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When building a brick and mortar store, you might find a shack in a field that is really cheap to buy, but would you consider that affordable housing for your store? Not likely should be your answer.

NCL Hosting Sydney VMWare VPS Review

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:32:52 +1000

When I first saw NCL Hosting’s end of financial year sale back in June (Australia’s financial year starts from July), I just could not resist it. From their VPS hosting plan page, they are offering 100GB of data transfer for $36.75 (ex GST) per month, and 500GB of data transfer for only $66.75 (ex GST) per month! Bandwidth at this price level might be common place with servers in US, but for NCL Hosting, a Sydney based private company having their servers in Equinix DC (Mascot, Sydney), providing this much Australian bandwidth would be insane!

So basically I asked a few questions in the forums (I am “scotty” on WHT.au) —

• Q: Virtualisation? A: Combination of MSFT and Xen


• Q: Debian or Ubuntu? A: Yes


• Q: Data Centre? A: Sydney (later I found out it’s Equinix)


• Q: You insane? A: (1) Limited offer (2) Bandwidth is subsidised (I guess subsidised == oversold)

Well. It’s only around 40 bucks so a few days later I signed up to give it a test. Almost 2 months later I am now writing this review.

VPS Plans — Cheap Australian Bandwidth

Rule of thumb #1 — when someone said it’s “limited offer”, never believe in it! At least I don’t mind in this case, as their “special price” is still available today, 2^nd month into our new financial year. Here’s their pricing table (taken from their website):

$40/month for 100GB is hard to beat, and $70/month for 500GB (AUD$0.14/GB) is way below cost. Storage is on RAID, and the amount of memory is more than enough for what I intended to use this VPS for — serving static data to Australian visitors (as an alternative to using a CDN like CacheFly). I planned to just install Nginx and let it serve Javascript, CSS and small images.

Signing Up

Signing up was straight forward although a bit of manual process is involved. Within 10 minutes of paying by credit card, Nathan from NCL emailed me asking which OS I would like to install. “Ubuntu 8.10” I replied, and then got the welcome email with IP address and “admin” password within two hours — on a Sunday evening at 10pm!

Although the account activation is not instant, NCL and Nathan still got my thumb up for the fast process.

Initial Impression

So I have now received my IP address and the password, what am I waiting for?!

There is no SSH access!

There is nothing listening on port 22. Having used several unmanaged Linux VPS for the last two and half years and it’s the first time that I was given a freshly-installed Linux VPS without SSH access. It turns out that instead of installing the minimum Ubuntu Server, the standard Ubuntu was installed. On top of that they have also installed Webmin + other packages that I don’t intend to use (Apache, mod_php, etc). The password in the welcome email was actually the Webmin password.

So for the next hour I was trying to figure out how to log into Webmin and then install the OpenSSH server. A bit of fiddling around I have finally got the Bash prompt as root, and the first thing I did was apt-get remove all the extra packages to strip the VPS back to bare minimum.

Then I tried to check out what kind of hardware I got.

$ uname -a

Linux localhost 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel

cpu family      : 15

model           : 4

model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.40GHz

stepping        : 8

cpu MHz         : 3400.777

cache size      : 1024 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug         : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu             : yes

fpu_exception   : yes

cpuid level     : 5

wp              : yes

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss constant_tsc up pebs bts sync_rdtsc pni

bogomips        : 6857.87

clflush size    : 64

Well. Looks like the previous era of Xeon processor, and I only have access to one of the cores. It is running 32bit Linux with kernel 2.6.24. Here is the result of disk performance test:

# hdparm -tT /dev/sda1



/dev/sda1:

 Timing cached reads:   782 MB in  2.00 seconds = 391.53 MB/sec

 Timing buffered disk reads:   70 MB in  3.07 seconds =  22.81 MB/seca



# ./seeker /dev/sda1

Seeker v2.0, 2007-01-15, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html

Benchmarking /dev/sda1 19751MB], wait 30 seconds..............................

Results: 501 seeks/second, 1.99 ms random access time

Interesting result! The throughput is a little bit disappointing for a RAID storage but 2ms seek time on a VPS?! You have to do a RAID10 on 15k RPM drives or SSD to get that! Or maybe the virtualisation layer is doing some tricks on me?!

Not Xen, Not MSFT — It’s a VMWare

It turns out, that my VPS is not on a Xen node. Nor on a MS Virtual Server/Hyper-V node. In fact it is running VMWare.

# lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 01)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 01)

00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 08)

00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)

00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 08)

00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMware Inc Abstract SVGA II Adapter

00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 01)

00:11.0 PCI bridge: VMware Inc Unknown device 0790 (rev 02)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Advanced Micro Devices AMD] 79c970 PCnet32 LANCE] (rev 10)

When you list out all the processes, you can also see vmware-guestd running. Is NCL Hosting running ESXi? Infrastructure? I have no idea but at least the VPS performs alright over the last 2 months.

