Via this WHT offer. SimplyWebHosting.com is a brand of Advantagecom Networks Inc that has been around since 1998 and has been selling VPS for 8 years. We covered them almost 2 years ago, and I have just noticed something interesting about their Economy hwVPS plan, which starts at $15/month. However when you pay annually, it comes down to $60/year (=$5/month). Here is a direct link to sign up, and the plan comes with
- 512MB memory
- 199GB storage
- 2TB/month data transfer
- Xen
- CentOS x64 only
The servers are in Walla Walla in the state of Washington (test IP: 66.29.157.55, kudos to Wing Loon), 4 and half hours drive from Seattle according to Google Maps (for those of us who aren’t familiar with cities in US). ~200GB of storage backed by SAS drives in RAID10 and 2TB/month data makes it a great backup server. CentOS 64bit only though, so for the Gentoo/Debian/Arch/Ubuntu fans might have to put up with yum and now pretty dated CentOS 5.
Use WHT0512 also give you $10 off one-time discount so your first year would just be $50.
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how about the port speed limit?
Unbelieve Price!!!
If I didn’t hear they are in the hosting industry for 8 years from LEB, I almost think they are going to run away.
But such a VPS with $60/Y, with out ballooning I can not image anything esle.
My question would be — can you oversell hard disk space on a Xen VM? Maybe they are not using LVM but disk volume as a file on dom0’s file system?
I thought Xen PV its not really a virtual disk, and just a set number in the config.
Either is an option, especially if they’re using xenserver (it’s a simple install option).
With that being said, i’d hope not :) They’re more likely than not dealing with peoples backups here and taking a chance at overcommiting that and destroying them is terrifying.
Francisco
They are advertising it as possible solution for backups:
“Economy hwVPS: Lowest cost CentOS Linux virtual private server.
Great for off-site backup storage, web hosting, or a compute node in your cloud.”
Myresellerhost…. ¬_¬
There is some moderate oversubscription of disk space (not “oversold” – oversubscribed – there’s a big difference!). We can do oversubscription because not everyone uses all of their disk space (most use very little) and compression get’s us 15% to 20% extra space even after allowing for compressed data that some send to their e-hwVPS. So far, things are right on track with our projections. We’ve had more than a decade to practice oversubscribing without causing performance or capacity problems. It’s how hosting companies turn a profit on the low end.
No, it isn’t file based volumes. I can’t comment further, because we do have a lot of time and effort invested in this proprietary setup and we don’t want 1000 other hosting companies doing this tomorrow.
Reliable?
Their website is AWFUL to browse.
How would you suggest we improve it?
Hire some designer to make it better :D
It seems too good to be true for so much space, but won’t really know till someone trys it. For anyone who has it, how’s port speed and performance? Also, they _should_ update the site a bit as it’s one of the most horrible sites to browse
What would you like us to do differently with our web site?
“Advantagecom Networks Inc that has been around since 1998”
Yup, their website proves it, it looks like it hasn’t been updated ever since.
This offer sounds very good though. Anyone used them before?
Our web site is updated every time we change or add a service. It also gets a major graphical/navigation/layout overhaul about once every 5 years or so.
You seem to indicate you don’t like our web site. What do you think should be different?
Hi – I signed up for your service.. despite your website, but haven’t yet really taken advantage of the space for offsite backup.
I’m a techie so I shouldn’t be impressed, or rather put off by plain / dull looking websites or GUIs.. but I SO am. The whole stylish “web 2.0” look with bold colors, rounder corners, slick themes.. even something as simple as this website’s theme, nice logo.. What you have just really dates your site.
One of the more recent *examples* of a nice site I’ve seen is http://www.surevoip.co.uk/
You kidding right?
I’ll suggest you to take a look at prgmr.com’s home page. Very much pre-web 1.0, but totally usable :)
I LOVE PRGMR site!! hahaha KISS principle is always be in my heart. :p
I love it too, nice and simple. Probably usable in lynx too :D
Nothing terribly wrong with it, but the design if far from being “modern”. Font is too large. I’d use softer colors and try to match them better, not just red and blue. I wouldn’t use tables for layout. It just looks like it’s 10+ years old.
Linode.com and slicehost.com look much nicer than prgmr.com… http://www.super-vm.com is simpler than the first two but “nicer” than prgmr.com.. that one just seems too plain to inspire much trust in their technical abilities.
