I know it’s the last day of March, but here are the “March Madness Sale” coupon codes that Chris from ChicagoVPS has emailed me. These apply to their OpenVZ packages.
- Starter Package — Sign up here
- 256MB memory
- 10GB storage
- 500GB/month data transfer
- $4.95/month (promo code MMstarter)
$53.00/year (promo code MMstarteryear)
- Standard Package — Sign up here
- 512MB memory
- 20GB storage
- 1000GB/month data transfer
- $6.25/month (promo code MMstandard)
$65.00/year (promo code MMstandardyear)
Servers with Velocity/ColoCrossing in Chicago. Also note that, yes, it is getting dealer than just a month ago — $0.50/month more for Starter, and $0.30/month more for Standard. Standard also gets only 1 IPv4 rather than 2 address, although IPv6 is now “Coming Soon”. Generally well received from previous comments.
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Finally a first, not easy on a busy site like LEB!
Interesting to note that the XEN promotion on the post above (http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/govpsgo-512mb-xen-scranton/) is only 75 cents more…I guess 6.25 is no longer a good deal for OpenVZ box these days :)
Agree with you :D
The problem is that most of those Xen offerings seem to be using ballooning. Xen is awesome, but the hardware and methods some people are using to run Xen platforms is really starting to get sketchy in the budget VPS market. Just watch out and only buy from trusted sources, I guess.
Sorry, don’t mean to jack thread… but we don’t use ballooning.
There is a lot more than just the amount of memory (although I use that in the headline title, together with the monthly cost). For example a 512MB box can different a lot in performance, depending on CPU throttling, the type of disk and disk array used, connectivity/transit used by the provider, how aggressive the provider monitor and purge abusers on the same box, etc.
May I know what exactly is ballooning (I guess I can Google for it :))? I thought one of the biggest advantages for Xen is that you can’t oversell on Xen and that is why, in general, it is a bit more expensive than OpenVZ?
Linkie: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/how-to-tell-your-xen-vps-is-overselling-memory/
Please give that a read.
@Geek, Depending on what Control panel you use some VPS companies can oversell. I would look for companies that use SolusVM, since SolusVM does not allow overselling with Xen. We use SolusVM so we cannot oversell, and even if we could would not elect to.
Regards,
Chris
We should note, we have Xen for sale now as well!
=]
Thanks,
Jeremiah
As Jeremiah has said, we do indeed have Xen on sale now. @Matthew, yes it is unfortunate that some companies are running Xen on ballooning, thus causing a poor VPS environment for everyone on that server. Here at ChicagoVPS we do not use ballooning, and facts behind that are true because we use SolusVM. SolusVM does not support this feature.
Regards,
Chris
For whatever it’s worth I’m still using ChicagoVPS without an issue. Keep it up.
http://highendserver.net/
Anyway for what it’s worth, ChicagoVPS seems to be ironing out the kinks since I’ve been with them in December. After a spout of downtime in Feb, the uptime was perfect this month. There is also another scheduled upgrade on April 14, 15, and 16.
I’ll just add to that. I’ve been with them since the New Year. There was some downtime in January due to a hard drive failure but the uptime was excellent in March, and they are quite transparent with their Pingdom stats panel.
@Mike,
Thank you for the words of encouragement! We hope to keep doing better! :)
Thanks,
Jeremiah
Hello all,
We have also decided to throw in 15% off of all Xen servers. Use coupon code save15 on any package.
Regards,
Chris
I would love to have one but it seems like all Xen servers are OOS :(
Victor,
Email me at chris@Chicagovps.net, we can get you a package.
Regards,
Chris
I’ve been using this provider for about a month, and as I posted in the last thread, I’ve been very satisfied with their customer support. Jeremiah is very good about responding in a timely manner, and resolving issues.
Here’s some hard data off my Xen box that might help you make a decision:
The disk I/O stats are quite good, and the download speed is respectable. I admit I have been experiencing some load averages that are a tad high, but the website I run there is low traffic enough that I haven’t felt the need to file a support ticket.
