Before Choosing a VPS Provider
Customers choose Aktiom because there's more to a VPS than just the amount of disk space or bandwidth. Make sure you're satisfied with a company's choices in the following areas as well.
Who builds the VPS hosting servers?
We could save money by piecing together servers on the cheap – instead we choose Dell PowerEdge servers. Why? Because a data center with racks full of hot-running equipment requires a different level of machine than the spare closet a custom-built SOHO server goes in.
Dell has the money and engineers for building servers able to handle the stress we put them under. It's possible that a VPS provider has the quality control for building their own enterprise-class machines, but we'd rather rely on a large company like Dell to handle it.
You should also find out what happens when a hardware component fails in a hosting server. Do they have spare motherboards on hand to replace a faulty one? If not, how long will your VPS be offline while they're ordering a replacement? This is another reason we choose Dell. After diagnosing a faulty component, a new one is delivered within 4 hours, 24x7x365.
What data center is their equipment in?
Aktiom's data center provider, SunGard Availability Services, manages the needs of high-profile travel and airline websites, as well as many mission-critical sites for companies in the financial services and stock exchange industries. You will directly benefit as an Aktiom client from SunGard's strength and experience in providing high uptime to their clients.
Although most providers have more than one ISP backbone connection, some use a weighting scheme to route all your traffic through a single budget ISP to save money. Make sure your VPS network traffic is routed for performance, not price.
Many data centers run smoothly 350 days of the year because there isn't an unexpected outage needing immediate resolution – but how the other 15 days are handled separates the average from the elite. SunGard earns their reputation of "uptime all the time" by continuous focus on automated processes, preventative maintenance, and disaster-recovery drills. This focus has resulted in only one partial outage in nearly five years since the facility opened.
SunGard has met and exceeded our data center requirements, letting us concentrate on what we do best: providing you a professional VPS that you can count on.
What VPS software do they use?
There are two popular ways to implement Virtual Private Servers: Virtuozzo and User-Mode Linux. Aktiom clients are on Virtuozzo, a commercial software product developed by SWsoft. User-Mode Linux (UML) is open source, and is a great project that we hope continues to progress. But there are reasons to choose Virtuozzo over UML.
First, Virtuozzo is more advanced than UML in allocating hardware resources. For example, a UML-based VPS has a hard limit on RAM, usually 128MB. UML also can't guarantee or scale back CPU usage to a VPS, meaning one customer can take over a hosting server. Our Virtuozzo-based VPSs can burst to 1GB or more of memory, and are guaranteed certain levels of CPU usage.
UML has a higher virtualization overhead due to the way it's implemented. Comparing benchmarks run on a dedicated server versus a VPS, Virtuozzo adds less than a 3% overhead. UML can add a 30% CPU overhead according to an article by the lead developer.
Stability is another factor in choosing Virtuozzo. The UML project relies on the community to find bugs. Our impression of companies using UML is that customers implicity are beta-testers for new UML releases. We'd rather let SWsoft's QA engineers ensure a new Virtuozzo release is stable – which includes extensive beta testing on various hardware and a battery of regression tests.
If you're considering a UML-based VPS, see if the company has a public support forum. Check for postings about recent machine lockups or how often they're upgrading the kernel. It's certainly possible for a company to provide good UML VPSs, depending on how conservative they are and their level of Linux kernel expertise.
Customers tell us that a rock-solid server with high uptime is their biggest concern – Virtuozzo has delivered in that respect. If you have any questions about choosing one VPS provider over another, please don't hesitate to contact us.