Agnivo Roy

In the first week of December 2007, I decided to upgrade my current 256MB guaranteed RAM OpenVZ VPS to something stronger and consolidate a few other shared hosting accounts to a single Virtuozzo based VPS. As usual, I turned to WHT forums for handpicking some reputable providers who have good feedback, reputation and of course, some special offers running. Yes, I’m a bit overzealous about comparison shopping and VirPus Networks caught my attention.

Initial Impressions : Researching about VirPus I concluded that they are a financially stable organization and have been in business for 2 years now. Their website looked professional and overall impression convinced me that they aren’t one of those cheapish hosts who don’t care about their services and support. In fact I read their support was really good. Now to throw in some pre-sales questions to make sure of the fact.

I have the habit of maintaining contact with my service providers over instant messengers, particularly with someone holding a higher rank in the organization. This tends to be mutually rewarding and faster in case I need quick support or personal level help. I added Ken (VirPus CEO) on my IM and conversed with him for nearly 30 minutes. He’s friendly, polite and helpful. Thus, I zeroed in on VirPus as my new VPS provider.

Pricing, Ordering & Setup : I found an offer thread “VirPus 7 days of madness” at WHT which had expired 2 days before. Ken assured me that I’d still get the same coupon as a special arrangement. I subscribed for Edge VDS which had the following specs : ( Double resources, 50% off first month and 20% off life. Woot! that’s a great deal. )

Edge VDS (Virtuozzo based)
40 GB of Space (usually 20 GB)
500 GB of Bandwidth (usually 250 GB)
512 MB of Guaranteed Ram (usually 256 MB)
1 GB of Burstable Ram
100% Service Uptime SLA
3 Clean IP Addresses
Basic Management included
Free control panel (I chose DirectAdmin & CentOS 4)
Price: $20 for the first month, $32/mo thereafter, No Setup fee.

Ordering was smooth (WHMCS) and VPS was setup in a few hours. Ken also provided me IP’s from different C-classes upon request. I went on to setup the VPS myself (DA licensing took some time as usual).

A 30 day money back guarantee, 100% uptime SLA and 24×7 support promised as well.

Hardware, Network and Performance : VirPus guarantees that you’d be placed on atleast a dual Xeon node with 12GB RAM and RAID storage. Housed at 1102 Grand DC in Kansas and connected by BGP bandwidth mix of AT&T, Qwest, XO, Cogent and Verizon Business, they use enterprise grade Dell servers and are also cPanel partners too.

I was placed on one of the older Xeon 2.8 (8CPU) nodes, VZPP also worked fine. Ran UnixBench and got score of 115 on the empty VM. Services seemed fast enough and nothing to complain of except the network for some days as below. I have asked them to migrate me to one of their newer nodes to check if I get better bang for the buck.

Little Troubles? : After some days, I started to face a little trouble off and on. I had read some reports at WHT that VirPus often faced DDoS attacks and the network goes down. Now myself started to face the same. It happened intermittently, entire VirPus network would go down for hours or days together. Some clients repeatedly complained at WHT. Even their support site remained offline for extended periods.

Yes, this was getting ridiculous even though emails about the network being down were sent by VirPus with apologies. Yet, I decided to wait and watch as they promised to install a Cisco Pix security appliance soon. I learnt later from Ken that a particular clan site was being targeted and was the root cause of the DoS attack. The appliance has been installed on the first week of January and my patience paid for itself in the long run; no network downtime since then.

Oh, I should mention that they do honor the 100% uptime SLA in practice. They credited me 50% for the network downtimes without even asking for it!

Support : Support was one of the major things that drew me towards this company. The WHT reviews indicated they are very quick to respond to tickets and always try their best in this end. They have a live-chat too which I think is mainly for pre-sales. I had a few issues and they were taken care of quickly. Similarly, as I have Ken (CEO) on my IM list, I have nothing to worry and enjoy a friendly chat often.

Additional Gains : VirPus has a loyalty program where you can get a free month after keeping your account current for 3 months. Also, after 9 months of service, you can have $40 gas card and 30% off next month. Publishing your honest review about them on public web hosting forums (WHT) can get you a $5 credit too.

Conclusions : Yes, after using their services for more than 2 months now, I can recommend them to all. The addons are cheap too. Here’s how I rated them :

Pricing : 9/10
Support: 9/10
Reliability : 8/10
Performance : 8/10
Overall : 8.5/10

For more information, visit [ VirPus Website ]

UPDATE! 27-Feb-2007

VirPus has honored it’s loyalty program and have made the 4th month service free. Also, there had been no network downtimes after security appliance was installed. My request to be migrated to a dual quad-core xeon node was kept and the VPS is running rock solid. They have recently moved the servers to their new space in the DC and updated the kernel. VirPus has started offering cheap OpenVZ VPSs as well. Everything looks and works perfect at the moment!