The promotion code you entered has been applied to your cart but no items qualify for the discount yet – please check the promotion terms!
The code:MMstandard has been invalid??
Looks like their “March Madness” does literally mean it’s March only.
Jhon got a server with us. He was using the wrong coupon code. He was trying to order a starter package with the standard package coupon code :-P all in all we got it straightened out for him.
@LEA, the sale actually is going on until April 30th.
Regards,
Chris
Hi, before I decided to buy, I have a question: Is it something problems may occur such as
many frauds against outgoing or incoming connection from Indonesia (me in Jakarta)..?
Delta,
Not that I know of.
Regards,
Chris
I’ve bought Standard for annual and trying ChicagoVPS for one overnight tested.
A good performance, immediate use just for 30 minutes installation, good pingdom &
more 1MB data speed (average 4MBp/s). I am very satisfied with this VPS.
Thanks Chris for the good CentOS Kloxo as long as I encountered.
Hi, my vps was down since 12 hours ago (SolusVM tells me if mine at chi-vps9), but the pingdom stats for chi-vps9 (16 April) looks very well. SolusVM also tells if the vps is online, but I couldn’t do any ssh, ping, etc on it. I tried to make a support ticket, but there’s no replies until now.
Ynov,
As you know we had a maintenance window setup for yesterday. Although everything did not go as planned myself and Jeremiah got everything back online. Support tickets were also a little slow because we were both in the data center until 4am. Everything should be working now, if not please reply to your ticket.
Regards,
Chris
My company is a ChicagoVPS customer. I can tell you very plainly, ChicagoVPS is not ready for prime time. They may be a provider to consider if you want a seedbox or some sort of hobby box. You can forget them as a provider, though, if you want a reliable webserver or application server.
ChicagoVPS is more focused right now on attracting additional customers than on ensuring reliable connectivity and uptime for their current customers. Our server loses connectivity on average once a day for several minutes at a time, if not more. There is either a bandwidth availability issue, or the server is just overburdened with the load created by other accounts on the box.
Or just look at their recent “maintenance window”. I don’t think they even announced the exact date and they defnitely did not announce the exact time. Then when they do the maintenance they announce it a minute or two before it happens and then the server goes down.
Even more when the servers come back up they don’t work and there is no response to suppport tickets for five or six hours while your server is completely nonfunctional.
The bottom line is that you can’t rely on this provider for any kind of hosting that meets a reasonably critical hosting need. Maybe a hobby server or backup server but not much else.
@Kathy,
I would really like to know what you are talking about not being a “reliable provider for connectivity and up time”. No server looses connectivity once a day. Before our maintenance window, we had 100% up time. I can assure you bandwidth is not an issue, and we sure do not overload.
As for the maintenance window, we had to make it general. We did announce a date but we did not have an exact time. Myself and the techs were in Chicago doing other maintenance work, moving server around was just something else we wanted to accomplish. Also only 2 nodes got moved not all of them. That is another reason for the general notice because we didnt know exactly where all the nodes were situated.
As for the server not working when the node came back up. That is also another false statement. There were only a handful of servers that had issues, and possibly yours could have been one that didn’t work. We got flooded with tickets that night, so yes responses were slow, especially when all hands were on deck to get the nodes up as quick as possible. Moves like these are never pretty, but all in all I thought we handled it pretty good.
Also, we host many large corporate accounts, and they are very pleased. We have one goal in mind and that is to provide a great service and we do. All of your accusations about the node going down at least once a day are all false. However you can still have your own opinion but I am not going to let someone with a fake identity on here bash us for all our hard work.
If you wish to actually confront me with your real identity and would like to talk about some sort of credit we can do so. Email me at chris@chicagovps.net
Regards,
Chris
I think I revealed enough in my posting to make it clear that I know what I am talking about when it comes to what is going on at ChicagoVPS. Either the company I work at is a ChicagoVPS customer, or I work at ChicagoVPS. Either way, my information is genuine and true. Nothing I said is false. Nothing.