My trust on their technical abilities lies on the fact that Luke co-authored a book on Xen, that is clearly linked on their website :)
Port speed and,test IP ,please!
I had a service with them a few years back. They suspended my VPS because they require your VPS to have their SSH keys inside of them, and they told me they wouldn’t unsuspend it until I put their SSH keys on it, but since the VPS wasn’t even up I couldn’t even get in to put their SSH keys on it. I just left them after that, I didn’t want to deal with it. They were really nice about the refunds though, I’ll give them that.
If the Xen VPS is offline, can’t they just mount it and insert their own SSH key in it?
If they want to get a bad name because of privacy violations :)
Francisco
I meant, Mike’s problem previously seem to be that…
All they need to implement is a checkbox for agreeing their SSH key to be inserted into the box, and the rest can be automated without asking your user to boot his VM up.
We can, but without getting buy-in from the customer to leave the SSH keys in the VPS, we’d just be fighting an uphill battle.
lol, they should change the plan to e-hwVnsPS -> economy-hwV(not so)PrivateServer
Whether you know it or not, every OpenVZ or Virtuozzo VPS has back door root access without SSH. We just do it from the node. No SSH keys are necessary for those platforms. They are not private from the hosting company tech support either.
With Xen, there is no such back door, so we have to use SSH keys to access each VPS directly.
A VPS was never intended to keep the customers’ actions/data private from the hosting provider. That assumption is ridiculous, and, unfortunately, very common.
That said, with tens of millions of files on our network, we have neither the time nor the inclination to snoop whatever you might have on your VPS. You just aren’t that interesting. Seriously. However, if you trash the node or our network, you can bet we’re going to login to your VPS to see what you’re doing and why. If we get a legal complaint or law enforcement request, we’ll do what we have to do, including logging into your VPS if it is necessary as part of the process. The same goes for dealing with hacked users and/or processes injected through an insecure php/cgi setup.
If you really need privacy and aren’t doing anything illegal or against our terms of service, colocation is your best option. A VPS will never get you complete privacy.
Meh.. I have xen and kvm vps with another providers, and they never ask me to put their ssh key in my vps. But it’s your company, it’s your policy, so good luck.
I think all servers from 100TB does include SSH keys so they can log on via VPN and check your server data , of course in case you require tech support :)
Is there some kind of privacy policy?
How am I supposed to offer some kind of privacy policy to my websites users if you can just access their private details whenever you want (if only you have enough time to do it) and do whatever you want with it?
Or I should just tell them to try to not be interesting?
vedran,
How about this: if you need privacy, run your web site on your own hardware. Colocation.
or this: don’t store sensitive private information without encryption (!!).
Our privacy policy is what defines how we protect and use *your* contact and payment information. It does not limit our ability to access files on our own hardware so we can do our jobs. Regardless of what other hosting companies do or don’t do, we recognize that there are federal regulations and state laws that *require* we maintain control over our users and their activities on our network. If we don’t, node and network quality goes downhill fast, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in fines, court dates, and possible jail time for *us*.
We know our job. Your friendly kiddie host from last summer doesn’t.
“We know our job. Your friendly kiddie host from last summer doesn’t.”
Is that really necessary? so linode, quickweb, rapidxen, prgmr, buyvm, and most of other hosts out there are just “friendly kiddie host from last summer”. C’mon no need to insult others.
How is old Francisco from buyvm? :)
What does it mean by “require your VPS to have their SSH keys inside of them” ?
they have access to your box over ssh and log in any time without password
Mike, I believe you must have misread or misunderstood the email that was sent to you. We would ask you to agree to re-enable our access to the VPS either by password or SSH keys. After we received that agreement from you, we would unsuspend the service so you could follow through on your agreement. If you didn’t follow through within a reasonable time (24 hours or so), we’d suspend the VPS again.
Once we confirmed that we again had root access to your VPS, then everyone goes on their merry way.
I don’t get why on earth someone would limit people to which GNU/Linux distro they use inside the frigging Xen.
Isn’t Xen’s selling point that you basically can run any OS, let alone any distro you like.
It could be they are manually setting up the VMs (from the sound of it in their previous post), and CentOS is what they are most familiar with…
They are doing some disk compression thing on these economy vpses. May be the host node has CentOS and for compatibility reasons they don’t wanna allow anything other than CentOS.
