Thanks to abjr (again!) for sending me links to new providers. RapidXen is offering cheap Xen VPS plans in either Chicago or Fremont (although at this point of time, Fremont CA is not available). For $5/month you can get a low end VPS wit the following spec:
- 64MB memory
- 256MB virtual memory (swap?)
- 5GB storage
- Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Solaris
It does not say how much data transfer you can push each month but in ToS it does say they have the rights to terminate you for abuses. It is also interesting to see that Solaris is included as they run Xen 3.2 so it should be possible to run unmodified stock kernel if the kernel supports paravirtualization opts. $5/month OpenSolaris box anyone (although system requirement for OpenSolaris seems to be 512MB minimum)?
Comments 12
More info:
Xen guest OS is based on LVM.
In fact, you can have any OS. (You just need to provide an image file which runs on Xen 3.2)
Console access is available but you have to ask.
Posted 23 Apr 2008 at 5:26 pm ¶Thanks. That sounds like a good set up. Unfortunately their West Coast VPS are still not available — I have been waiting for a few weeks now and it is still showing “At Capacity”.
Posted 24 Apr 2008 at 12:19 am ¶Their West Coast VPS are available now.
http://rapidxen.net/plans.php
Posted 25 Apr 2008 at 11:34 am ¶@weakish — thanks! Just got me a 64MB VPS there.
Posted 26 Apr 2008 at 10:50 am ¶I heard some info about bandwidth:
Below 95% of 2mbps is O.K.
Posted 01 May 2008 at 9:50 am ¶How do you like rapidxen so far? Worth it?
Posted 04 May 2008 at 5:39 pm ¶@mighty_falcon — it’s pretty good. The new servers at Fremont are running 64bit whereas the ones at Chicago are 32bit. You programs will actually use more memory if it is compiled on 64bit (all integer and pointers are double in size).
The owner (William) seems to be a great guy. I stuffed up my sign up and there were quite a lot of email exchanges between me and him trying to get issues resolved. Not often timely, but they do get resolved.
Posted 04 May 2008 at 11:46 pm ¶Rapidxen is now doing a promotion. Buy 1 month and get 1 month free.
Posted 14 Jun 2008 at 12:33 pm ¶is rapidXen dead?
Posted 23 Oct 2008 at 1:39 am ¶i been trying to sign up, and i haven’t been able to get to their site, this has been for about 3 days. I already tried with a couple of webproxys and still no luck. Anybody nows something?
I’ve also was trying to sign up with rapidXen, however with the outage going so long, I’ve been having second thoughts. If the website is down for a few days, what does that mean when a server hosting a vps goes down?
Posted 23 Oct 2008 at 10:10 pm ¶RapidXen is alive and well, but we are in the process of rewriting the website.
Right now, you can sign up through our customer management system at https://systeminplace.net/helpdesk/signup/view_packages.php?type=8
Kind regards,
Posted 24 Oct 2008 at 5:14 am ¶William Pitcock
SystemInPlace (RapidXen)
@rob - Typically we don’t have outages like these. The problem is that we had an ex-employee go in through credentials that he had not documented with us during his work on our cluster and erase several drives (including some drives that internal backups were on) before we could lock him out. He moved fairly quickly, and managed to wipe enough of around 3 drives/arrays within the 5 minute window that he had to make data recovery impossible.
Basically, the reason why the site had such an outage, is because it was on one of the drives that was destroyed, and it’s backup was destroyed as well. Ironically, I had a server backing things like that up offsite, but I gave it to a friend of mine when his computer blew up and hadn’t gotten around to setting up a new backup server yet in my home. This is now rectified (well, once some drives arrive from newegg anyway).
Very few customers (roughly 5-6%) were affected in the outage at all, and only 2-3% lost any data because of it (e.g. had their vps on the arrays that got wiped).
Mostly the actions of this ex-employee resulted in damage to our internal stuff, but most things were becoming operational as of a few days ago. Getting network services and our pbx restored was seen as more important than getting our sales presence restored, hopefully this shows that we value our current customers over generating additional sales.
Anyway, sales has reopened via our customer management system, and a proper RapidXen website will likely go online by Saturday afternoon.
Kind regards,
Posted 25 Oct 2008 at 12:18 am ¶William Pitcock
SystemInPlace (RapidXen)
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