I do not know whether you are on purpose misleading people with the uptime information you mention, or if you just do not know the facts. I will be courteous and assume it is the second one.
In that case, I suggest you speak with your colleagues. They know that there are plenty of accounts which, because of bandwidth issues, server load issues, or some other issue are regularly not reachable for webserver or web application purposes. These incidents happen almost every day, and when they happen to an account, the account’s server is effectively down.
Pingdom uptime stats mean nothing. They are a marketing gimmick. What really counts is whether a server can get and process customer traffic, and ChicagoVPS is not providing reliable service in that way. Again, ask your colleagues. They will tell you that they have monitoring logs that show exactly what I say.
Why were you so busy at the data center the past few days? Setting things up to handle new accounts, that is why. As I said in my previous post, that is the focus of this company. The focus is not on providing reliable, quality service to existing customers.
If so few customers had problems during recent maintenance window, then why was there a “flood” of support tickets after the maintenance window.
Please stop blaming the messenger or saying the messenger is lying. I am not. I know the truth. If you do not know it, now you do. Please do something about it and stop misleading with irrelevant Pingdom uptime numbers. ChicagoVPS customers want and deserve reliable service. You can provide it to them if you want to. If you do that, you won’t see any more comments like this or the one before from Ynov.
I don’t know why providers here always assume that any public complaint is fake — seems much more likely to me that someone is just being less forgiving / more exaggerating when anonymous in public than they would when dealing directly with support. It’s more likely than everyone being a competitor choosing them out of the hundreds of VPS providers to target, anyway.
But when you go changing details, first claiming you are a customer, now trying to insinuate you are a staff member, it becomes difficult to view your post as anything more than an attempt to troll ChicagoVPS.
Your post would be much more believable if you were straight about who you were, and provided any sort of details about the supposed problems. Your complaint is pretty nebulous (it “loses connectivity”… HTTP? SSH? ping?), and has no actual description of so much as a single example of a symptom you experienced, just a laundry list of guesses of why a server might not work. It’s also so generic it could be wholly made up. Can’t really blame the provider for reacting the way they did.
@fanovps,
Thanks for your understanding. Although Kathy has stated some points that are true, they are highly exaggerated. I did not deny there being downtime that was longer than expected, and I also did not deny that the maintenance window sent out was a little too generic and not detailed.
Like I stated all moves always have their problems, but I feel as if we did our best and I am happy with the outcome. Before the move, we did have 100% up time.
Regards,
Chris
Doesn’t Pingdom have to receive a response from the server in order to count it as “up”, in which case the server would have to process the request? Granted, that doesn’t tell you anything about performance, but it does tell you about reachability.
I don’t think Kathy is exaggerating. I’m a ChicagoVPS customer — Chris will know exactly who I am — and I’m here at LowEndBox because I’m at my wit’s end because of the performance and uptime issues we’ve had with ChicagoVPS since becoming a customer a month and a half ago.
Let me give everyone an idea of how ChicagoVPS can’t even get the basics right. When we got our server, the time on it was wrong. It took ChicagoVPS almost an entire day (I kid you not) to figure out how to get the time setting right. (And, no, it’s not something you can change from within your VPS; you can only change the timezone within an OpenVZ VPS, not the fundamental time on the server that hosts all the different VPSs.) And when they had the server issues this past weekend that resulted in a 15-hour (yes, FIFTEEEN hour) outage, was the time right on the server when it came back up? Nope. It required another ticket to get it set right.
And connectivity and response times have been a *continuous* issue with our server. Maybe the server responds to pings, but that doesn’t matter to me. I need a server to be able to serve up webpages reliably and with decent response times. So I use Pingdom not to check whether the server responds to pings, but whether it serves up the homepage of one of the websites I host on the server, and how long it takes to serve up that homepage. Once again today, the server was sufficiently overburdened — presumably due to other accounts on the server — that Pingdom reported that, for at least 3-4 minutes, my simple webpage couldn’t be loaded within 30 seconds from three different testing locations.
