Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Other than price?

[NetHosted - Bret]

What do you guys look for in a company / VPS.

Trying to gather a bit of market research and a few threads I've seen with similar intentions have gotten a bit old / outdated. So it would be interesting to see what people look for in a VPS and the VPS providers these days!

Many thanks,
Bret

[LuxuryServers]

I look for the specs of the, Bandwidth and RAM. I also love to check out the control panels that they offer with VPS.

[cd/home]

Originally Posted by Bret - dediShack

What do you guys look for in a company / VPS.

Trying to gather a bit of market research and a few threads I've seen with similar intentions have gotten a bit old / outdated. So it would be interesting to see what people look for in a VPS and the VPS providers these days!

Many thanks,
Bret

it must stink of quality

[NetHosted - Bret]

Alright, thanks for your responses so far. To LongArms, do you look solely for the amount of resources given and disregard the price? Or do you look for the price first then see what resources you can get for that given budget?

[LVPSHosting]

Location, fast network etc... and most important FREE of charge, fast and quality support.

[hostestate - Mae]

I would say the ability to add extras on the go from backup space to management.

All in all the more you can offer for the better quality price your likely to get better business...

[SSHocker]

Support that answers and resolves tickets in under 30 minutes, even if its 3am christmas morning.

[cartikadave]

it must stink of quality

I agree with this. The whole industry seems to be in a downward spiral focusing on "quantity/pricing" and this is also pursued/pushed by end users. The problem is they take quality of service as a secondary "option".

This is the largest mistake being made by hosts and endusers in my opinion. Compare apples-to-apples when choosing a host. Someone like my current host for the past 5/6 years offers hard resources in completely isolated environments using a quality hardware environment with outstanding reputation, service, and support. You cannot compare a host for a VPS that is utilizing 8*300GB 2 1/2-inch 10K SAS drives in raid 60 with one using raid1 2tb SATA drives. Let alone using desktop processors with XEONs, burstable ram, shared kernal/OS, fair use of CPU over dedicated etc. But the very same people wanting those huge resources they will seldom use, often come back and complain about the service they are paying 1/5th of the realistic price of a high quality hosting environment.

I simply sit back and shake my head at both the hosts and the endusers most of the time. The host and the endusers are not doing anyone any favors in environments like these. Heck, you see people complaining over sub $5 unlimited plans..what do people really expect? I think it's a hosts duty to deliver the education the endusers need to know and what to realistically expect. WHT does a pretty good job of this.

It's easy to sell quality even though someone may not have the budget to pay for it; at least it can be justified. I would think it would be more difficult to constantly be chasing the lowest price and highest quantity for a host - something has to suffer.

Give me quality with performance/reliability at a justifiable cost over quantity any day

[NetHosted - Bret]

Thanks a lot for all of the input guys, trust me when I say it's all being taken on board!

[LuxuryServers]

I don't look at prices I look at the company profile, if the company profile is good, the server can cost about $50 just for 1GB Ram and 100GB bandwidth, I would still pay for it. Its a high price so I should recive good support and uptime along with respect from the company. That is how I see it as.

[gplhost]

Originally Posted by tcstatic

I agree with this. The whole industry seems to be in a downward spiral focusing on "quantity/pricing" and this is also pursued/pushed by end users. The problem is they take quality of service as a secondary "option".

Please don't make such generality, sure there's loads of hosts in this case, but many reputable hosts aren't doing that bad (luckily).

Over the years, I have been reading many posts here. Most people are writing that they want to save up to the last dime, and mostly compare prices. Then of course, a large amount of hosts are going this way, trying to put prices down. This of course does not work, for a very easy reason. At any given time, there can be only ONE company offering the best price. Meaning that this type of customers are really volatile, and will go from one host to another. Also, you can only have the best price if you are insanely big, and have a really bad support (because you can't invest on it). So it might work to have very low prices, but for let's say 2 or 3 hosts at the big maximum. Others trying to compete only with prices are going to starve (eventually starve to death).

Also, trying to get insane characteristics is also a wrong thing to do. This is the same reasoning as for prices, but the difference is that your host can lie about it, especially with bandwidth. It is so easy to write that you have a multiple terabyte quota, knowing that the server is only connected at 10Mbits (meaning that you wont be able to transfer more than 320 GB per month at max). So many hosts have made that choice.

Next, are you going to choose yet another host that only understands how to click on its control panel, and vaguely setup an operating system? Because there's loads of them as well.

In this industry, there are very few companies really innovating. To avoid talking about myself (which is forbidden by policy in this forum), I could talk about successful hosts like linode that have a quite complex control panel. These are rare, and you should consider that a host that is capable of doing such programming MUST know what it does. If I was to select a host, I guess that would be the first thing to check, and THEN later all the rest (price, specs, etc. have to come later).

Originally Posted by tcstatic

Heck, you see people complaining over sub $5 unlimited plans..what do people really expect?

That's exactly what I think as well!!!

Side note about hardware: As for using Xeon (which I read before), we NEVER used them, because they are highly overpriced. Currently, I believe that core i7 is the best offer in terms of price and power ratio. And really, core i7 are faaaaaaaaaaaaast!

Thomas

[astiak]

In agreement with what someone mentioned earlier. I will go by the profile of the company itself, and then look at what they offer. I prefer to host with well established companies that have a record of providing good service. Support is of course important and a good company profile should in theory have a good support team, it goes hand in hand.

The network comes second, how fast and how reliable. Following all that I would then look at what resources I need for the VPS depending on what I would be running on it. I'm not too fussed about the virtualisation technology being used, as long as it's not oversold, I'm happy with openvz.

Finally, I would try and fit that into my budget, whatever that may be!

[bugeye]

In order of importance to me is

1. Port speed for the vps
2. Support response time
3. Reliability of vps accessibility. (should never take longer than 10 seconds to login via ssh)
4. Price
5. Flexibility (if I grow I need to be able to migrate easily)
6. Ram - CPU
7. Bandwidth
8. HDD space

Just my opinion and what I have found is important for ME.

[Nnyan]

Over the years I've stopped looking too closely at the overall specs of a server (opposite of what bugeye does). I don't care about CPU being used (since you can't control how many accounts are jammed onto a server). I don't care too much about the specs as long as the meet my needs. Too many hosts offer you 5000GB of this or that but with poor service you'll never use it.

Anyway in no particular order:

1. Quality of services
2. Consistency of quality
3. Dynamic Services (steady improvements/increases)
4. Responsiveness to customer
5. Solid value for services offered
6. Reliability

[123Andrew]

1.) Server/Network Uptime/Speed
2.) Good sales/support/billing
3.) Flexibility
4.) Overall Network/Server Reliability
5.) Node Specifications