We chose to limit this budget offering to CentOS for several reasons. The three primary reasons are:
1. We have to support/fix it when customers break it, which happens frequently.
2. The Xen kernel in CentOS tends to be very stable and reliable in paravirtualized mode.
3. Our setup automation is built around kickstart, a technology found in CentOS.
It simply wouldn’t be practical to give people their linux flavor of the day on a low-end offering like this. It’s easy for us to be an expert on all the ins and outs of one long term support linux distribution, but we could never truly be an expert on all linux distributions simultaneously.
We’re currently investigating adding Debian to the 2012 plans, but nothing about that is finalized or guaranteed at this point.
Nice price. 512M XEN just 50$/year, why CentOS x64 only：p
Could it be this way: having 512 mb RAM, and at the same time limiting the OS to Centos64 only, means they try to reduce the RAM amount available (by increase RAM used by OS, and even some other apps), so that eventually you won’t be able to use advertised 2000 GB bandwidth!
And HDD looks oversold at best it can.
Anyway, this is a great offer.
No. It’s not that way. There is no ballooning of RAM. You get the full 512MiB of RAM immediately, right up front. Your RAM allocation is dedicated to you and only you.
CentOS only uses about 130MiB of RAM at boot, including some disk caching that happens during boot. It is bare minimal install. There are no “other apps” running. That level of RAM usage has zero impact an the data transfer.
2000GiB of data transfer is intended to be a sanity limit. The vast majority of customers come nowhere near that each month. A few come close to that and it has been our experience that most of those are distributing warez, copyrighted music, or copyrighted movies and are in violation of our terms of service. If you’re using it legitimately, you have nothing to worry about.
Ah monthly payment does make sense @ $15/m, yearly is what is $:
Let’s get some of those and fill all the disk with “dd”.
Obviously oversold!
fill em with /dev/zero. maybe dedupe/compression will be fun.
Do so and it would be construed a malicious attack. I don’t think you’d get the results you intended.
I just like centos 32.
I hope it can support centos 32 and I will buy one stock.
32 bit will not be offered. This is 64 bit only since it has to support up to 16GiB of RAM per e-hwVPS.
Any IP address for a testing?
Test IP from WHT is 66.29.157.55
http://www.simplywebhosting.com [66.29.157.55]
That’s their website.
The tesp IP ? and this vps need buy Additional ip?
They don’t have any control panel too, you have to submit a ticket if you want to shutdown the VPS :P
Yeh. Typing halt or reboot is so hard now-a-days.
Work? I think I shall faint….
Is hard when your vps is out of ram…. or is locked, or is firewalled xD
I just gave a very simple example. Do you know any command to rebuild the VPS (Reinstall OS)?
I’m serious, I just went with VPS about a month :P
Yeah, you can’t xD
technically you might be able to debootstrap or something if its not openvz
To get the OS reinstalled, you would just open a ticket with tech support. We have the means to accommodate such requests easily.
Test IP waiting and IPv6 supported?
Test IP and Port speet found at WHT :
66.29.157.55 / 100 mbit
To answer the “What’s up with the site? Have they ever changed it?” looks like they haven’t made that many changes:
http://replay.web.archive.org/20000816132848/http://www.simplywebhosting.com/
It’s interesting though that they make such a big deal about the BBB rating but yet they’re not accredited with the BBB. You would think that if it was that important with them to put it dead center of their site, they would take the next step and actually become a member.
Nice though to see someone brag about their BBB rating and have a reason to be bragging about it. Not like a certain other provider who brags about theirs and has a crappy rating with lots of complaints.
To be fair,
is probably much better than all the kiddie hosts out there
BBB is a joke and has been for awhile. BBB should not be taken as a serious measure of quality.
Agreed but I was pointing out how they promote their experience with the BBB but fail to take full advantage of it.
Every time I’ve dealt with the BBB, it’s been a waste of time and gotten me nowhere.
We agree that the BBB is of limited use, but from a business point of view, too. They closed our regional BBB office and consolidated it with Spokane. The guys up there are a joke (kept messing up our profile, didn’t have spots in their directory for our industry, etc.) and their customer service was so bad that we finally ditched our BBB membership. It was overpriced and of no use to us.
That said, they do at least tally the number of open and closed complaints, so it can serve as a barometer of sorts versus other companies in the same industry. It also displays a third party verified time in business.
If you’re expecting the BBB to be guys with clubs to smack companies you don’t like, you would definitely be disappointed. They don’t take sides in disputes, nor do they have any authority to resolve disputes.
