Unmetered VPS

Updates will be posted here (in GMT time).

20:35: Node reported offline, booted into rescue mode and config files checked

20:40: Technicians are on-site looking into the cause…

22:20: Problem located, the eth0 device isn’t starting due to the MAC address being incorrect, working on a fix

23:08: Waiting on the node to re-build vzquota files for each VM

23: 46: Node back online

1:54: The node dropped about 30 mins prior to this, due to a NIC driver issue (as a result of the fix for the above). The node should now be back online.

Customers: My apologies for this downtime; if you wish to do so, please get in touch about SLA credits for this downtime.

All VPS accounts now come with one backup slot, and further slots are $2.50/month each. Please get in touch if you are a current customer and wish to obtain the free backup slot, or wish to purchase more slots to keep backups of good configs/etc. More info on the backup system here.

Our new node Sandy has been fully installed and configured, and is ready to start hosting VPS containers immediately!

Our new German node should arrive tomorrow, German packages are currently out of stock for today while we wait for & setup this new node. This new node will be called “Sandy”.

I apologize in advance for the length of this post, though I encourage you to read it all, particularly if you are a customer with us.

US VPS Status & Future

Recently we’ve been having some problems with our US nodes. Often small issues, but blown out of proportion because our provider (who will remain un-named) is seemingly incapable of running their business in the recent months. We’ve had emails lost, RDNS records not set for weeks and worst of all, hour-long reboot tickets.

Obviously this is something we can no longer tolerate, and as such I’ve made the decision to stop our US services, or at least no-longer expand in the US (more on this below). The above isn’t the only reason, just the main reason; here’s the rest:

• I really want to focus on our German VPS, the servers in Germany are better quality, in a better datacenter which provides excellent support and a wonderful control panel for all the nodes, as well as bandwidth graphs (critically missing from our US provider)
• I’ve seen a lot of articles about independent news hosting in the US, many of which highlight the increasing number of content removal demands direct from the government, for things such as Wikileaks mirrors (of which I believe we host a few)
• US datacenters are much more paranoid on the whole about DMCA complaints & etc. Our German provider is not only extremely understanding that we can have a high number of complaints, but will happily listen to any reasonable argument to completely ignore the complaint (DMCA complaints from non-copyright owners for example, which are non-legally binding in many cases).
• The state of the US hosting market is 1. extremely saturated and 2. very expensive compared to Europe. I’ve looked at many alternative providers, but when factoring in the cost of the servers & extras, we simply cannot provide non-overloaded servers at our current prices and make a profit. We don’t want to fall into the extreme overloaded budget market.
• The speed of the internet today has negated the need to host websites for US visitors in the US, so in theory this change in strategy will only affect gameservers, which is unfortunate but necessary.

I’ve been reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of US hosting for the last month, and have finally decided that starting immediately we will no longer be expanding in the US. Of course, we currently have around ~60 VPS’s in the US, and they will continue to run fine, along with the two nodes. It’s important to note, however, that the eventual plan is to phase out these nodes, but certainly not for 3 months at least (I have yet to decide how this will be done, to sell the US side or simply discontinue it). Please note: we will be emailing all US clients once we know what the next step is. There is no immediate concern to be had.

It’s been an extremely difficult decision to make, it’ll certainly reduce the profit we make and number of new signups we receive, but I’d much rather we provided an excellent service in one location, with a good reputation, rather than an average service in the US, and a better service in Germany. In the long term, I see this as the best way forward.

Fanatical VPS Development

With the aove said, our focus is now of the German VPS, our original starting place. I’m looking at other locations in Europe, although I’m satisfied with the German provider and we already have excellent pings to all of Europe.

I have quite a few improvements coming soon to our website, particularly in the client area, which is missing some features and has quite a few important style issues which will soon be fixed. I’m also writing some PHP backend code which will allow things such as per-node emails, as WHMCS’s mass-email feature cannot do this (and emailing all clients about an issue on one node is annoying and pointless). The wiki will also see improvements and more articles, as well as links to articles on other websites (which have been tested and verified as working).

I’ve also found some more Ubuntu OpenVZ templates, the current ones still have some issues in some cases (booting without any services running, including networking & ssh). Hopefully these new templates, once tested, will no longer have these problems. I’m also certain there are a few new OS’s available, all of which will be tested and added to SolusVM if working correctly.

As well as plain OS templates, I want to start looking into making some pre-made setups, such as a LAMP template, a LNMP setup (N for nginx) and a cPanel template.

Without a doubt the biggest aim over the next few months is to improve the speed of our service. I’m writing another PHP script which will allow us to have a better view of each node and the number of each package on each node, as it’s always important to remember it’s not the number of VPS’s on a node, but the combined size of all the VPS’s, which varies from package to package. Of course, even then things vary as a Micro can easily use large amounts of CPU while a Huge might use almost nothing. I’m employing a few new tactics to improve the reporting of high loads on nodes, and installing a base set of tools on each node which will allow more efficient and detailed monitoring of what VPS is causing what IO/CPU/network/memory load.

Client Suggestions & Interaction

I’d like to take this chance to encourage our clients to give us suggestions for our service, and to complaint when things aren’t up to scratch! I’m not sure if a client forum would be popular enough, but it’s something under consideration. I’d also like to push our Facebook page & Twitter account, they’re an excellent way to keep up to date with the goings-on here at Fanatical VPS.

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Many thanks for reading,

Nick (owner) & the Fanatical VPS support team.

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If you have any questions about the above post, feel free to contact me directly: nick@fanaticaldev.com.

Fanatical VPS has now been selling VPS servers for 8 months. As with any startup, we’ve had ups and downs. I recall a particularly bad two weeks where we had multiple issues across multiple nodes.

I’m writing this post on the back of our recent purchase of two more nodes, one in the US and one in Germany. This brings us to a total of 6 nodes (4 in Germany, 2 in the US). At this point I’m incredibly pleased with the progress of Fanatical VPS, and hope to continue & expand for years to come. However, I’ve also been thinking about other VPS niches. One market we’re currently looking at is the Windows market, mainly due to a large increase in demand for the same plans, but Windows based. So far we’ve had to turn many people away.

Anyway, the point of this post was simply to notify all of our slow, steady expansion, and plans to possibly expand elsewhere.

After many issues with various bad Ubuntu templates, I have finally found some working ones! We now offer Ubuntu 10 in 32 and 64 bit on all VPS’s!

Welcome to our new website! We hope you like it, we’ve been working on it for quite some time now. We’ve also got a fully redesigned client area for clients which we hope you like! However, probably the most exciting part of this change is the addition of US Unmetered VPS! Even better still is that they’re exactly the same price as our Germany plans!

Check out our unmetered US plans >>