Background

Over the past ten years or so, I had the displeasure of experiencing a number of poor hosting providers until I found ServInt, who blew all the others away with the quality of their services. When I moved to the UK, however, ServInt’s US-only datacentres meant I needed to find a closer host for better response times from my business web services.

VPS.net caught my attention early on with their “cloud” offering, which claimed “self-healing” and fast, easy, auto-scaling of resources. I’ve been with them for over a year now, and I’m going to gauge them against my top-notch experience with ServInt.

Stability

A server that just keeps ticking over is a server that makes me very happy. I can’t remember the last time I experienced unscheduled downtime with ServInt, and I wish I could say the same about VPS.net, with whom I have had any number of outages over the past 15 months.

To be fair, they initially advertised themselves as being in a “beta” stage, and issues have definitely decreased over time. Nonetheless, there have continued to be outages in the past few months which have lasted for many painful hours. Somewhat irksomely, until recently they also advertised “100%” uptime and magical “self-healing” abilities. Thankfully they now seem to have removed these spurious claims and, at a recent “town hall” chat, management promised upgrades and fixes which would see significant improvements to stability.

Support

This is another area in which ServInt excels and VPS.net stumbles a bit, firstly in the need to contact support at all. VPS.net has, in theory, a unique edge in that their self-service control panel means you can handle most changes to your account by yourself, while ServInt’s more “traditional” offering requires their staff to make changes by request. And yet, and yet… Despite the great potential, datacentre outages and bugs in the management software mean I’ve had to file about 20 tickets with VPS.net over the past year. Tickets filed with ServInt: 4.

When I have had to contact support, the speed and helpfulness of responses has varied. Here again, ServInt sets the bar with consistently fast, helpful responses in clear English and 24/7 availability both online and by phone. VPS.net’s response time via their online ticketing system is usually quite good, often under 15 minutes, but my feeling is that the helpfulness of the responses I receive doesn’t reach the same level. Additionally, it is clear that a lot of VPS.net support staff have not mastered English and, while this hasn’t been a major issue, there have been times where I have had to reiterate things because they were either misunderstood or ignored the first time. In contrast, my impression of ServInt’s support is that they both communicate clearly and really stick with an issue until it is resolved. VPS.net plans to launch phone support soon, so we’ll see what impact if any this has on the quality of their support.

Price

I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a quality service and, for me, this is yet another mark that ServInt hits very well. In comparing the basic VPS offering from ServInt with the “nodes” that can be bought for the equivalent price from VPS.net, they initially seem somewhat comparable. They both offer about the same amount of RAM and, while processing power is harder to compare because they both measure it differently, I’ve been able to run similar applications on both. ServInt offers three times the storage that VPS.net does, while VPS.net’s recently updated offering gives twice the transfer allowance of ServInt’s.

When you consider the fact that ServInt includes a free cPanel or Plesk licence while VPS.net charges an extra £7.50/month, four IP addresses to VPS.net’s one (extras are £1/month), daily off-site backups (£4/month on VPS.net), and a higher quality of service, the gap really starts to open up. In addition, ServInt regularly refreshes its offering by increasing resources for all its customers once or twice a year. VPS.net recently increased the transfer allowance for its customers for the first time, but it’s too early to say whether this will be a regular occurrence nor whether they will increase other specs as well.

Communication

I’m only really interested in two basic categories of communication from any hosting provider: notifications about downtime and information about changes to my product. ServInt does this just fine, and every once in a while I get an e-mail notifying me well in advance of some brief scheduled maintenance or saying they’ve just given us more for our money — great.

While they’ve had a fairly regular newsletter, until recently VPS.net was really failing disastrously in making contact about service interruptions. Fortunately, it’s now making moves towards improving this situation and I was pleased to receive an e-mail last weekend announcing scheduled maintenance. It was still only a couple of days in advance, and information about unplanned outages remains pull via a status blog rather than push via an e-mail to affected users, but I am glad to see them coming on in this area. They also differentiate themselves a bit by making their management very accessible via Twitter, e-mail and, for the first time recently, “town hall” chats to address customer questions and share plans for the future.

Features

I’m not quite sure what to call it, but one race in which VPS.net really does pull ahead is its extra features. As I alluded to earlier, it has significantly easier provisioning and scaling via a management control panel, and this is a big part of the “cloud” draw. ServInt doesn’t have anything comparable, but VPS.net manages to be its own worst enemy here by creating something that would be wonderful if it worked consistently but instead causes extra downtime and frustration when it doesn’t. Even when it does work, it doesn’t live up to claims about the speed of scaling nor the previously-mentioned “self-healing” ability.

