November 25, 2009 @ 3:27 am 
Today I noticed that one of the providers we covered last year, Mini VDS, is now redirecting its domain to this new hosting company called JoinVPS. Mini VDS specialised in Linux or FreeBSD virtual servers, but their domain has expired a few days ago. Not sure whether they are rebranding into JoinVPS, or JoinVPS just snatched the expired domain. But anyway, JoinVPS has a relatively new domain (registered in September 2009), and they offer very similar plans:
- 64MB guaranteed/192MB burstable memory
- 3GB storage
- 100GB/month data transfer
- OpenVZ/ISPmanager
Yes — using the same backend (ISPmanager) as Mini VDS, and have servers in the same location as well (New York with NAC).
This smells a bit dodgy to me. Benefit of the doubt says that Mini was bought out by another crowd who decided to use the existing infrastructure, however this *is* the budget VPS market…
Minivds didn’t have such advanced plans – 768mb for $44.
That suggests a rebranding, which is logical as 768 isn’t exactly mini, however I’d wait a while to see if they aren’t a fly-by-night.
AFAIK MiniVDS was a subsidiary of FirstVDS.ru which is Russian low-end VPS provider and in it’s turn is a subsidiary of ISP System (http://ispsystem.com/en/). Which is also Russian by the way.
FirstVDS is pretty well known here. It’s 7 years old. It offers FreeBSD jail boxes and OpenVZ ones. I run some of my sites on it (OpenVZ) and I’m quite satisfied.
NAC is NJ, not NY IIRC
Thanks @Eugene. I think these companies are probably all related.