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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    87

    Solar VPS review

    After having all of my websites hosted with a reseller account in the states I recently decided to upgrade to a VPS account, preferably one based in the UK or Europe. I looked at a number of VPS providers including interhost.co.uk, vpsland.co.uk, boltconnect.co.uk, eurovps.co.uk and solarvps.co.uk.

    After reading about Windows VPS I decided that I wanted to 512Mb of memory so solarVPSs Jupiter VPSW seemed right for me but the transfer was far higher than I required. So, after a little negotiation via their live chat I placed an order with them for the Jupiter VPSW package but with a lower storage capactity and data transfer and lower price.

    So far the performance of the server has been excellent and actually being able to jump on to the server via remote desktop has been a great help compared to the limitations of my previous reseller hosting. Their european data centre seems to have some good connectivity, I get pings between 10ms and 20ms on my home connection and it didn't seem to be phased by my employers JANET connection, I couldn't actually see how long it took to download a 10Mb file as it had downloaded too quickly.

    The thing that has impressed me the most so far is the support that they provide, it is far beyond what I had expected at this price point. Ross, Bob, Claudiu and the rest of the team have managed to answer all of my tickets promptly and generally within the hour, though sometimes a lot faster. Not knowing a great deal about hosting itself they've helped me set everything up through Plesk and have even been helping me with some code problems that I've had which are well outside of the scope of their support.

    Iv'e not long been with solarVPS but they've managed to impress me so far and I look forward to being with them for some time to come.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Posts
    67
    I will second the positive review of them, had a good experience while I was hosting with them

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    Under the sea
    Posts
    4,208
    I have been with them for about 6-8 months and they are excellent.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Posts
    391
    Sure, its about our 7th month with them with more than VPS (Linux&Windows/US&Europe DC) and actually they'r great all the ways, Wish them always success
    Mostafa
    http://www.Venatra.com
    Venatra.com .:. Specializing in VPS Hosting

  5. #5
    Agreed!

    Nothing but positive things to say about Solar VPS too. Bob and Ross are both extremely helpful and ticket response times are excellent.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Posts
    73
    I've been with Solar for 9 months - nothing but high marks. Performance has been stellar and Ross and Bob have been great to deal with.

  7. #7
    Hello,

    this is my first post in this forum.
    I was only active as a "reader" while looking for a reliable Windows VPS Hosting.
    The positive comments about SolarVPS made me finally switch to them.
    I am (we are, the company I am working for) with SolarVPS for 3 months now.

    Now...we had our worst hosting expirience since we do e-business. Site down, SQL Database troubles, Virtuozzo trouble, EMail enable trouble and many more factors which reverses every action we take to a trouble ticket at SolarVPS.
    I really need a lot of space to comment every one in detail.
    32 trouble tickets...mostly reagrding Site down, Database issues & Virtuozzo trouble

    Why we are still with SolarVPS?
    They support response is excellent, they really do a great job and really make any possible effort to fix our issues.

    Why I post here?
    Now, I was wondering...as you have only positive performaces and no trouble to comment at all...what did we finally pay for?
    Today, as I write...we have issues again and I reading your post, I really start to believe.....that we have been placed on a "refurbished" server.

    Away from this issues, the people make no moves to make us feel secured with their services.
    I mean, OK...it's good to have issues solved...BUT! It makes no fun to have same issues over and over again!


    I do not post because I want to give a bad impression about these guys, I need your advice, how to handle the problems we have as the SolarVPS Team did never took a step to make us feel secured.
    They leave us with this issues like: It happens all the time with SolarVPS Hosting, just call us when your site is down, when your Database has errors, when Virtuozzo troubles....never mind, it happens all the time.

    I mean, they could change the server for us, they could install a new VPS for us from the scratch....they could do so many things to have us as happy customers.
    Because we are not.

    And we are not the sort of guys switching from one host to other....we do not expect 100% uptime.
    But I wonder:Comparing your expirience with ours, it is a big big gap.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Posts
    270
    hey sh2gr , i also had a bad experience with solarvps one month ago and i switched to knownhost and i am really really happy for the change, this is how it goes..

