Decent UK VPS Providers?

Moredhel

Moredhel

Moredhel

Soldato
Joined
11 May 2004
Posts
4,789
Location
Gloucester
Hi guys,

I'm currently with slicehost, and while I generally can't fault them, they are US based so SSHing to the host is slightly laggy, and I get charged an extra £1 a month in overseas transaction fees.

What UK based VPS providers do people recommend? I'd need 512mb of RAM, preferably capable of running FreeBSD, but I'd settle for Linux (in order of preference: Ubuntu Server, Debian or Gentoo, absolutely no Fedora or Red Hat!)

Disk space I'd settle for 5GB although obviously the more the merrier, I'm using about 1.9GB on my slicehost setup.

Bandwidth I'd prefer over 100GB / Month.

Price I'd not be happy going higher than I'm currently paying for Slicehost, which on their 512mb slice is $38 / month.

Any recommendations / experiences?

I also don't really want any restrictions on the kind of services I can run on it, I use my slice for Subversion, various IRC bots and a shoutcast server as well as hosting a few websites.
 
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Tidied up the post as I was on my phone last night heh.

I use rapidswitch for mine - £14.95/m (not inc. VAT) gets you 512MB RAM, 20Gig Storage and 300gig transfer. I highly reccomend them as the quality of the service and customer support is unsupassed imo.

OS Wise CentOS, Debian and Fedora are the default VPS installs (I use debian) - but they may install other OS if you ask...

The only restrictions on IRC useage is your not allowed to connect to EFNet or Undernet - everything else is permitted - tho there have been a couple of clients cut off for having xdcc bots connected to warez networks - I'm guessing after legal action was taken against these bots/networks.

Bandwidth wise I've never seen less than 80-90Mbit/s up/down (~10.4MByte/s down on wget tests) - I'm not sure on the current overage prices but last time I heard it was something like 19p per extra gig - I believe it may have gone down since.
 
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JonRohan said:
I was using cheapvps.co.uk but after a nasty hack through the vps software they were using (not their fault really I guess)
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Aye, HyperVM, they're just switching to KVM now. I've been with a2b2/cheapvps for over 3 years and have been pretty content with the service beyond that incident (which didn't actually effect my vps). £5.46 for a 10gb/128mb/150gb uk based xen vps is hard to beat.
Moredhel said:
various IRC bots
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Most reasonable hosts will forbid anything related to IRC in the T&Cs.
 
beh said:
Aye, HyperVM, they're just switching to KVM now. I've been with a2b2/cheapvps for over 3 years and have been pretty content with the service beyond that incident (which didn't actually effect my vps). £5.46 for a 10gb/128mb/150gb uk based xen vps is hard to beat.

Most reasonable hosts will forbid anything related to IRC in the T&Cs.
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Most VPSs (and I've been looking at a lot of sites now!) don't actually mention it at all. I don't use it for xDCC bots and certainly nothing illegal. My bandwidth usage is actually usually a couple of gig a month, but there have been months of much higher usage (one of my sites was hit by digg at one point)

Looking into rapidswitch now, the efnet and undernet restrictions don't concern me as I only use foonetic, quakenet and freenode.
 
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Can't really explain without a very long post what I use mine for...

mobile putty + screen + IRSSI as a convenient way to use IRC when on the move without lots of reconnections to the IRC server.

Supporting game servers without the cost of another dedicated machine i.e. for file redirects and voice servers.

VPN/web tunnel for either when I'm on other networks I'm not sure are secure or to get around my ISPs rather buggy traffic management that keeps flagging perfectly legit applications as P2P and throttling them to 1.5KB/s :( - not something you need the cost of a full dedi for.

And many other uses.
 
beh said:
Aye, HyperVM, they're just switching to KVM now. I've been with a2b2/cheapvps for over 3 years and have been pretty content with the service beyond that incident (which didn't actually effect my vps). £5.46 for a 10gb/128mb/150gb uk based xen vps is hard to beat.
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That's good to know. In the year I was with them I was very happy and had a great deal with them. In my defense I did do without a proxy for three months whilst I was unemployed. It just happened to be when they were hacked.

Engram said:
Just out of interest.. why do you guys use VPSs?
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I use my VPS as a proxy to access bbc iPlayer (iPlayer blocks none UK IP addresses), as an FTP, webserver and will eventually put my mail on it.
 
I hope this doesn't sound daft but what's the difference between getting a VPS that's based in the UK and one based in the US or elsewhere?
 
Delay between you doing an action and seeing the result from that action...

So if your typing commands into ssh on a UK VPS your latency is typically well below 50ms and things will seem almost instant... on a US based one the delay could easily be 100ms often as much as 200ms from the UK - which starts to get noticeable.
 
Rroff said:
Delay between you doing an action and seeing the result from that action...

So if your typing commands into ssh on a UK VPS your latency is typically well below 50ms and things will seem almost instant... on a US based one the delay could easily be 100ms often as much as 200ms from the UK - which starts to get noticeable.
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Thanks, in the real world (for web hosting), would you notice the difference in time it takes for a web page to load in the UK vs US?
 
Doubtful - page load times are generally in the region of 2-20seconds - 200ms is easily absorbed in that... but you may see varied results due to the traffic levels and routing over that distance - a lot more variables.
 
citycm said:
Thanks, in the real world (for web hosting), would you notice the difference in time it takes for a web page to load in the UK vs US?
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Potentially not that noticeable, server on the East coast with decent transit, for web hosting it's not that critical. Although, if your clients are based in the UK, better to go with a server here.
 
Indeed, my websites on Slicehost are perfect, it's really just the SSH latency which is annoying. I tend to develop on the remote machines when I'm doing small bits of code, and vim in a laggy terminal is insufferable. I have access some UK dedicated servers, and have ended up keeping some of my things on there rather than my VPC simply because of the latency.
 
I use FutureHosting.com for mine. Have a look at webhostingtalk.com for deals which they post on there regularly. I pay about $32 a month for 20GB HDD, 768mb RAM, cPanel and management included as well which is one thing I cant fault them on.
 
JonRohan said:
I use my VPS as a proxy to access bbc iPlayer (iPlayer blocks none UK IP addresses), as an FTP, webserver and will eventually put my mail on it.
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JonRohan
Out of interest as I live in Cyprus at the minute, how do you configure your VPS for use as a proxy?? Have you got software installed??
Do you know if the proxy would work with a PS3??

Cheers.
 
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