Nonetheless, I do really like the self-service aspect and am desperate for it to work well, so I’m hopeful about the impact of improvements promised with upcoming upgrades to their infrastructure. Their provisioning is already very solid, and it’s the work of only a few minutes to load up a new, working VPS with one of their many available system images.

In addition to these “cloud” features, VPS.net also differentiate themselves by offering a slew of associated services at competitive prices (bar the previously-mentioned control panel licenses), such as server monitoring, backup, and DNS. And who doesn’t like unlimited free SSL certificates?

Conclusion

VPS.net may have come out of this review a bit poorly, and with good reason: the stability of their product has been poor, their customer service hasn’t been exceptional, and their prices are nothing to write home about. That said, I’ll be staying with them for the time being.

It’s partly a question of effort — I’m not disturbed enough by their shortcomings at the moment to spend the time finding and transitioning to another host — but it’s mostly because of something more positive than that: the sense that they are committed to making improvements. The upgrades they have in the pipeline sound promising for addressing stability issues, I appreciate their big push to increase communications and treat their community well, and I really like what they’re trying to do with their control panel and scaling and I’m fully prepared to love it when it gets even better. Fingers crossed.

Bottom Line

If you’re moving mission-critical services tomorrow you may want to look somewhere else, but if you can wait until the new year or are looking to test the waters then VPS.net may become an excellent option as it develops further.

Pros:

• Very flexible and easy server provisioning
• Commitment to improving quality of service
• Recent efforts at communication
• Add-on features

Cons:

• Service issues
• Quality of support
• Price

Full disclosure: I was motivated to write this review as part of a giveaway by VPS.net.

Posted from Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom.

I’ve found myself working around several annoying Android (or possibly HTC Sense) bugs recently. In the hopes of saving someone else a lot of frustrating Googling, here’s a list of recent issues I’ve suffered and steps to solve them. I’ll update this post if and when I come across any more.I’m not sure how it works, but I think it might just start over from 1 and look for the first available filename, so it ends up filling in the gaps if you

I have an original HTC Desire (Bravo) with HTC’s stock Android 2.2 (Froyo).

Gmail reply is constantly “sending”

Sometimes when I send a reply in the Gmail app whilst offline, when I subsequently connect the e-mail will never get sent.

Workaround (can’t remember source):

1. Connect to the Internet
2. Open the conversation with the unsent replywork arouwork around themnd them
3. Start a new reply to the original message and save it as a draft
4. Go to your “drafts” label/folder and open the draftwork around them
5. Mysteriously, your unsent reply will open for editing
6. Send it
7. You can delete your dummy reply after this

Calendar won’t display all remote calendars

My calendar wouldn’t load the US Holidays calendar from Google. It had worked previously but, for some reason, after a few refreshes it disappeared from my calendars list and wouldn’t reappear. I tried removing and re-adding it in the Google Calendar web interface to no avail.

Workaround (source):

1. Go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All > Calendar Storage
2. Clear data
3. Resync your calendar

Facebook birthday calendar disappears after calendar reset

After a reset of calendar data, e.g. in the previous workaround, the special calendar of Facebook friends’ birthdays will be missing from the Android calendars list. No amount of syncing/refreshing the calendar and Facebook has any effect.

Workaround (source):

1. Go to Settings > Accounts & sync > Facebook for HTC Sense
2. Remove account
3. Re-add your Facebook for HTC Sense account
4. Sync it

Camera takes a long time to save photos

Twice in the past few months, the stock camera app started being very slow to save photos. I’d press the shutter button, the autofocus square would turn green, and the picture would take, but then I wouldn’t be able to take another picture for quite a while. The display would keep working, but the focus square would not reappear, nor the GPS status, nor would the menu work. If I pressed the shutter button again whilst waiting, a picture would unexpectedly be taken later, when the camera started responding once more. Eventually, the camera would be come responsive again, however the video mode would continue to not work in the same way. A force stop of the camera could make the photo mode work again, but the next shot would cause the same problem. I’d been taking a lot of photos, sometimes several quite rapidly, sometimes quickly switching back and forth between photo and video mode, and sometimes taking a fast photo and locking the screen again straight away. It’s seemed to be in some of these instances that the problem has arisen.

Workaround:

1. Go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All > Media Storage
2. Clear data

Note that this will reset your camera settings but will NOT delete your photos off the SD card. Initially your old photos will disappear from the gallery app, but will eventually reappear. In addition, the file numbering of the next photos you take may not follow the ones you’ve already taken, but they won’t overwrite existing photos.

Note to self: when builds from a Git source fail with “Please tell me who you are,” go to the Jenkins configuration page and enter a name and e-mail value in the “Git plugin” section. Rather than setting some reasonable defaults, this bug was “fixed” by the introduction of these settings (see https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-2754).