James from Axcelx emailed me about their VMWare ESX based VPS packages. The standard pricing starts at $6/month for the “VPS Mini A” plan with the following spec:
- 128MB memory
- 10GB storage
- 200GB/month data transfer (use promo code LOWEND to get 50GB more)
- VMWare
Sign up link. From this image it appears that VMs are running on shared storage (SAN?) which might mean better redundancy. Servers in Boston MA with CoreSite. Axcelx Technologies LLC was founded in 2003 (from overview page), but the domain was only registered since 2008. ToS can be found here, although the terms sound more like shared hosting terms, than VPS/dedicated server terms.
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Just ordered “VPS Mini A” plan. Waiting for activation.
It seems they are using RAID 5 according these twitter posts:
Axcelx launches another virtual host server and when its testing phases are over will accommodated new VPS… http://fb.me/XQ7GLMgF
Watching a Raid 5 ESX server build/verify is not very fun, but the possibilities when its complete are endless.
29 Mar
“… I will email you and effected clients on 4/21 in regards to the cpu/memory upgrade as well as Raid/Drive settings. We just need to optimize the cluster your currently on.
James Thomas / CTO & Co-Founder”
I would like to thank lowendbox for this post and wanted to elaborate on the 2003 founding and 2008 registration date of the domain, maybe it’s wording needs to be changed. We had an older company name “Crucial Servers” which was started in 2003, and LLC’d in 2004. After 4 years we determined this name was too confusing and even some people asked if we served food or servers, so we re-branded to Axcelx. Hope this clears up any confusion and my sincere apologies.
I have ordered quite a few VPS’s off Low End Box, but I must say I must have gotten lucky when ordering this vps, or maybe they truly have good support!
I was checking around their website, and I noticed they have an online sales/support chat, and unlike most places the staff was actually online!
Johnathan, who helped me, was very knowledgeable of not only their network infrastructure but worked with me to find the best location to have my vps so that it would have the closest routing possible with my other servers. As I understand it, they actually have two locations in Boston, Ma. Their main routing/peering providers are Cogentco and Level3.
Not only was he helpful with finding the best location, but he was more than willing to talk shop about their vmware infrastructure and how it performed and answered some questions I had regarding its functionality. He was also more than willing to work with me on upgrades and pricing based on my needs, for what I needed he made a very realistic offer. I would encourage you to talk to their support when ordering so you can get the right deal for you, in case this low end offer is not exactly what you need. Johnathan even went out of his way to find a Debian 6 Squeeze net-install for me so I could run Debian 6 from the go.
At current, I am waiting for everything to come online, as they are working on install as I am typing. I will post some tests once it is online and I have taken it for a test drive.
I ordered:
128mb Ram
20GB HD Space
150gb Transfer
I wish you the very best of luck as my VPS didn’t perform as I expected and I going to cancel the service — their VPS is one of the worst i’ve ever experienced.
As we all have different experiences none of your issues and concerns were addressed with us. As I think in any business if your having issues or problems you should contact the provider to get assistance. If your concern is IO, you should wait another 3 weeks until our san expansion is completed, if your speaking about anything else I would love to know more about it so I can help you as we have a lot of satisfied clients.
“… I will email you and effected clients on 4/21 in regards to the cpu/memory upgrade as well as Raid/Drive settings. We just need to optimize the cluster your currently on.
James Thomas / CTO & Co-Founder”
===========
Last Up 4/22/2011 12:38:48 AM UTC
Last Down 4/22/2011 1:48:15 AM UTC
Downtime: ~1 h 10 m
HD performance after the maintenance:
ma:~# date
Sat Apr 23 23:54:59 UTC 2011
ma:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 73.7789 s, 14.6 MB/s
ma:~# date
Sat Apr 23 23:56:22 UTC 2011
The maintenance on your host was to install a HBA card, the HBA is not linked to the san cluster until we add the expansion. We also upgraded ram and cpu on the machine and ran testing before we powered the VM’s back on. Yes this “host” was effected and was 1 of 48. We “were” supposed to go live with the san on your host however we wanted to wait although your 14.6 is far from reasonable it’s stable until the upgrade is done.
It is not up to you say what is “far from reasonable” for a customer. 7.3 MB/s is not reasonable, 14.6MB/s is not reasonable.
Francisco, Yes I know and I said “It’s far from reasonable” which in my eyes means its “not good”.
Ive been using Axcelx since day one, and have not had any known issues with them such as downtime. I’ve messed up a few settings here, and there and their support team fixed it for me within 1 hour.
I just wanted to note that all existing clients on LEB have been moved to our new host server in which sustains IO tests using 64k/16k count of 200MB/s+. We have tested this host with a higher stripe size and seen much higher numbers in the 400MB/s range. But due the small writes/reads some of our clients databases we don’t want to sacrifice their vm’s so we have used 64k and you are seeing the 200MB/s on the(low side) and I’ve seen it reach just under 300MB/s. By the time this host sees the 180MB/s range we will have a new host server up. We are setting up XEN servers with SolusVM for those who like the control it gives them on their VPS. After our testing phases I will update website with two different sections and explanations on each raid set and how we stripped it so you can choose which will work better for your applications and os. Remember we are not colocating our machines nor renting servers, we are hosted on our own network and in our own racks.
Thank You LEB.