OnVPS Infrastructure: Built To Perform
We believe in giving customers exactly what we'd want out of a virtual server hosting company. Whether you're looking for a VPS to maximize your horsepower-per-dollar or to find a scalable solution in the cloud, we know performance matters most.
VPS Performance
Performance on a VPS boils down to one thing: Disk I/O. The greatest bottleneck in any server is the I/O available from the disks. Disk access is orders of magnitude slower than RAM access – even for SSD drives. Think about it – you instantly know when your system starts hitting the disk to swap out RAM because everything slows to a crawl. Now this one simple rule of server performance is amplified on a VPS by the number of servers that are on any given hardware node. Any action that requires disk access will have to contend with as many other servers as there are on the hardware node. On an overloaded hardware node, it's almost like needing to hit swap space for anything. How providers deal with this issue is what makes every VPS provider unique.
No Two Providers Are The Same
Shopping for a VPS is pretty confusing. It doesn't seem like there's any uniform standard for defining a product to sell. You get more bandwidth from provider X but less disk, more RAM from provider Y but less bandwidth and more disk from provider Z. And each of them have their own pricing as well.
It gets even worse when you start looking at factors that influence VPS performance. Performance is the first evident difference between any two virtual hosting providers. VPS providers have long had to contend with balancing the optimal number of servers provisioned on a hardware node with the real costs of running that hardware node (bandwidth, power, datacenter space and the hardware itself). Providers balance this in very different ways – some provide optimal resources, passing additional costs on to customers; others maximize their return on investment by overselling resources and packing as many customers on to a box as possible. This is the primary reason that VPS hosting quality and prices vary so widely.
At OnVPS we are able to offer both price and performance because we have our own datacenter. Our servers are located in the brand new datacenter of our sister company, Wowrack. This cuts down significantly on our overhead, which means that we can concentrate on providing the best possible performance for your dollar. Here's how we do it:
We Only Use Xen
We have experience with products like Virtuozzo or OpenVZ that allow providers to pack as many servers onto a single hardware node as possible. These products maximize provider profits at the expense of end-user performance. Like many other VPS providers out there, we could have chosen this route, but at the end of the day, what we're interested in is building a long-term relationship with our customers. Our customers are our most important asset; and in every technology choice we make, we always remember that.
We Never Oversell Resources
If you buy a server with 256MB of RAM or 2GB of RAM, that memory is dedicated to your server alone. A hardware node with 16GB of RAM will have a maximum of seven Vps2G accounts on it (dom0 is given RAM, so that's why there's not eight accounts built). Disk space and swap space is already partitioned and formatted from the moment your server first comes online. This ensures the best performance possible of your server and bypasses the inevitable problems that come with overselling resources (such as additional downtime for migrations, hardware issues).
We Ensure Optimal Server Population
We ensure that performance is maximized by limiting the number of servers provisioned on any hardware node. Since we never oversell resources, the number of servers that can be provisioned to any node is always locked to the amount of RAM/Disk/CPU that's available in the hardware node. We've spent a lot of time and effort testing to find the best possible hardware configuration to maximize your performance. Instead of packing as much memory and disk into the hardware node as possible, we limit the total disk and RAM installed into any hardware node. We've found the sweet-spot of server performance and have limited the resources on the hardware node to maximize server performance.
We work hard to ensure that every node is running optimally because we know how important your business is.
That's what we would want in our VPS provider and we think our customers deserve no less.
Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:31
Tags hosting, performance, server, VPS