This happens probably once a day, and we have the “Professional” level OpenVZ server option, and we’re using it to host 4-5 websites that get, together, at most 5 page requests per minute. In other words, we’re not talking about doing stuff on the server that should in anyway overburden it.
When we hosted our websites on a consumer-grade desktop system at our office connected to the rest of the world via a T1 line shared with our phone lines, I never had to worry about server performance. I went to Pingdom maybe once a month, mainly out of curiosity.
We switched to ChicagoVPS because we hoped we could get more reliable performance from a server in a professional-grade datacenter. No more minor lags in server performance when several people in the office are watching Youtube videos. But the performance has been so spotty that I now check the websites several times a day and I literally have Pingdom open in a browser tab all day and consult it multiple times during the day.
I’ve filed support tickets describing the problems we’ve had. I’ve been told numerous times that they are working on the issues. I practically begged them not to do the server move because I knew something would go wrong. But things are back to the way they were before the server move.
Chris, I think you’re the one who’s exaggerating, the one who’s not being honest. Perhaps the comments here from other ChicagoVPS customers are valid. I can’t say. But what Kathy wrote definitely seems plausible to me based on my experience, and I honestly have to wonder if she’s one of your employees who can’t stand by any longer and watch how you continue to mislead current and potential customers.
Boris,
It makes me laugh a little and cringe a little inside that out of the 300+ clients we have, you and this “Kathy” are the only ones with issues. I would like to see your pingdom reports, you can send them to me at chris@chicagovps.net. Also, Kathy is in any way affiliated with ChicagoVPS. We are a smaller company, and only have 3 employees who I all know personally and know they have not posted.
As for your 15 hour downtime, like I said to Kathy that was only a handful of people, not everyone.
Also reviewing some of your tickets, one had to do with a DDoS attack they we null routed, another you complained that your latency was bad because we were running nightly backups which we turned off for you, and in another ticket, you complained that if the server load got above .5 you saw really bad response time.
From every ticket that I read over, we have been more than helpful and resolved your problems to the best of my ability. I also noticed that you only complain about 5-10 minute delays. Im really sorry that you feel this way about us as we try very hard to deliver a great product. To be honest I think your expecting results that you would get from a dedicated server on your VPS. Maybe you need to look into a dedicated server if you want the best response times possible.
Regards,
Chris
The user is really complaining about node load of .5? That’s a WTF moment if there ever was one…
I have had clients open up tickets with us complaining that a load average of 0.01 is too high for them on a “new server”. I guess they forgot it takes *some* processing power to run SSH, Apache, etc…
I think what Chris just said basically proves the point I made at the beginning of this discussion. Here is a client (Boris – thx for your comments!) who has a VPS at ChicagoVPS with 1 full GB of memory. That is the “Professional” plan. The client wants to serve up maybe 5 pages a minute. Then Chris says that Boris can’t expect this plan to reliably serve up 5 pages a minute all day long most days of the week. He should consider a dedicated server instead.
That is what I said at the beginning. ChicagoVPS is great for seedboxes or hobby purpose. That is it. Even if you pay for more expensive plans that are supposed to be “professional”, you will not get a solution that gives you reliable service on a regular basis.
Kathy,
I don’t think that is what was said at all. Two things:
1) If you want a server with near zero load, get a dedicated. Complaining that your $15 VPS has a load of .5 simply dilutes any legitimate point you might offer. Not only that, it makes you come across as less intelligent.
2) The fact that the user complains about system time (which was corrected) as a major issue goes to further the clear point that they like to complain. System time, really? How is that even a notable problem.
I’m familiar with ChicagoVPS, just like I am of many hosts in this industry. From what I’ve read, there is nothing of merit here.
Mike, you and I know you are hardly a neutral party in this discussion. As already was pointed out earlier in the comment thread, you are a self-described friend of one of the ChicagoVPS founders. The way you twist any criticism of the company will probably make some people wonder if you have some kind of financial interest in ChicagoVPS.
