I was in need of some external facing virtualized servers and ran across the website at http://vpsland.com. I was skeptical at first as the specs on the website said nothing about them running on ESX servers. But I decided to give it a try. I tried both Fedora virtualized servers and a CentOS virtualized server.

Performance – Fedora
My first concern came when I tried to log on to my first server which was on the Fedora operating system. There seems to be some pretty serious latency between the time you get your user prompt and the time it takes for the password prompt to show up and let you in. This problem also translated into problems when trying to ftp files to the server. The FTP client would often time out while simply making the initial connection. Once the connection is made the file transfers worked just fine.

The second issue I had with the fedora server had to do with running PHP / MySQL applications such as OSCommerce. While static web pages and dynamic web pages from the shopping cart displayed well, when someone tried to add information to the database, it was extremely slow – even unusable. My first customer to purchase on my shopping cart while hosted on this server ended up being listed in the shopping cart as having three purchases. I also discovered that as one uses any php to database operations, the application would seemingly hang for about 30 seconds prior to completing the processing of the data and taking you to the next page.

On the positive side, I had some java based applications sitting on Tomcat that were not serious database consumers. These applications worked acceptably well in this environment as these apps tended to be more memory intensive and less dependent on processor / disk IO / database performance.

Performance – CentOS
I tried using one of the CentOS servers. This server seemed to work better. The logon latency was much improved. I did not test my php applications on this CentOS server. I only tested my java apps with one instance of Tomcat running. This particular application was Fisheye – an Atlassian product. This application works well on this virtual machine. It is memory intensive and comes close to using the entire 1GB of memory that is allocated to this server.

Customer Service:
In spite of them not giving out thier phone number, I found thier customer support to actually be quite effective. It is not good for 24/7 support, but if you are okay with submitting a trouble ticket and waiting about 4 hours, they appear to be fairly reliable.

Conclusion:
In the end, my review is mixed. I continue to be a customer with them as I have the Fisheye application running on the CentOS server. The rest of my applications I got back onto a dedicated server where they seem to work much better. If you decide to try thier services, I recommend starting with the CentOS flavor of a virtual server and not use the Fedora servers.