Of course not. I was using various free web hosting providers – Spree, Tripod, Angelfire, Dencity… etc. You name a free web hosting provider, and I probably used them. Occasionally I did well, and made a site that was worth something, and was able to sell it to someone else for a few days worth of lunch money. Sometimes I turned around and bought a new site that interested me. Regardless, one of the first things I learned was that your hosting provider may be the very single most important part of your website (besides the topic of course). Features, flexibility, and reliability are all three that were important to me back then, and are still the most commonly asked questions we get in the pre-sales queue at VPS.NET.

A Cloud VPS from VPS.NET is able to accomplish all these, while also having several other value addons, like the scalable technology, which when combined with the high availability aspect of the cloud, is something every site could certainly benefit from.

Features
The ease of performing certain tasks ranks high for a lot of users. Having to deal with a hassle is never fun; we’ve attempt to bring in a number of outside features that’ll add a tremendous amount of value for our clients. We offer free billing programs in Blesta and HostBill, free CodeBase accounts and free SSL certificates. Along with that, you can purchase Server Density licenses, a number of control panel licenses (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk), along with cool tools like CloudLinux and KSplice.

Flexibility
With any VPS, you have the flexibility of a dedicated server, being able to install any services or features that you need. You’re able to run your Cloud VPS as necessary for your site. Not only can you install the necessary services, but unlike a dedicated server, you have the flexibility to pay for only the resources you need. With the ability to scale your resources up and down on demand, you can give your site as many resources as it needs at the time. This will not only save you money, but also, if your site ends up receiving a significant amount of traffic, avoid a lot of downtime.

Reliability
Our Cloud VPS product is built from the ground up for reliability. The way we’re able to offer this is through the auto-healing aspect the cloud is able to offer. If at any time the server hosting your VPS experiences a problem, it is migrated over to a new server. This benefits you in comparison to a dedicated server, as you would wait for the server to at least be rebooted, if you’re lucky don’t have to wait for a hardware replacement . We also utilize redundant SANs (storage area network), which means your data is stored across multiple storage arrays. If one of the SANs experiences a problem, the other SAN will take over the work, and your website will carry on with no problem.

                          

This cloud is based on the same technology as our London H & I cloud, which features the OnApp software on the back end, which is what powers and manages our self-healing cloud infrastructure. The cloud also features the same 48 drive redundant SAN setup; this setup is one of VPS.NET’s advantages over competing cloud hosting companies. The way the system works is there are two 48 drive SANs, each in a RAID 10 array with multipath I/O. What this means is data is constantly going in and out of both SAN units as they’re both in an active/active state, so essentially at all times there are 96 active hard drives at your disposal.

Our Amsterdam location is located in the EvoSwitch datacenter, which is in Haarlem, Netherlands, which is just west of Amsterdam.  The datacenter features 431,000 square feet of datacenter space, of which VPS.NET has a cage. The datacenter has all the necessities you’d expect, like a A+B power grids, and VESDA fire protection. The datacenter is also completely carbon neutral, and has signed on as part of the MJA, which aims to cut power consumption by 30% over 15 years.

                          

Our new Chicago Cloud Server location is online. It’s located at the stunning Dupont Fabros Technology data center. This brings our total number of Chicago clouds to 3. In addition to the new Chicago cloud, our new London cloud went live yesterday, bringing the total there to 3 as well. The London cloud is located in the UK2Group datacenter, which is the same location as the prior 2. For those curious, besides the Chicago and London locations, we also have 2 located in Atlanta, Georgia, and 1 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The new license manager module is now available in the VPS.NET control panel. You can find it under the “Edit this VPS” option. The license manager allows you to manage each of your software licenses purchased through VPS.NET, which includes cPanel, ISPManager, ServerDensity, RVSkin, Softaculous, LiteSpeed, and soon KSplice and DirectAdmin.

We’ve also released a few more banner advertisements and buttons for your websites. We now have both US & UK banners  and buttons available. These are great for those who participate in our affiliate program. If you’re not already an affiliate, check out my post from earlier this week on why you should be and how to implement it on your site. As someone who’s been building websites since the ’90s, I can honestly say I really haven’t ever seen an affiliate program that pays out as well as the one we have going on here.

In addition to our announcements, the activity on the VPS.NET forums is really starting to pick up. Some hot posts this week are:

VPS.NET Module for HostBill [Official Release]

How to get Akamai on Demand Streaming to work

PHP Mail() not working

New Blog

A friend sent me a link to a Gizmodo article titled, “Google’s insane number of servers visualized.” They created an image to show how many servers Google has in comparison to other companies, and it’s truly impressive. It, unfortunately, doesn’t take into account the processing power of each of those servers, but it’s still fascinating to see.

That’s all for me this week. Hope you all enjoy the weekend – it’s looking like it’s going to be a gloomy one here in Cleveland, so I guess it’ll be what I call a “Netflix weekend” for me!

                          

This has been a hugely requested stack, and one we just too happy to provide.

At the moment just the standard image is available, in the upcoming weeks we will have LAMP, LB, DB, etc, versions of it available as well.

                          

One will be located in our Utah Datacenter in the USA (home of Westhost, named one of the most reliable hosting companies by Netcraft), the second will reside on our London, UK Datacenter.

Until now we have been working on the VPS Cloud with “temporary” hardware, but with the date of our beta closing in, the final hardware has begun to arrive, today we got to see some of it in the UK office.

Now bare in mind, the hardware costs for the VPS cloud are higher than many smaller companies gross in an entire year, so to see this array of top notch hardware come thru the door, well .. lets just say some bibs where in order to contain the drool

                          

So as such, time has come to start a blog, to keep everybody informed on the latest and greatest features we are working on for the VPS Cloud, as such, during the upcoming days and weeks, we will post details on the new website, the Cloud features, the user interface, and much more.

VPS.net is a new brand by that great hosting outfit, the UK2 Group, owners of 10TB, UK2.NET, Midphase, etc ..

So keep checking this page every day (or even several times a day, things are moving fast), we expect to release VPS.net LIVE on January 31st, but will be looking for beta testers in the upcoming few weeks