Look how you twist Boris’s comment about the time setting. He didn’t say it was important. He just said he had to practically step the ChicagoVPS people through how to deal with the problem, and the whole process took almost a day. Spin the comment how you want. I think the story says alot.
Look also at how you exaggerate and twist what was said about load numbers. Load numbers can be marketing hype almost as much as Pingdom numbers. You try to get people to dismiss Boris’s criticism of ChicagoVPS because Chris says Boris complained about loads higher than 0.5, and that must clearly be a sign that Boris is unreasonable. Now however even former ChicagoVPS fan Alex is leaving ChicagoVPS and he says that in his experience consistent loads higher than 0.5 are not very good. (See Alex comments here from April 22 at 10:00 pm.)
I stand by what I said way back at beginning of my comments. I said ChicagoVPS can’t be considered a solution for someone looking for a high quality of service VPS. What Chris just said above makes it clear that he and the rest of ChicagoVPS team have not even really intended to provide that kind of service. In their minds, “high quality of service” and “VPS” should not be in same sentence together.
I say: If you believe that, don’t offer plans called “Professional” and “Enterprise”. Call them something like “Super Hobby” and “Extreme Hobby”, but don’t imply that your higher-end plans are for serious business applications because they definitely are not.
Kathy,
A VPS sits in a shared environment. Anyone who requires a configuration that provides near-zero node load should be on a dedicated server, period. It’s not even up for discussion. Complaints regarding load higher than .5, and clock times (which were resolved) are valid points to make because they clearly show the base from which a customer is operating from. Some people like to complain — especially those who bring up issues which were resolved and we’re not even a big issue from the get go.
I’m friends with a number of VPS providers and other hosting companies through a wide range of verticals. I do not hide this fact. Yes, I am familiar with ChicagoVPS and yes, I do think they offer a great product. Does that make my opinion invalid or less valuable? Absolutely not.
So to review my position:
1) Pingdom is one of the best sources for uptime statistics.
2) Node load of .5 is more than acceptable in a VPS environment. If you require virtually zero load spend more money for a dedicated server.
3) Complaining about clock time, despite the issue being resolved is crappy and dilutes any valid arguments you/anyone make.
@Kathy,
Boris did not have to give us step by step instructions on how to change the time. He was just impatient while we got to his ticket. His ticket was updated 3 times in the matter of 10 minutes assuming we did not know how to change it, which obviously is not the case. Also, your basing our whole company based on 3 peoples experience. So because 3 people have posted a problem with us, your going to auto assume all 350+ clients are seeing the same problem? I don’t think so. The saying always goes in business that not enough credit is given when you do good, but the few that get bad results let it show. To expand on that, look at all the GOOD comments everyone else is posting, Im pretty sure that outweighs the bad by a ten fold. I just check the track record of the clients and we have over 275 that have been with us since January or before. They would not keep renewing if their VPS was not accessible. Also, again I am going to point out that we host many corporate accounts so no our service really shouldn’t be considered just for a “Hobby”.
Kathy, this will be the last time I post to one of your posts because we now know who you are. I have looked at your tickets and see nothing wrong with our support or downtime on your server.
No hosting company can be perfect. There will be problems time to time because everyone has different things they want to run. I’ve decided that I am not going to let 3 complaints bother me anymore because I stand behind what I have always said: we give a great product and I have nothing to hide.
Regards,
Chris
Kathy,
I know you are not an employee and I am not misinformed since I am the CEO. Pingdom is a great tool, besides being considered industry standard I know many data centers who use it as a primary tool to identify outages. We were working at the facility to migrate existing equipment to the same switch so that we can better utilize our existing IPs (considered IPv4 depletion). We also turned up a few nodes at the same time to be efficient. The flood of tickets resulted in people wanting updates regarding their services being restored, just about everyone was very understanding and patient (remember we sent notice regarding the window). The bottom line Kathy is that we appreciate your business and will look forward to discussing your concerns more in a ticket.
