $1 per day nodes. I had done a few installs of different distributions, and tinkered with the different add ons that are available. There are lots of options. LOTS! So when I needed to move these clients to their own server, I needed one that was easy to scale, and would be ready fast.
With lot’s of locations to choose from, it was nice to pick the best spot based on where the traffic was coming from. I choose SLC-F, for you VPS.net newbies, that’s Salt Lake City, Node F. I spun up 2 nodes with CloudLinux and added Server Density monitoring. Once all the files were moved and the DNS had propagated, Server Density automatically bumped it up a node. I was excited that I could let this server take care of it self in many ways.
Then in the ultimate in bad timing, within 24 hours the server wend down. I tried to reboot, and it never came back. Turns out SLC-F was a newer node, and the SAN died in some way. A “SAN” in laymen’s terms means that the server OS is on one machine and all the storage is on others. I was stuck in a big way. In a mixed blessing though, the sites had not been up on this server to have had any new data put on them. This allowed me to put them up on an alternative site. I will say that Nick and team were very honest and upfront with everything that was happening and credited me for the sever time. The level of transparency is phenomenal at VPS.net read Yoast’s post/interview here,
I am a current customer, but only use as a testing environment at this time. I would love to move our whole infrastructure to VPS.net, but I’m still scared after the incident above. However, many big name sites including our favorite Woothemes.