    2006/11/07 i purchased a Mercury Unmanaged Linux (cPanel/WHM), and 2 days after that i received the mail with the configuration of the server, so i loaded up my sites and configured them, i mainly run one site that is a simple machines forum, so i started having a lot of blackzone alerts ,and i even came here to the board (check out my older posts) asking for advice with the black zone alerts on the privmpages , so the things that i remember the most is that u may have black zone alerts because u are exceding the ram usage or the speed of the disk drives is two slow to handle the load so the linux starts putting a lot of processes under the D state flag , what happens is that when apache gets this problems it starts spawning a lot processes to handle the load, and thats when the ram goes high then u get the black zone alert and the virtuozzo kills some processes to stop this from happening....

    What i want to tell u is that check out your black zone alerts logs if u have a lot in the privmpages start thinking to move , maybe even to knownhost , i started thinking to add more ram i even contacted solarvps to do that and im really happy i did not add it. Instead of adding more ram i switched to knownhost and it really is better..

    I even configured apache and mysql to use the less ram possible and that helped on reducing the black zone alerts but the site was really slow whm was slow , everything was slow...

    My site is svcommunity.org and i have 5 more sites under my vps but the main site is that, the fact is that solarvps had 256mb of ram guaranteed and now i have 192mb of that and believe me when i tell u the ram is not the problem, knownhost is really faster and faster and faster than solarvps..

    Maybe solarvps ran out of linux servers so they are loading the new customers into a really full server....

    So on 2006/11/08 i switched to knownhost they configured the server in 30 minutes i started using it since that day im the most happy knownhost client ... SolarVps was unmanaged and knownhost is managed, Solarvps had no backup , Knownhost has daily backups

    Images after i moved to knownhost

    Solar vps load
    hxxp://img47.imageshack.us/img47/8223/solarresourceon5.jpg

    Solar vps alerts
    hxxp://img412.imageshack.us/img412/6999/alertsws6.jpg

    Knownhost load
    hxxp://img219.imageshack.us/img219/8349/knownhostresourcexw6.jpg

    Knownhost alerts
    hxxp://img205.imageshack.us/img205/1759/knownhostalertsen8.jpg

    Thats all



  9. #9
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Minneapolis, MN
    Posts
    1,648
    Quote Originally Posted by rdogg
    My site is svcommunity.org and i have 5 more sites under my vps but the main site is that, the fact is that solarvps had 256mb of ram guaranteed and now i have 192mb of that and believe me when i tell u the ram is not the problem, knownhost is really faster and faster and faster than solarvps..
    That's really not an apples to apples comparison. On Solar's 256meg plan I have a burst up to 384meg, so I surmise you had the same limitation. It's not surprising that you stopped having memory allocation failures, your amount of burst RAM doubled! (Knownhost's plan is 192m guaranteed/768meg burst) The problem is that burst ram, by definition, is not guaranteed, so once the node you are on starts to fill up some more you're likely going to have the same issues again. Unfortunately that's a limitation of the needlessly complex UBC resource parameters, so it's going to be a balancing act with any host not using SLM parameters.

    Quote Originally Posted by rdogg
    SolarVps was unmanaged and knownhost is managed, Solarvps had no backup , Knownhost has daily backups
    That's not entirely accurate either. KnownHost does not have any unmanaged plans (at least they don't advertise it), whereas SolarVPS offers both managed and unmanaged. Just about every Virtuozzo provider (including SolarVPS) allows you to make your own backups with a single click through the VZPP. In any case, it's still a "Best Practice" to have your own off-site backups in case any situation arises where your host would be unable to make them available to you.

    I'm glad you found a solution that works for you; I have heard nothing but good things about Knownhost. From my 10 month run with SolarVPS I've found them to be a fine provider as well. I just can't wait for all the Virtuozzo providers out there to fully convert over to SLM parameters -- at least it presents memory usage in a way that makes sense to the average client.