Pretty much felt the same way with our local Chamber of Commerce.
according to offer tittle on WHT “$5/mo Xen Linux VPS 512MB RAM / 39GB SAS RAID10”.
So, could it be 39Gb disk instead of 199gib?
Also, 1 ticket allow per/month according to someone ordered thru WHT.
Per their website “http://www.simplywebhosting.com/plans-vps/index-economy-hwvps.shtml” that should have allowed 20/month.
Per provider,
Actual promotion is for “$4.17/mo Xen Linux VPS 512MB RAM / 199GB SAS RAID10” WHT has a typo.(annually for 1st year with cupons code “WHT0512”)
That mean Annually payment paln of 50/year for 1st year. Thereafter 60/year recurring.
No control panel with Linux cento64. need to open ticket for reboot when you stuck.
20 ticket/month. reboot of node doesn’t count as ticket.
(1gig)you’ll see approximately 300Mbps as the max. currently in fiber build construction, so you might get 30Mbs (100Mps).
Subscribing …
Can anyone post test file please?
I want to check the actual download speed from my country.
Subscribed , I see VPS active in my WHMCS account, it seemed setup email goes to junk folder and was deleted, now I’m stucked with opened support ticket asking to get IP of my VPS as login details I can see in my account ????
I signed up Thursday night, I got my details on Friday.. but gmail put it in spam.
However, the site and the IP they told me.. it all seems to be offline at the moment…
yeah,someone post a test file please,so we can test, thanks!
signed up and paid via paypal yesterday night, money taken but not even an email
I get this ” Please note that according to our policies refunds are processed within two to three weeks.” this smells like fraud … what u think ?
Wait two or three weeks…
No refund? Scam xD
Shouldn’t have to take 2-3 weeks to check a refund box on a webform.
2 to 3 weeks is our standard refund policy. Most are processed in a day or two. Some take less time and some take more time. If the customer paid by check and a refund check must be issued, we have to wait for the customer’s check to clear completely before issuing a refund to avoid being a victim of scams involving check fraud. Further, the signers for issuing refunds are occasionally unavailable for extended times due to illness, vacation, [pick your major life event], and the policy reflects that. It is intended to reflect the worst case scenario. Under promise, over deliver.
I think they have 90days money back Guarantee isn’t it?
@Chris There are several automatic emails from their signup system, and they set me up within a day. However, gmail put that email into spam – check for emails from @advantagecom.net in your mail.
Hi tried using code WHT0512 but was getting message code no longer valid.
Is there a new code availabl?
Hi code WHT0512 does not work. Are any other codes available
Thanks in advance.
I signed up for one of these, and finally got OpenVPN working (it’s a little tricky on CentOS x64). Impressions so far:
– Every piece of communication was filtered to my spam folder until I whitelisted their domain. This meant I didn’t get their setup mail – apparently this is a common issue because they suggested I check my spam folder and there it was. :)
– You’re allowed only ONE TICKET PER MONTH, they seem pretty strict on this. However, they were nice enough to go out of the scope of my original ticket I opened and reimage my VPS when I messed it up badly enough that reimaging was faster than repairing.
– VPS was set up correctly with TAP/TUN enabled and they processed my RDNS request overnight.
– Network performance seems excellent with good connectivity to Asia (traffic routes via Comcast). I’m getting ~250ms from my Asian location and 2.0Mbps downstream, which is MUCH better than I ever got to any commercial VPN services. This is good enough to use Hulu etc.
– VPS is very fast and responsive. Xen vs. OpenVZ makes a big difference, I’m getting the resources I am paying for.
This is really night and day compared to my VPS from W2 Servers, which is so slow that it’s barely usable even for a single OpenVPN connection (although I allegedly have unmetered 100Mbps and a large amount of resources). Obviously, you get what you pay for and $5 per month isn’t bad for what I’m getting in return. I won’t cancel my W2 VPS, because if they ever get their oversubscription issues sorted out it’ll be an incredible value. However, it’s been relegated to backup status.
Re: tickets/month:
When I asked, I was told:
“Your e-hwVPS account has 20 tickets per month. When we increased the number of tickets per month there was a delay in updating the setup email and some customers received a setup email with the incorrect number of support tickets. The current e-hwVPS setup email has the correct number of tickets.” so.. don’t worry!
This didn’t work out for me. I signed up on the 27th of may paid through PayPal. I got all the emails confirming account order and payment confirmation. The account status was at pending.
Since then, everyday I have checking my account hoping that it has moved on from pending status. On Wed the status turned to fraud and my payment was returned.
