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FST Servers - $6.25 256MB Xen VPS in Chicago

FST Servers Brandon from FST Servers wrote to me earlier this month that they were having a “grand re-opening”, accompany with some plan pricing changes. The pricing actually went up against how much they charge back in February. Their “VM1” plan is now $6.25/month with

  • 256MB memory
  • 10GB storage
  • 500GB/month data transfer
  • Citrix XenServer

You can sign up on their VPS plan page, although you need to be registered with their system before you can look at the cart so I haven’t bothered to test an order. Servers in Chicago with Continuum Server, test IP 74.119.216.153. Business registered as an LLP in Illinois, and was founded in mid-2009. They have recently developed their own control panel on top of Citrix Xen Server to allow customers to reboot/reimage their VPS and getting console access.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

19 Comments

  1. id:

    what’s the difference between Xen and Xen Citrix? I mean, does it matters to us, LEBers?

    June 19, 2011 @ 3:26 pm | Reply
    • Looks like Xen Citrix is just the commercial version of the software instead of the free version:

      https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Xen

      June 19, 2011 @ 3:36 pm | Reply
    • Citrix XenServer is not open sourced I believe. It’s also more Xen HVM-like, i.e. allowing you to install any OS with full hardware vitualization.

      June 19, 2011 @ 3:39 pm | Reply
      • I can’t make heads or tails of it all but I’m stuck here listening to a starneg looking couple discuss the um orientation of American Idol contestants while watching the show off of their iPone nice and loud here at Panera’s.

        I think it’s all open sourced now:

        On 21 October 2009, Citrix further announced their, now commercial, applications of XenServer would be fully open-source and made freely available to the public under the name Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).[5] Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, stated: “XenServer is 100% free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all.”

        I was sitting here trying to figure out what I would need to setup a rack of servers with Xen and I can’t figure it all out.

        June 19, 2011 @ 5:15 pm | Reply
      • Alight. Sounds like my mis-information. Should have research a bit more on that.

        June 19, 2011 @ 11:32 pm | Reply
        • I still have no clue to be honest. I was hoping someone else would clue as in.

          June 19, 2011 @ 11:51 pm | Reply
  2. I have been a customer of FST since the last offer here on LEB. I am very very pleased, if there is going to be scheduled downtime I always receive an email 24-48 hours in advance. Server is fast and its XEN. Great host I would recomend. feel free to ping chi.jmainguy.com which is hosted by FST.

    June 19, 2011 @ 11:34 pm | Reply
  3. Jonathan, thanks for the kind words.

    I just wanted to clarify a few things. The “grand re-opening” is for our new in-house control panel and the introduction of our new cheapest plan ($4 – 128MB RAM, 7GB HDD, 500GB bandwidth). You can check out the feature list of our FST Control Panel here: http://fstservers.com/uncategorized/control-panel-list-of-features/

    Also, we are no longer hosted with Ubiquity but now Continuum Data Centers. You can test with this IP, 74.119.216.153. You can also download a test file from http://fstservers.com/100mb.test.

    Let me know if you have any questions about our services.

    Joe Steinkamp
    FST Servers LLP

    June 20, 2011 @ 3:30 am | Reply
    • Thanks. Post updated.

      June 20, 2011 @ 3:43 am | Reply
    • circus:

      Any plan for ipv6?

      June 20, 2011 @ 3:57 am | Reply
      • Definitely. We’re working hard on adding more features. Recently, we’ve been working on the first step of the FST Control Panel. IPv6 is definitely on the shortlist of our upcoming features.

        Joe Steinkamp
        FST Servers LLP

        June 20, 2011 @ 4:00 am | Reply
        • Adrian:

          Is it possible to upgrade my bandwidth on your VM1 plan?

          June 21, 2011 @ 6:02 am | Reply
        • Yes, it is possible to upgrade your bandwidth. We’ll have to setup a custom plan for you. Please contact us at admin AT fstservers DOT com.

          Joe Steinkamp
          FST Servers LLP

          June 21, 2011 @ 1:46 pm | Reply
  4. For those who are interested in their services, I have (as usual), done a review about their VPS, for which you can read it up here:
    http://www.96mb.com/96mb-low-end-vps-review-part-ix-fst-servers/
    Overall the VPS is pretty good and at $4/month (I tested the lowest plan, VM-0), it is a really good one to have, provided you do not need a lot of processing power.

    June 20, 2011 @ 11:08 pm | Reply
    • xhack:

      Nice review. On the no CentOS thing, if I remember right the anaconda installer refuses to work with less than 192M. Even the curses/no-gui version, because the backend is written in memory gobbling python. They do need some more OS options though. Debian, Debian, or pseudo Debian, is pretty limiting.

      June 21, 2011 @ 8:52 am | Reply
      • @xhack: thanks for the compliment, I think Joe from FST did commented in the post about the issue with CentOS, so I guess it will be a while before people could fit a CentOS into a low end XenServer VPS then…

        June 21, 2011 @ 12:15 pm | Reply
      • On our smallest plan we do only offer Debian and Ubuntu simply because RedHat based OSs can’t. As of now the linux distros we offer are only CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. There are a number of reasons but mainly because our FST Control Panel does a fresh install every time it setups and those distros work best with automatic installs.

        What OSs would you recommend that we offer?

        Joe Steinkamp
        FST Servers LLP

        June 21, 2011 @ 2:33 pm | Reply
    • circus:

      CC only?

      June 24, 2011 @ 4:42 am | Reply
      • At this time we only support credit card. We do not save credit cards for any reason. We use PayPal for all our transactions and setup the recurring payments through them.

        We keep no records of the transactions. We prefer to stay away from any troubles associated with that.

        We do hope to offer more payment options in the future.

        Joe Steinkamp
        FST Servers LLP

        June 24, 2011 @ 1:21 pm | Reply

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