Pcextreme XEN VPS review
About a month ago I got an offer from Pcextreme to try a VPS of my preference for free for one month. Here is a review of my experience with Pcextreme and their new VPS platform as my free month is almost up and I also had some time on my hands.
First impressions.
My fist impression of Pcextreme was a good one. Their sales department answered all my questions in a reasonable amount of time and the sales people are polite and friendly. After some mailing back and forth they even offered me to try a VPS for fee. Their prices are also really competitive as their cheapest plan is around 15 Euro’s a month.
The VPS platform.
In January this year Pcextreme launched their new VPS platform based on Xen virtualization technology. Their machines use Dual Intel Xeon quad core CPU’s, totaling 8 cores per physical server and have 64Gb of ram. Storage is taken care of by 16 fast 15000RPM SAS disks configured in raid 50 to guarantee both throughput and high availability. Each server has dual 1Gbps uplinks to the backbone configured for failover in case a connection goes down.
They also offer free customer controlled reinstalls and reboots of VPS servers. Other options include pausing, stopping and starting your VPS servers as you see fit. All of this is offered through a really simple SSH console and if you are not familiar with the command line Pcextreme has some excellent documentation for their VPS-Shell. You can even hire one of their techies to configure a VPS for you according to your specifications if you have no Linux experience whatsoever. Be prepared to pay for this service though.
What I really like is the fact that Pcextreme does not limit any VPS in resources. Some VPS providers limit a VPS on how much bandwidth, CPU cycles or disk I/O it can use. Pcextreme does not do this, and it seems your VPS can use as much resources as it needs as long as fellow VPS neighbors do not get crippled by it. Another really nice advantage is that Pcextreme only counts your outgoing bandwidth to your monthly traffic limit as opposed to a lot of the other Dutch VPS providers I know of, who count both incoming and outgoing traffic. Bandwidth statistics are not available at this moment though which is a bit of a pity, but features like this are in the works.
Specialized solutions seem to be available as well. Things like private network interfaces between multiple VPS servers for load balancing and high availability are available on request. And traffic between private interfaces is not counted towards your monthly traffic limit. If you are after solutions like this do not hesitate to contact their sales department as they are more than willing to help you out.
Operating System templates.
Upon delivering your VPS it does not do anything. You have to install an Operating System (OS) template of your preference first. In my opinion the choice of OS templates is a little limited. At the time of this writing Pcextreme only offers Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. Yes they took the most popular distributions but I.d really like to see them offer more OS templates in the future. An Arch Linux or Gentoo template would be more than welcome.
Both Debian and Ubuntu are offered in 32 and 64bit templates while Fedora and CentOS are only available in their 64bit variants. Pcextreme however does give you the option to supply them with a Xen template so if you have enough free time, Linux knowledge and a Xen environment available you can possibly built and run any Linux like OS you prefer. For this you have to contact their support people first though.
What I really see as a limitation however is that their OS templates are preconfigured, meaning you cannot run your own real OS installation and thus cannot control the partitioning scheme using the installation wizard of your distribution of choice. You might be able to shrink your disk and reconfigure your partitions and mount points manually. I did not try this out myself though. And to be honest it seems to be more of a hassle that way than specifying a partitioning scheme upon installation. The general quality of their templates is very decent and I am sure that their support people are more than willing to help you out if you want a custom partitioning scheme for your VPS.
The physical host.
The physical machine my VPS is hosted on is very responsive and I have yet to experience any downtime other than the downtime caused by my own stupidity. I seem to be sharing the server with 25 other VPS neighbors ranging from 256Mb VPS servers to 1Gb variants. The nice thing is you can use ‘top’ in the VPS-Shell to get some information about all running VPS servers on the physical machine.
Technical Support.
I did not have too much contact with technical support but the two times I needed them they were really responsive and helpful my two low priority tickets where solved within the 60 minute mark from creating the ticket to a solution, did I mention both times where on a Saturday night? For a low priority ticket this is a really acceptable timeframe in my opinion.
Conclusion.
After a month of use I am really pleased with Pcextreme.s VPS platform. Servers feel responsive and fast, and the uptime of their hosts is good as well (as far as you can test that out in only 30 days) their sales and support people are friendly and willing to help you and answer within reasonable amounts of time. If you compare their feature set to VPS providers like Slicehost or Linode they are a bit limited but this might improve in the future and for my needs Pcextreme is more than sufficient.
