I’ve been using Virtual Private Servers from a well-known provider since 1999. Administering it was mainly from shell access and occasionally from their custom control panel (which was buggy and did not have the functions I needed).

After a few years I found the service to be lacking in many areas and started to look for an alternative in 2006. I had a few criteria for choosing my next VPS:

1. Price -  I found it ridiculous to still be paying $95/mo for 4GB of space.
2. Support – My provider started to slip in response time, sometimes taking up to 20 hrs to get a reply.
3. Control Panel – It was 2006 and they were still developing Control Panels that were so unstable that I could not let my clients use (its better now).
4. Overall Reliability – Not really a problem with my then provider, but this is a crucial factor in deciding.

I began my research in popular hosting forums like Web Hosting Talk, Hosting Discussion, etc. A few names seemed very popular, with 2 that were highly recommended – Power VPS and ServInt. I signed up for both (I’ll save my experiences with Power VPS for another review) but here I’d like to share how pleased I am with my choice of ServInt.

I sent in my order in late Oct 2006 and received a personal welcome letter from sales. The turnup email arrived a day later. Here’s the original specs for the  Essential VPS:

• $49/mo
• 10GB Disk Space
• 300GB Bandwidth
• Plesk Control Panel
• Bonus – Acceess to an active forum that had lots of happy customers sharing tips and info. (Tip: This is always a positive indication of a good host)

The server came with 4 IPs and I was able to setup my own DNS pointing to it which is useful for privacy reasons. Setting up websites was very easy using Plesk. It gave me all the control I needed over FTP, Email accounts (including spam filtering/training), MySQL and even DNS.

Performance for my sites were really great, speedy and fast loading. What I really liked was how resources and processes were managed, warning me if something went down and automatically restarting them (I used to have to write scripts/crons to manage them in my older hosts).

But I had some surprises in store. In January 2008, the bandwith was bumped up to 500GB and disk space to 15GB by ServInt. Shortly after that, in March, guaranteed and burst RAM was also increased by 50%, adding a noticeable performance boost. It’s proactive steps like these that really made me glad I switched! That’s not all, in Oct 08, they announced XO Communications network routes to their network of existing connections, which meant better latency for us.

Overall, the uptime over the years have been great. I’ve experienced 100% most of the time save for scheduled support downtimes (which are few and far between). Support turnaround has been typically less than 20 mins.

All these are essential for business growth, allowing me to spend less time in managing it and more time on developing plans that’ll help my clients and resellers. My only regret is not deciding on ServInt earlier!

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