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TinyVPS - $4 Xen VPS with 64MB

Updated November 2011: Kerplunc has turned off all its web-hosting related business including TinyVPS.ca. It’s now in the dead pool.

TinyVPS Via this WHT offer. This offer is from Kerplunc Inc, the same company that brought us SuperBytes, TinyVPS and FibreFirefly — $4/month Xen VPS under the brand of TinyVPS using coupon code TINYXEN (order link here).

  • 64MB memory/128MB swap
  • 5GB storage
  • 50GB/month data transfer
  • Xen/SolusVM

Servers are in Limestone Networks in Databank at Dallas TX. Interestingly it uses KSplice which allows admins to update and patch Linux kernel without rebooting — something hosting providers ought to consider to maximise the uptime (although at a cost).

27 Comments

  1. Nick's avatar
    Nick:

    Is KSplice only an option if we opt for Ubuntu in the Xen containers? Or will CentOS support KSplice at the dirt-cheap price also?

    March 24, 2010 @ 6:02 pm | Reply
  2. Pascal's avatar
    Pascal:

    I think KSplice is only used on the nodes, not on the vps themselves. It’s a unmanaged service so that’s your own choice.

    March 24, 2010 @ 7:00 pm | Reply
  3. LEA's avatar

    I believe KSplice works on both host node and the virtualized nodes. It is however important for the host node to have continuous uptime. I can’t believe how many times my OpenVZ VPS needs a reboot because the host OS gets a kernel update.

    March 24, 2010 @ 10:53 pm | Reply
  4. Pascal's avatar
    Pascal:

    It depends on how they run Xen. If they’re running in HVM or pvm with pvgrub/pygrub then each vps runs it’s own kernel. So if they update the node’s kernel, your vps will not have it’s kernel updated.
    If they run default xen pvm mode however, your vps will use the same kernel as it’s node.

    March 25, 2010 @ 6:23 am | Reply
  5. Pascal's avatar
    Pascal:

    Ofcourse either way you’ll have downtime if they upgrade the host node kernel so KSplice is a big plus.

    (why can’t I edit my comments?)

    March 25, 2010 @ 6:39 am | Reply
  6. Matthew Hall's avatar

    Just thought i’d clear things up on the Ksplice debate

    We run Ksplice on all of our nodes – not inside the VPS themselves.

    We also run Ksplice on our OpenVZ nodes so in that case they would actually effect the kernel inside the VPS.

    March 26, 2010 @ 4:18 am | Reply
  7. scott's avatar

    Been using these for two months, and loving them.

    I had around 50 days of uptime, but due to some data-centre issues in the London DC, the node was migrated. No disruption was done as maintenance was performed in the early hours of the morning and Kerplunc was quick to give me my new IP.

    All in all very happy, but I can’t seem to get MySQL to work, possible due to memory exhaustion while using apt-get (my problem, not tinyvps’).

    April 4, 2010 @ 11:53 pm | Reply
  8. scott's avatar

    MySQL now works, as it was me that had broken the my.cnf — Wasn’t a memory exhaustion problem. If anyone needs a VPS, I shall definitely be recommending.

    *thumbsup*

    April 7, 2010 @ 4:07 pm | Reply
  9. William's avatar
    William:

    They have been down for the past few days. Any one know what the story is?

    September 2, 2010 @ 3:54 pm | Reply
  10. LEA's avatar

    Their website is still working. You meant your VPS with them is down? Contacted Matt from Kerplunc Hosting?

    September 3, 2010 @ 12:27 am | Reply
  11. Gary's avatar
    Gary:

    Their website’s always been a bit flakey. My VPS with them is up.

    01:34:29 up 29 days, 22:31, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.08, 0.08

    September 3, 2010 @ 12:34 am | Reply
  12. LEA's avatar

    Kerplunc Inc seems to be down?

    – kerplunc.com
    – tinyvps.com
    – superbytes.net
    – fiberfirefly.com

    All appears offline.

    October 5, 2010 @ 10:22 pm | Reply
  13. Gary's avatar
    Gary:

    The server their websites are on is always going up and down. My VPS with them is still up, as is the control panel.

    October 5, 2010 @ 10:24 pm | Reply
    • LEA's avatar

      Yeah. Just that all kerplunc sites are down at the same time for over a day now. A bit worrying, as they have been around the budget VPS space for quite a long time.

