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Posted on April 27th, 2010 by Angelo | Linked in Announcements

This has been cross-posted on our forums at https://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=3028.

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Something’s gotta give

Posted on April 3rd, 2010 by Cheyne | Linked in Opinion

If you’ve recently been wondering about the state of the Virtual Private Server (VPS) segment of the Australian web hosting industry, then don’t worry, you’re not alone.

We’ve watched with amusement as more and more “budget” VPS services flood the market, offering everything for next to nothing, while at the same time watching customers come to us on Live Chat or eTicket asking when our Xen VPS services will be available again, as they’re annoyed with the speed of the service, constant high loads, disk I/O problems, or just issues with customer service in general.

The idea behind server virtualisation is actually a good one, but it was never designed to be an oversold platform for cheap containers. In fact, it was designed to make use of under-utilised servers where CPU time and memory otherwise went begging, thereby getting more “bang for your buck” from one server.

The problem with cheap VPS’s is the price. As we found with our Deal of the Decade shared web hosting plans, price is generally a deal maker, but when you’re talking about cheap VPS’s you need to be able to cram in dozens of containers on to the one server (or blade) to make it even come close to turning a profit, and therein lies the problem. A virtual private server should be exactly that, a private server where it looks and feels like nobody else exists, but when you’re cramming 30+ VPS’s on to the one hardware node, you’re going to have issues… eventually.

There are two good examples in the Australian market that I would draw your attention to.

The first is that of Crucial Paradigm. Beside the fact that they still advertise their VPS offering as a “cloud” service (when they tell you it’s not technically a cloud service, but just a marketing slogan), but during a recent hardware failure on one of their VPS nodes, they said they have around 35 VPS’s on each hardware node.

This means at any given time, up to 35 VPS’s can be competing for CPU time, memory and disk I/O, and network access on the one shared ethernet port. On top of this, they have persisted in using HyperVM, a platform for managing virtual servers, even after it was exploited in June 2009 which resulted in over 100,000 websites being wiped out and the owner and founder of the company tragically committing suicide, leaving the project in dire straits.

The second example is Jumba. When you choose to run a virtual server container (VMware), with a virtual server platform (Virtuozzo) to provision VPS’s, automatically the alarm bells ring. Virtuozzo may be the “best value virtualisation platform”, but it’s also one of the most clunkiest and restrictive platforms available.

The trouble is that it’s not a true hardware-based virtual platform, it’s a full software virtual platform that simply emulates hardware, which requires special kernels made by Parallels in order to operate correctly. This causes problems for many users, as the kernels are often many versions behind the “current” release versions of kernels which may be a security risk, in addition to many core features that are missing and unable to be included (until recently, iptables was extremely difficult to operate in a Virtuozzo container).

They are also spruiking the benefits of their IBM blade hardware and 48GB of DDR2-533 memory. Ignoring the fact that DDR2-533 memory is quite old in the grand scheme of technology in 2010, knowing the operators as well as I do, you can be assured that every megabyte of that 48GB will be used.

Going by what most people are saying on their forums and on Whirlpool, most are choosing the “Vegetarian” option which gives them 512MB of RAM, meaning they plan to squeeze around 90+ VPS’s on the one blade! Even if we discount down to 60 VPS’s on the one blade (to allow for a couple of the other menu items), that becomes 60 VPS’s all clawing for CPU time and memory I/O, not to mention the fibre channel disk I/O – but remember, this is just one blade of up to fourteen in the one chassis, all sharing the same fibre channel disk I/O. And because the disk space allocations are so low, the fact that the SAN is running 15,000RPM SAS drives becomes completely irrelevant, as one hard drive could be seeking data for up to 20 VPS’s at any one time.

And on top of this, we haven’t even began to touch on the economics of either example. Our first example would be outlaying around $10,000 for each of their nodes based on the advertised configuration, for a $1,400 per month return, not taking in to account network, co-location and support costs. While our second example has shelled out around $150,000 for their hardware, which is why you can expect them to cram as many customers per blade as possible, as even 60 customers on the base plan only brings $597 per month in to the till, which wouldn’t even cover the cost of it’s share of the monthly repayment, let alone network, co-location or support costs.

While I sincerely wish both of these companies all the best in their endeavors, I will admit to being concerned about how customers see this type of offering without fully understanding the impact it could potentially have on both their service, and the market in general.

The great thing for us is that no sooner do we provision new VPS hardware nodes they are full, and with a waiting list of more than 40 customers, we know that our service, a true hardware-based Xen virtual server environment that doesn’t oversell CPU time or memory I/O, is still a drawcard for us.

We just need to make sure customers are better aware of the different types and levels of service available, and that when they are looking for a VPS solution, they compare apples with apples, and not lemons.