    Eric
    Eric Spaeth
    Enterprise Network Engineer :: Hosting Hobbyist :: Master of Procrastination
    "The really cool thing about facts is they remain true regardless of who states them."

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Posts
    270
    About the burst ram , if u see the images of my resources i am always below the 40% of the ram used , and when i was having problems with solarvps i was constantly monitoring the ram and it was below 40% but then in maybe 5 minutes that i got distracted *BOOM* blackzone alerts all over so i am still thinking that it had nothing to do with ram but then again its just my opinion.

    Quote Originally Posted by spaethco
    That's not entirely accurate either. KnownHost does not have any unmanaged plans (at least they don't advertise it), whereas SolarVPS offers both managed and unmanaged.

    I'm glad you found a solution that works for you; I have heard nothing but good things about Knownhost. From my 10 month run with SolarVPS I've found them to be a fine provider as well. I just can't wait for all the Virtuozzo providers out there to fully convert over to SLM parameters -- at least it presents memory usage in a way that makes sense to the average client.

    Eric
    If u read more carefully and take your time my post is like this:

    SolarVps was unmanaged and knownhost is managed, Solarvps had no backup , Knownhost has daily backups

    SolarVps was unamanaged and knownhost is managed; "i am talking about the plan that i had and the plan that i have now" , not talking about what the provider offers....

    With my Solarvps i had no backup and with KnownHost i have daily backups, one of my clients deleted his domain in plesk by mistake , so i went opened a ticked and within 10 minutes KnownHost Support dropped all the data of that domain from last nite into my root folder , thats what i call a working daily backup

    And im not talking about the virtuozzo backup that is stored inside the same server, i am talking about a backup in some other server :p

    But then again if u are a happy customer of solarvps congrats to you and i hope you´ll never have any problems with them, if one thing is for sure they are some kind people. I had problems i switched, now i dont have thats all

    Regards,
    rdogg

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Minneapolis, MN
    Posts
    1,648
    Quote Originally Posted by rdogg
    About the burst ram , if u see the images of my resources i am always below the 40% of the ram used , and when i was having problems with solarvps i was constantly monitoring the ram and it was below 40% but then in maybe 5 minutes that i got distracted *BOOM* blackzone alerts all over so i am still thinking that it had nothing to do with ram but then again its just my opinion.
    Actually, the system resource % bar you are referring to is *NOT* the amount of RAM used, but rather a composite percentage of the following parameters:
    Code:
    kmemsize      
    lockedpages
    privvmpages
    shmpages
    numproc
    physpages
    vmguarpages
    oomguarpages
    numtcpsock
    numflock
    numpty
    numsiginfo
    tcpsndbuf
    tcprcvbuf
    othersockbuf
    dgramrcvbuf
    numothersock
    dcachesiz
    numfile
    numiptent
    Note that privvmpages is only one of the metrics measured and represented in that list. You could max out on just privvmpages and still not hit 100% on the resource bar because the other resources are not exhausted. The problem is that privvmpages is the amount of ram your VPS is actually using for programs, and is capped by the amount of burst RAM available to you.

    The only way for you to track that is to either expand out the detailed resource parameters, or cat /proc/user_beancounters and read the current usage value. That number is reported in the number of 4K pages allocated, so multiply by 4 to get your memory usage in megabytes. I'm sure if you look at your usage on Knownhost now, you'll find you are using more than 384meg of ram. Any amount of privvmpages used in excess of the vmguarpages value are fair game to be denied memory allocations.

    There's no magic here -- you doubled the maximum amount of RAM available to your VPS, and now you don't have memory allocation problems. Like I said before, UBC resource allocations are stupidly complex and are therefore very easy to misread.

    Eric
    Eric Spaeth
    Enterprise Network Engineer :: Hosting Hobbyist :: Master of Procrastination
    "The really cool thing about facts is they remain true regardless of who states them."

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    New Jersey
    Posts
    358
    While I am in no way interested in getting into a heated discussion here, I feel it necessary to make the voice of Solar VPS heard in this thread.