I think the main issue I have with VMWare is the leaky vmware-guestd. It uses quite a bit of CPU, and the memory usage grows from 1.2MB to 20MB within a month. I have to run /etc/init.d/vmware-tools restart to claim the memory back every now and then although I have no idea whether it will introduce any ill effect on a VMWare-based VPS.

2 Months Later…

So how is it after 2 months? I installed Nginx to serve up static data so I am not running anything CPU intensive. The load pretty much stays at 0 most of the time. The VPS itself is rock stable — no reboots, no downtime, the network is always up. Basically I got nothing to complain about.

As I am only serving the Javascript, CSS and small images, I used around 30GB last month so I have not yet had a chance to test the limit. Bandwidth wise it seems to be buying from the Wholesale Communication Group, and I am getting Teleglobe.net for international traffic and Optus for Australia-wide traffic. Bandwidth also seems to be capped at 10Mbps which is fine for me. From a work server I had at Optus DC at Ultimo, I can fully saturated the 10Mbps link. However from both my home and work ADSL2+ link I can’t even sustain 1Mbps, for some reason that I have not yet investigated.

Overall it is pretty much “set and forget” and the server has no problem handling the traffic. However I am still hesitated to bring my site back to Australia (after moving it to US earlier this year), as I think I still trust Linode more if a disaster strikes.

However if you have high bandwidth requirement in Australia, I doubt you can find anyone cheaper.

Lunarpages Windows Dedicated Servers - Special Offer

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:43:32 +0000
Are you in need of a premium reliable Windows dedicated server?

Lunarpages is providing the first 100 customers to purchase any Windows Dedicated Server plan for 12 or 24 months with a copy of WYSIWYG HTML and website editor, Microsoft Expression Web, and a one-year subscription to Expression Studio Training from Total Training, which provides ...]

Kiosk.ws Offer Unlimited Hosting Plan

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:24:07 +0000

Kiosk.ws recently announced the upgrade of their Titanium shared hosting plan which will now include “unlimited” everything. Realistically this means that they have removed all restrictions on things like storage space, bandwidth and the like.

For full details of the revised plans visit Kiosk.ws Hosting

Kiosk.ws has long been the choice of marketers as a reliable and feature packed hosting company.

Kiosk offer three levels of shared hosting and tailor made dedicated server plans for those needing something special as opposed to the cheapest deal they can find.

As a Kiosk customer I have never had cause for complaint and their service has been faultless and their hosting reliable with very impressive uptime. They have been criticized for their prices in recent times and this has doubtless put off many people seeking “cheap” hosting, but for those wanting real value for money, Kiosk remain a strong contender for anyone doing business online. The excellent affiliate program is an added bonus for Kiosk customers, paying recurring monthly commissions.

With the latest announcements regarding the Titanium Hosting package, Kiosk have ramped up the value for money of their services by a considerable margin. For a very limited time, new customers are also being offered a special “super reseller” package if they are prepared to commit to Titanium hosting for a full 12 months - this includes the design and set up of your own professional Wordpress blog by the Kiosk design team. You will need to be quick to secure a place for this special offer however as it has proved hugely popular.

If you want to see an ingenious use of viral marketing - one reviewer called it “The greatest viral marketing idea of all time” - take a look at The Ultimate SuperTip - a free book packed with valuable and unique marketing tips.

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Seven Effective Ecommerce Strategies

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:01:21 +0000
If you want to maintain a successful business online you can follow seven basic fundamentals that will get you going even in the times when market is in loss.
The first and most basic element in a successful web business is the presentation of your website which can be the web template you’ve used or the ...]

I like water. I drink a lot of it, maybe two gallons + each day. Now the trouble with glasses of water seems to be pervasive especially in the hosting industry and especially during times of maximum conspicuousness. Case in point, Keith Duncan’s drinking problem. I love Keith to death but the guy has a serious drinking problem. With adult beverages he can drink just fine, not spilling a drop, but when it comes to water the guy has serious issues, he can stare at a glass and it will fall over.

Go to Hostican.com

Today`s suggestion:



hostgator Features Review

hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start
windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the
features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited
domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They
use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script
installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few
clicks.



They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the
packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for
others).



hostgator Performance Review

hostgator host their sites on top-of-the-line Dual Xeon servers in their data
centers at Dallas. The data centers are well equipped and connects to 10
backbone providers. They offer 99.9% uptime Guarantee which is the industry
standard.



We started realtime testing of hostgator uptime on Feb 2008. The test is done on
a site hosted with hostgator, using a third party uptime monitor service. The
result after one week shows 99.78% uptime for our test site hosted with
hostgator.



While this is slightly less than the assure 99.9%, it is the BEST performance
out of top 4 hosts tested. There has never been a single case of site being down
for more than 3 minutes at a stretch. hostgator indeed lived up to their
reputation.



Click Here to go to hostican website.





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