Where's the beef?

[lvlk]

Three general topics today:

(1)
Now that we're 1 week into the Windows VPS Beta, how does the PowerVPS crew feel about it so far? There have been some tweaks and adjustments as expected, but overalll, is there a general consensus about the product and its viability?

Don't mean to pressure you guys, just looking for a timeframe of when decisions will be taken, good or bad. Until then, I am reluctant to setup "mission critical" stuff. If things are good, and I hope they are, then I can realistically setup "real" data. If it ain't looking good, then I need to reconsider my deployment.

(2)
My reaction so far is positive. I appreciate the level of knowledge and service that the PowerVPS team puts behind their offerings. I feel confident that stability and security issues will be addressed and that there'll be someone around to guide us in setting up various things.

(3)
How do the rest of you Windows VPSers feel about your product/service so far? Is it overwhelmingly good that you guys want to keep this, or have there been too many quirks and bugs to make you reconsider? Any beefs you want to get out there?


cheers,
Thomas

[charles]

Hi Thomas

Excellent questions. I have been thinking of blasting out an announcement asking these questions too, since things have gone quiet. I'm not sure thats because things got stable or (as it seems like in your case) they are really not using it fully.


(1)
Now that we're 1 week into the Windows VPS Beta, how does the PowerVPS crew feel about it so far? There have been some tweaks and adjustments as expected, but overalll, is there a general consensus about the product and its viability?

Don't mean to pressure you guys, just looking for a timeframe of when decisions will be taken, good or bad. Until then, I am reluctant to setup "mission critical" stuff. If things are good, and I hope they are, then I can realistically setup "real" data. If it ain't looking good, then I need to reconsider my deployment.


Were feeling very good about this. We would not have invested the time and money we have already unless we didn't feel strongly about this succeeding. As you can see SWSoft does an excellent job of responding to issues and helpign us resolve them. This has been a bit rocky for my liking, but has been pretty good since the last updates.

We are moving forward with this. At this point the only things left are details. Fine tuning packages and cost. Unless you use the VPS ina realistic fashion we are not going to get a realistic idea of performance and stability, so please do use them. We will not leave you in a lurch or anything I promise.


(2)
My reaction so far is positive. I appreciate the level of knowledge and service that the PowerVPS team puts behind their offerings. I feel confident that stability and security issues will be addressed and that there'll be someone around to guide us in setting up various things.


Good to hear! Know what's everyone else thinking? Why is it quiet? is it because you have no problems, or because you are not putting your VPS to work?

Thanks for starting this Thomas

charles

[jpetrov]

As far as I can say right now - I am generally positive about Windows VPS thing...

The things seem to run stable - looking at the logs everything looks normal, no problems at all. I really like the desktop MS SQL option which is lacking in Helm. It is easy to setup a free antivirus and also plesk 7.5 comes with it's own firewall.

The key question is will Plesk 7.5 fix some of the quirks - and if SW soft does this updates - then it would be very nice to have one of these in my little "farm" :).

As for the upgrades - all negative comments are from users trying to upgrade from 7 to 7.5 - obviously SW soft did not do their best in the upgrade scripts. BUT freshly installed 7.5's seem to work perfectly.

Also have in mind that ver. 8 is due in 6 months which will harmonize linux and windows world by its full extent and I believe that Plesk will be one of the most useful panels for the hosts (having the same interface and being able to be supercontrolled by HSPcomplete - another great invention of SWSoft).

I was always looking for solutions that show a clear path towards progress (even if I personally dont reach that goal) and SW Softs solutions (although sometimes buggy at the moment) provide this path for me.

One positive thing from my contact with SW Soft is that I had succesful talks with them to translate their products officially in the local languages from the region I come from. So I am personally involved already with all of these.

One final remark - I believe the most important one - I don't feel that boxes as they come are tweaked to run with the highest performance under VPS - I believe that we will see in the future HOWTO's on which services to be stopped, some apps tweaked and so on - in order to provide better memory footprint. And - I would love to see an implementation of 2 level memory provision system - fixed and burstable - this apart from more flexible swap system would provide us very nice performing VPSes for just a fraction of the investment on a full dedicated server (i.e. licencing fees for the system, email system, ftp, ms sql especially).

Even more - these VPSes seem to be a very nice platform to run company specific extranets and services (i.e. sharepoint, exchange). There is a good business in this as far as I can see.