    First of all, thank you to all for your positive comments and thank you to sh2gr for bringing your issues to our attention. I would like to comment about sh2gr’s experience as that is where this thread took a turn. Sh2gr is a great customer of ours and we are happy that they have made the decision to continue doing business with us. They have had some very unique problems with their Windows Plesk VPS Server that we have continually helped them with and we will continue to help them with. We have never denied service or assistance to them and we have even offered several other solutions including upgrades or simply a change of VPS at no monetary cost to them. We are working with them to resolve this situation and we are more than confident that their experience will become a positive experience through our support and communication with them.

    Rdogg, as I stated in a previous thread (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=542795), I am sorry your experience with us was not a good experience. Despite the fact that we aim and nearly do make all of our customers happy, we simply cannot provide a service that EVERYONE thinks is the best. In all honesty, we have had customers leave us for other providers who are better suited to them and we have had many customers come to us and tell us we are the best host they have ever been with. For every customer that posts something negative, we have 10 more who say something positive about us. The problem is that many of the people saying positive things say those things privately and not out on WHT. In fact, many customers don’t even use WHT as a regular resource.

    With regards to your “Black Zone” issues, yes it is true that our old 256MB plans were 256MB guaranteed and 384MB burst. Many providers offer burst RAM up to 1GB and beyond, however, we have seen performance issues with this and also feel that is you have paid for 256MB of RAM, you should get 256MB of RAM. Any kind of burst RAM beyond your guaranteed RAM brings the potential for excessive server load. This is also why we don’t advertise burst RAM for these packages on our site. In the past, we have dealt with this on a case by case basis and given additional burst RAM resources to customers when applicable with no additional cost to them. When we revamped our package lines early this summer, we began offering burst RAM of twice the guaranteed RAM and no longer adjust unless the package or RAM is upgraded. Spaethco is exactly right; some providers offer more burst RAM than others. Some providers also experience far greater issues with server load than we do. This is not to say it doesn’t happen to us, but we feel it happens much less by not allowing all of the customers on a node to burst at 4-8 times their guaranteed RAM.

    Spaethco, regarding the SLM memory params, most of our nodes now support this, however, we have seen issues with this so far and until we complete further testing, we will not be implementing it.
    Solar VPS The Best Price to Performance Ratio In Cloud and VPS Hosting
    e: sales@solarvps.com
    The SolarSystem - On Demand VM Creation, DNS Control and more.
    Speed Test: speed.fortressitx.com

  13. #13
    Well, I was the one who turned this review to SolarVPS to a direction where it should not have ( I want to apologize to Padwah, starting this post) so I must be the one who brings it back where it was.


    Since yesterday I am in a continuous contact to SolarVPS and I finally convinced myself that real bad luck and a big lack of knowledge to have serverside issues explained, makes troubles sometimes occur bigger then they are.
    Maybe this will make it simpler: 99% of software & hardware failures are sitting not far in front from the monitor.

    Ross did a great job to explain our issues we have which finally are not related to SolarVPS services or tech. structure, hard to understand if you are new on VPS and new customer of a new chosen Hosting Provider.
    SolarVPS will take any efforts to fix our problems and I am sure they will.
    I want to apologize to SolarVPS as well, bringing our internal technical issues to public.

    After all, one thing worth to mention about this tuff Hosting Business is: There are people behind machines and most Hosting providers forget this…..I met lots of them in the past years in business.
    SolarVPS really impressed me as well with their support.
    For me…there is no other I can compare with so far. I would never change this because of a few bucks less.

    Finally, like in every business, a kind, quickly & professional reply to support tickets does more then a great fancy data centre.

