Hi Everybody,

 

I'm looking for a nice reliable UK based VPS hosting company. Pricing is not a major issue. I'd rather pay more and have great service. Fair enough the price is important. We don't really sit on bags on money, but I'm not looking for the cheapest there is. I'm looking for good service and a decent price.

 

We are looking at acquiring a number of VPSes as we'll be moving our entire hosting infrastructure to VPS.

 

Tech specs:

• Linux - preferably Ubuntu
  
• Unmanaged
  

 

Thanks

Victor

Is your entire hosting infrastructure completely "test-bed" based or are you actually running live production websites?

 

If your running live production websites then either shared or dedicated would be far better for you and would run far quicker than several servers all sharing the same disk input/output.

 

VPS setups will always be slower purely because unlike normal shared hosting, you now also introduce several operating systems that are also competing for disk input/output, along with all the websites they are trying to serve too, which is why normal shared hosting is actually typically much faster (If not oversold)

 

Some cheaper VPS's also have 100mb split between however many VPS's are on 1 physical server too instead of 100mb connections per-VPS, but no matter how people word it or how they try to convince you, a VPS, no matter how many or few are on 1 physical server, the weakest point will always be the throughput speed of the disk controller.

Is your entire hosting infrastructure completely "test-bed" based or are you actually running live production websites?

 

If your running live production websites then either shared or dedicated would be far better for you and would run far quicker than several servers all sharing the same disk input/output.

 

VPS setups will always be slower purely because unlike normal shared hosting, you now also introduce several operating systems that are also competing for disk input/output, along with all the websites they are trying to serve too, which is why normal shared hosting is actually typically much faster (If not oversold)

 

Some cheaper VPS's also have 100mb split between however many VPS's are on 1 physical server too instead of 100mb connections per-VPS, but no matter how people word it or how they try to convince you, a VPS, no matter how many or few are on 1 physical server, the weakest point will always be the throughput speed of the disk controller.

 

I am aware of these shortcomings of VPS's, but we currently have small websites so I'd need to put quite a lot of them on a single machine to make it worth buying a dedicated server. I don't want too many applications to run in the same environment as many of them have different requirements and it's also better from a security point of view. Also if one VPS fails the others will continue to work.

 

There are always pros and cons.

VPS setups will always be slower purely because unlike normal shared hosting, you now also introduce several operating systems that are also competing for disk input/output, along with all the websites they are trying to serve too, which is why normal shared hosting is actually typically much faster (If not oversold)

 

Some cheaper VPS's also have 100mb split between however many VPS's are on 1 physical server too instead of 100mb connections per-VPS, but no matter how people word it or how they try to convince you, a VPS, no matter how many or few are on 1 physical server, the weakest point will always be the throughput speed of the disk controller.

We have many clients come from shared to a vps - the extra cpu , faster disks, dedicated memory can make a significant difference over shared hosting. It's swings and roundabouts - a VPS is a good middle ground between shared and dedicated servers, not to mention how easy it makes it to backup and shift your whole hosting infrastructure without downloading / ftp messy tar.gz backups of clients accounts without root access.

 

VICTOR - what you are asking for is perfectly reasonable, make a list of companies from recommendations and your own research and perhaps start firing off emails to their sales / support. Go the whole hog and ask for a free trial or suchlike - many will be happy to do this for you (with limits mind you!).

We have many clients come from shared to a vps - the extra cpu , faster disks, dedicated memory can make a significant difference over shared hosting. It's swings and roundabouts - a VPS is a good middle ground between shared and dedicated servers, not to mention how easy it makes it to backup and shift your whole hosting infrastructure without downloading / ftp messy tar.gz backups of clients accounts without root access.

 

VICTOR - what you are asking for is perfectly reasonable, make a list of companies from recommendations and your own research and perhaps start firing off emails to their sales / support. Go the whole hog and ask for a free trial or suchlike - many will be happy to do this for you (with limits mind you!).

 

I'm looking for a company someone's been had some great experience with and can fully recommend. There is so much you can find out about a company during a trial period. I remember not having any issues with our current provider over the first 3 months, but after that things started to get a bit on the slow side and quality continued to degrade. Also there are certain things you can't predict at the beginning, but if you have some experience with a company you know how they react to different issues. I'm fully aware there's no such thing as a service without failures. The question is not whether things fail, it's how quickly they can recover from a failure.

 

That's, in short, the reason I'm looking for recommendations.

I can highly recommend NuBlue (http://www.nublue.co.uk/web_hosting/) - I have a couple of VPS with them, performance is brilliant, and prices are reasonable. Their support is also excellent. They specialise in Magento hosting but of course, the VPS can be used for other packages.