There was no email explaining what the issue was. In my attempt to resolve the matter I phoned the sales number and spoke to polite lady. Unfortunately all the lady could tell me was that my account was at status fraud. I asked what the issue was to which she replied that she didn’t know. She said she find out and call me back.
I haven’t heard anything since.
I am really disappointed with the experiance. A week wasted, achieved nothing. I was really looking forward to my first vps and the joy’s of configuring it and re-configuring it and etc… etc..
As you can probably tell from my rant that I’m a total newbe.
Any one recomend an alternative?
Thanks
I’m sorry this didn’t work out for you. We do have an extensive order screening process. I can’t give details without compromising the process, but if we chose not to accept your order, we had good reason. It often relates to anticipated terms of service violations, identity theft, fake contact information, or payment fraud.
hi,
i signed up for a vps. got some mails about order and a few hours later with my server-ip and some more useful things :)
its a great offer 2 virtual cpus, about 195gb diskspace and 512mb ram. i can copy from this vps to another with 8mb/s and back.
once again there are 20 support-tickets/month and you can reboot it without a ticket. one important thing: iptables is preinstalled and you can only with a script in /root/bin check how many traffic are used. if you clean the iptable-rules, stop iptables, … the script dont works and you have to choose another way to check the used traffic.
i think its expensive: after 2tb traffic 1$/gb
the better way is limit the bandwith to 10mbit or less.
at last: xen-based vps ist great :)
cu
oh i forgot: i dont like centos. hope debian is available in the future :)
Debian is being considered as a possible (not guaranteed!) option for the 2012 plans. We do not yet have an ETA on when the 2012 plans will be released, but we typically release them in the January to March timeframe. We always try to get them out the door sooner, but inevitably some major kernel issue or automation problem rears its ugly head during development and testing and a major technical battle ensues.
thx for response, nice to hear there will be debian as option :)
today centos also works for me
Still waiting for a call back!
If you were actually told that (I don’t have a transcript of the conversation), the person you spoke with misspoke because she does not do order screening. We do not tell people why they did not pass order screening because to do so would compromise the process and make it easier to fraudsters to craft their orders to bypass screening. When/if the person you spoke to inquired about this, she would have been told not to call you back because there was nothing that she would be allowed to tell you about the reason why your order was rejected.
Hello Andrew,
I think it probably be wrong for me to mention the name of the person who I spoke to. I appreciate that u have systems in place to detect fraud, which is good. Have you ever thought your system may some times get it wrong? There are other ways of confirming one’s identity. Especially when I called to try and resolve things.
Anyway no hardfeelings. Thankkyou for taking the time to respond to my comments.
I have now got an account with another leb provider.
Have a nice day
Proxima
tried to use WHT0512 but i got:
# The promotion code entered has expired #
:(
paid last night $60 with paypal, already had access by morning.
since this will mainly serve as a backup place, thought the speeds might need to get tested first.
using the cachefly test file (http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test), i’m getting 10.2MB/s
The speeds have been limited to 8Mb/s in both directions from the 100Mb/s.
Download from cachefly only have 800k/s
found code WHT0609 for $10 discount @ WHT
oh well… i’m already up and running.
For those interested, we setup a special lowendbox coupon code that’s good through July 8, 2011. The code is LEB0611 and other than the revised coupon code is exactly the same as the one linked to above on WHT.
the network speed seems limited to 10m now? download from cachefly only have 800k/s, and even wget between two vpses both are in the same network of Advantagecom, only have about 800k/s…:(
the support have said that the Economy hwVPS accounts are data-rate limited to 8 Mbits/sec, in fact, I don’t know when they change it to 8m, and also have not received any notification about this change…
I noticed the same thing. The speeds have been limited to 8Mb/s in both directions from the 100Mb/s it started with. I did not receive any notification either.
Do they have a control panel for you to install any O/S at anytime (e.g. Centos/Ubuntu) . Can i restart at my own will or do i need to open ticket for their staff to do it manually for me ? If so, it creates lotsa hassle
There is no control panel. They only install centos. If you have ssh access (I haven’t lost it yet unlike supervm and hostrail where I had to login via the out of band access to restart ssh) then you can initiate a reboot. Otherwise, yes, you’ll need to file a ticket.
has this company proved to be real?
Yes, it’s real… just I had some connectivity issues on and off from overseas. However, at least some of that time it worked within the USA.