    Hope this brings the thread back to his positive review about SolarVPS

  14. #14

    Angry Solar VPS has no guarantees - beware

    It was on April 14th that I spoke on the phone with a sales person with Solar VPS before placing our order. I explained to him that I needing a window VPS because my current service provider was going to charge me $50 more to move from Linux to windows. I stated to him that we needed the windows VPS for a SightMax chat software and I gave him the minimum requirements that needed to be on the server. The sales person said that would not be a problem and explained to me the promotion on their website of $1 for the first month of service if I order a windows VPS. He directed me to their windows VPS server page and told me what bottom to select to order my plan. I selected the plan and entered my credit card information and ordered. He told me that it would take 24-48 hours to setup our server, so I waited. I received an invoice it had $1 setup and $48 for the server which I believed was paying for one month after the free month for a $1, so I didn't question it at that time, until I became fed up with all the problems and I wanted to cancel. Ticket [#BCN-456-83364] 1) truncated emails. There was a delay in the setting up our server because they said that they needed ID verification and they wanted me to send unrelated business information that was not regarding credit card verification. After completing this hurdle, the setup took 5 days to setup. From the 14th to the 19th they had delayed the setup of the minimum requirement on our server and still not having access at this time. On the 19th they said it was ready and I attempted to access the plesk control panel and it would not let me access. I notified them again. I was told by Voicu Rogojan [#PYP-738-29661] it was ready and then said that there must be a confusion and another ticket was opened to check the problem (ticket [HJH-688-17695] and [PYP-738-29661]). From April 14th – April 25th to fix email truncation [#HJH-688-17695] Upto the April 24th we could not access the website to begin our migration. It wasn’t till April 21st that we could begin migration. During this time we still were experiencing problems with mysql and on the 23th the update to mysql 5.5 was completed by Alex Alex Hociung [#HJH-688-17695] . On the April 25th our server crashed the first time within the 1st 15 days we ordered the serve and I was the one to contact Solar VPS on April 26 at 11 am to fix it, ticket [#HJH-688-17695]. Still by May 1st we are continuing to having problems installing SightMax Live Chat on the server and we cannot resolve the issue of an ASP.NET tab that was supposed to be installed onto the server in IIS ticket [#FFZ-633-95597]and Dragos the manager for the IT department of SightMax.com was getting frustrated in the process. Here we at May the 3rd and we are not able to get webmail working because of a DNS problem that was fixed on the 3rd as well as our church website using shtml was not able to viewed by users, see ticket [#CRQ-359-22991]. Here it was now May the ninth with no resolution the minimum requirements and now the billing department sent a second bill to closed in 10 days we had access to the server and this gave us now reason for concern. I contacted billing and requested to cancel the server because of all the problems. Lukas Rosiak from billing answered the call and after I has stated that I wanted to cancel he said that we still owe $49 and we need to pay before he can cancel. I explained to him that we were under a promotion of $1 for the first month as advertised on the website. He explained that I did not use the code to order the server so it is not valid. I explained that it was his sales person who directed me on how to order online and he did not tell me of a code. I also explained that during this entire process we were not able to use the server because of all of the problems we had encountered within one month. I stated this is unacceptable and unjust. He reversed the second bill because it was 10 day before their next cycle date however Lukas was not willing to refund me back an amount Solar VPS advertises on their website. I have documented all emails and have screenshots of the pages in this complaint. Thank you for your time. SolarVPs has a strict policy of no 30 guarantee, on refunds of any kind and they will not give you the advertised $1 for the first month unless you place a code in the right place. I do not recommend the hosting provider. Buyer beware.
    Every merchant who advertises something on their website should be honest in their business practace and provide what they promise. I was told that we were to have one month for $1 by their sales staff and that is what it should have been as stated on their website. As to the other problems they are

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    Milan, IT
    Posts
    478
    Guy, you should format that message if you want somebody to read it...
    Prometeus.com & iperweb.com Hosting Solutions since 1997
    We are LIR (RIPE NCC member) and do BGP with ASN 34971 Multiple gigabit/s network capacity
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  16. #16
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    Kepler 62f
    Posts
    16,703
    Quote Originally Posted by iperweb View Post
    Guy, you should format that message if you want somebody to read it...
    Agreed.
    And make your own new thread -- don't bump one from 6 years ago.
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