In early May I signed up for a collocated virtual server at John Companies. I had a bunch of web sites which had become homeless at short notice and I needed something cheap, functional and easy to approach for a Linux/Debian person like me.
In less than two hours after my first mail to them I could log into my server as root and start to customise it. In a couple of days I had mysql, apache, mod_perl, HTML::Mason and other ancillaries setup and migrated my sites over. It couldn’t have been easier.
The real server appears to be a four-way Xeon based machine with 4Gb of memory, but I cannot see all that much of the physical server.
My setup includes 4Gb of disk quota (later increased to 8Gb), 40Gb of monthly transfer and technical support. All this for $45/month which is not bad at all. I seriously doubt I could find many others that can match that offer.
The $45 offer is given to Open Source contributors. The normal price is $75. That kind of offer is another good reason to use JohnCompanies.
The Debian installation I was given initially, was a Debian stable setup, and not quite up to date. I had to install a few security updates immediately. I also installed some packages from testing, since my sites depended on functionality found only in newer versions of the packages.
That is the beauty of a VPS, or Virtual Private Server. I’m root on my own system and can install and configure anything I like. The only thing I cannot do, is to reboot it or install custom kernels or kernel modules. Also, the firewall is out of reach, but I can send my firewall rules to JohnCompanies and they’ll install them.
I have absolutely no problems with their technical support. They are very knowledgeable and helpful. My mails are normally answered in minutes, not in hours. I take more time to answer their mails 🙂
In short, I’m very content with my JohnCompanies Virtual Server.
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