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02-12-2010, 03:07 PM #1Newbie
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e-Sensibility : FreeBSD : Great Performance, Stability, and Support
I guess I'll start by saying I'm a FreeBSD nut and I've been monitoring VPS hosts for a couple years waiting for affordable FreeBSD VPS hosting. I've tried rootBSD, noticed arpnetworks, and skimmed over the sketchy hosts. I purchased e-Sensibility's es2 VPS package on Jan 13 after chatting with sales and getting the thumbs up for FreeBSD support, even though it would be running in full virtualization.
If you dont want to read the whole story, here are my ratings:
Support: 11/10
Hardware and VPS Performance: 9/10
Network Performance: 9/10
Hardware and Network Stability: 10/10
Price: 10/10
We (e-Sensibility and I) started with FreeBSD 8 amd64 generic. I started my OS configuration (Nginx-PHP5-MySQL) and ran unixbench. Then I ran sysbench --oltp MySQL benchmarks. The results were very good.
Since FreeBSD 8 amd64 is not fully supported as a Xen domU, I built and installed the amd64/XENHVM kernel, which we assume is a kernel configuration that is semi-optimized to run as a Xen guest. This improved some of the unixbench scores a decent amount, but I/O performance dropped significantly. The reason for this still escapes us.
It was about this time we caught "benchmark fever".
Benchmark fever led to us installing Centos 5.4 x64. Since CentOS is para-virtualized, we expected the results to be much higher. They were.
Frustrated, I requested FreeBSD 8 i386 so I could build and install the para-virtualized i386 XEN kernel which is supposed to be "self-hosting" (can compile world + kernel in a VM). For good measure, we benchmarked i386/generic. Unsurprisingly, the results were almost identical to amd64/generic.
After building + installing the i386/XEN kernel, the VM would not boot. We reloaded the snapshot, recompiled, installed the kernel and it still refused to boot. We reloaded the snapshot again, this time tweaking /etc/ttys and /etc/fstab to get it ready for living in a Xen world but that only led us to another failed boot.
A Xen kernel that refused to boot in Xen? 0_o
At this point I was advised to consider a linux distro. I refused and went back to FreeBSD 8 amd64/generic.
After a couple days I decided to have them reload the i386 snapshot so I could retry building i386/Xen. I failed. Twice. I felt bad that I had 10 or more snapshots saved of my VM, and had to keep asking to change it, so I decided to install XenServer and XenCenter at home to see if I could get i386/Xen working, and e-Sensibility was nice enough to help me with that.
I was not able to get i386/Xen to boot, however after installing Debian/Xen instead of XenServer I could finally run i386/Xen para-virtualized.
I was horrified to find that it was slower than dirt.
Frustrated and without hope, I gave up on FreeBSD and asked them to install Debian Lenny on my VPS.. and I broke it. They reinstalled it. I tried to work with Debian, but it just wasn't for me.
I was sad, but e-Sensibility threw me a reality check. The fact is my original FreeBSD/amd64 benchmarks showed that it was actually overkill for the load I was expecting on my websites.
I realized how annoying of a customer I must have been, and how patient and helpful e-Sensibility was/is. So I now have FreeBSD 8 amd64/generic back, im happy, and heres my ratings:
Support: 11/10
Hardware and VPS Performance: 9/10
Network Performance: 9/10
Hardware and Network Stability: 10/10
Price: 10/10
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02-12-2010, 03:12 PM #2Uptime Aficionado
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Thanks for the kind words, raouldlv . Don't forget to report your domain for the mods to verify by either clicking report in the top righthand corner of your post, or by posting it here in the thread.
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02-12-2010, 03:17 PM #3Newbie
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02-12-2010, 03:25 PM #4Web Hosting Evangelist
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- Oct 2006
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- canada
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Good to hear about a positive experience. I was ever so close to signing up with e-Sensibility instead of one of my current providers, ever so close
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02-12-2010, 03:44 PM #5Web Hosting Master
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- Mar 2009
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- Austin, TX
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Very thorough review. Thanks!
Do keep us posted in near future!SysAdmin.xyz
Having severs with customer data on it without proper monitoring is like having one night stand without using protections - eventually, there will be an 'oh s**t!' moment.
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02-12-2010, 04:07 PM #6Newbie
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- Jan 2010
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I was ever so close to signing up with one of your current providers instead of e-Sensibility. Ever so close.
I was afraid it was too thorough. I'm glad you appreciated it.
Having built, rebuilt, and installed so many kernels and OS's, I learned a lot about their architecture. I would gone further into hardware, storage, etc specifications, but I don't want to get in trouble . I guess I can say that all the hardware they use is top notch and enterprise-quality in every way.
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02-12-2010, 07:36 PM #7Retired Moderator
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- PA
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02-12-2010, 08:30 PM #8Web Hosting Evangelist
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- Apr 2009
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- 481
Great review, glad to hear good things about e-Sensi. FreeBSD under Xen is non-trivial for sure! Even under KVM accelerated drivers for paravirtualization just aren't there; so performance pales compared with Linux. But as you noted, when run on current-gen hardware its good enough that it doesn't really matter for light users
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02-12-2010, 09:13 PM #9Web Hosting Master
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- Jan 2007
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- 1,025
Thank you for your review raouldlv, there have been quite a number of good reviews about e-sensibility lately, e-sensibility is on my to try list now.
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02-12-2010, 09:41 PM #10Newbie
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- Jan 2010
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- Anaheim, CA
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I'm happy someone here understands my frustration.
I can get FreeBSD i386 XEN running paravirtualized now without too much difficulty on Linux/Xen 3.2+, but I havent figured out XenServer yet.
In fact, if you're a Xen VPS host reading this and would like to test FreeBSD paravirtualized as a guest, I'll build the kernel/world and send you the kernel, disk image, Xen config file, and any other information I know to help you out.
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02-13-2010, 08:02 AM #11Junior Guru Wannabe
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- Mar 2003
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- 57
thanks for the review, good to hear they are treating you well.
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