Regards,
Chris
I’ve been with Chicago VPS for over a month now.
I plan to continue renewing with them. Performance and support have both been superb.
I have been with them since 4/08 and love it. The server has been reliable and performs as expected. Support has been responsive to my questions and have fixed the issues I have brought up in a timely manner.
Ok, I call shenanigans on this one. I have made positive comments on this thread before. I still like their service. But ChicagoVPS has not been around since 2008. http://highendserver.net/?p=76
Even the domain was registered on 27 July 2010. (whois it)
Was there a previous company or are you just making stuff up?
Maybe he means April 8th of this year?
Good point. Too late and too many beers. :)
@Raj,
Yes he did mean he signed up on April 8th :-P
Regards,
Chris
@twur,
We have in fact been around since 2008 as a hosting company, but not a VPS company. We transitioned over from game servers late last year. So we are newer to the VPS industry but not hosting.
Regards,
Chris
I know I’ve been writing a lot of good stuff about these guys, so in the interest of fairness, I think I owe it to the LEB community to report on my most recent experience with ChicagoVPS. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been good, as my box has been experiencing sporadic downtime.
It started a few days ago, and since then my box has been disappearing from the internet from anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours. After reporting this to them, they informed me that I’ve been the only one having problems on my node (but the previous posts make the suspicious of this claim). So, even though I hadn’t really changed anything on the box in weeks, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought that I might have misconfigured something, so I set up an experiment today. I moved my website to another server, and reinstalled a fresh copy of Ubuntu on my VPS. I haven’t changed *anything* on it. I haven’t even so much as logged into it. But alas, since then my box has been down on three separate instances today for about 10 minutes at a time. This tells me that the problem is definitely on their end.
The pingdom and UptimeRobot reports are below. As you can see, I’ve been monitoring it with Pingdom for much longer. I’ve only been using UptimeRobot since I’ve reinstalled Ubuntu on my VPS (about 24 hours). One outage on the pingdom report can be blamed on me for reinstalling the webserver. The other 55 downtimes I think are their fault, given my recent experiment.
Pingdom: http://img638.imageshack.us/i/pingdom.png/
UptimeRobot: http://img690.imageshack.us/i/downtime.png/
I can also report that the load average has been creeping up, along with the iowait. IMHO, a constant load average of 0.5 isn’t very good on a system with only one processor.
Unfortunately, these problems have forced me to move to another provider, but I wish them the best and hope they get these issues resolved.
Quick followup: Chris was nice enough to offer to move me to a new node, but I politely declined, as I can’t keep moving my website around. As I’ve said before, Chris and Jeremiah have been nothing but courteous to me, but for the reasons explained above I can’t keep using their service.
Alex,
By moving you to the new node it could fix it permanently. Your keeping the VPS until the end of the billing period anyway, so why wouldn’t you try it out? If you still don’t that’s fine, I am just trying to be as flexible as possible.
Regards,
Chris
Hello,
Just wanted to let everyone know that we have 3 additional deals going on to touch on everyone’s needs:
1024MB memory
30GB storage
1500GB BW
OpenVZ/SolusVM
Use coupon code 1024 for $6.50/month
512MB memory
20GB storage
1000GB BW
OpenVZ/SolusVM
Use coupon code 512 for $5.50/month
256MB memory
10GB storage
500GB BW
OpenVZ/SolusVM
Use coupon code 256 for $4.50/month
Regards,
Chris
Any XEN deals/offers?
Victor,
As of now no, we are completely full on Xen :(
Will be adding new nodes soon!
Regards,
Chris
How much cpu do you provide with your plans?
And happy bday!
Yomero,
It rotates between all 4 cores.
Regards,
Chris
Hey Everybody!
it’s Chris’s Brithday here at ChicagoVPS! You can drop him a line in billing and request the Chris Special! Remember to drop a Happy Birthday to him as well :)
Thanks,
Jeremiah
Chris,
How much is the guaranteed CPU (equivalence in GHz) for the Prof plan?
Thank you.