      October 5, 2010 @ 10:37 pm | Reply
  14. Gary's avatar
    Gary:

    Yeah, I’d be a bit annoyed if they vanished, the service I’ve had over the last year or so has been pretty good. It’s only my irc bnc VPS, but 99% of providers don’t allow IRC whatsoever, so finding another stable VPS that does might be a bit of a pain.

    I do automatic backups every 6 hours on all my VPS that get rsync’d to a box I just use for backups and mucking around, and those backups are then downloaded locally. I’m trying to think of low-cost/free places I can mirror the backups to, for a little more redundancy.

    October 5, 2010 @ 10:57 pm | Reply
  15. Gary's avatar
    Gary:

    Good news!

    http://www.kerplunchosting.com/

    You can contact us at hosting.kerplunc@gmail.com

    We apologize for the continued delays! We have experienced a “perfect storm” of issues. We experienced some serious network issues limiting the transfer of our backups to below 50kbs. Everythign is back to normal and backups are transferring at multiple mbs. We will start putting sites back online as soon as they transfer.
    Our daily backup is currently being transferred to our live production server. This should be completed by 10am PST October 5, 2010

    You are seeing this message because we are having some serious issues with our servers. Here is an update of what is happening and what we are working on to get your service back online.

    Throughout the day of October 3, 2010 we experienced Denial of Service attacks and attempts to crack into our systems.

    Server crashed. We thought this was just a part of the denial of service attack. Forced a reboot. Server refused to come back online

    Server refuses to see the hard drive and the hard drive won’t spin up.

    Our backup provider XSBackup has their backup servers offline. A case of bad timing. We are waiting for their servers to come back online so we can recover our latest backup(Supposed to run daily).

    Most recent updated from XSBackup
    “we are aware of the issue. one of the front ends serving the backup content went down. we are looking into it. should be up and running in a few.”

    “the customers data is safe, the main backup node is online, and it has no issues. only the front end server is not reachable.”
    This means that assuming our last rsync completed successfully we will be able to recover all of the servers data within the next few hours.

    We finally have access to our backups! They are scp-ing over to our server now. Going to import the backup then mail all of our users.
    Thank you very much for your patience.

    Which explains why their sites are all down, but their VPS nodes are up. Hopefully I won’t have to find a new host for my IRC VPS!

    October 6, 2010 @ 11:15 pm | Reply
  16. Gary's avatar
    Gary:

    Thanks for fixing my tags. ;)

    October 7, 2010 @ 11:51 am | Reply
  17. KLIKLI's avatar
    KLIKLI:

    Typo – “sometihng” at the last line

    October 7, 2010 @ 12:05 pm | Reply
    • LEA's avatar

      Thanks for spotting. That’s the problem when you do most of your blog posting in vi (no real time spell checking) and forgot to call up aspell before posting :P

      October 7, 2010 @ 12:32 pm | Reply
      • drmike's avatar

        How do you get from vi to wordpress? Copy and paste?

        May 7, 2011 @ 3:39 pm | Reply
        • LEA's avatar

          I did quite a bit of browsing on w3m (a text based terminal). When it gets into a textarea, it invokes $EDITOR to let you edit the text, which in my case it’s ViM.

          May 8, 2011 @ 11:28 am | Reply
  18. Dodge's avatar
    Dodge:

    VPSes down for days, dead?

    May 6, 2011 @ 9:02 pm | Reply
    • Gary's avatar
      Gary:

      I have a VPS with them in the UK, it’s fine.

      May 7, 2011 @ 12:36 pm | Reply
  19. Simon's avatar
    Simon:

    TinyVPS is ending, I got an email a few minutes ago (either a Matthew or Martin) saying since hosting was taken over they haven’t been paying the bills or replying to customer support tickets so its closing down on 30th September.

    Just a quick notification to let you guys know, I’m sure emails are going out to everyone.

    August 23, 2011 @ 4:23 pm | Reply
  20. Showfom's avatar
    Showfom:

    The domain tinyvps.ca has been expired

    October 12, 2011 @ 7:34 pm | Reply
    • Gary's avatar
      Gary:

      Yeah, we’ve known for a while now that they were on the way out. Service was OK when they were actually manned, but after the company was sold it went to shit, as they so often do. :/

      October 12, 2011 @ 10:57 pm | Reply

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