Finally we have upgraded from an underpowered little VPS to a real piece of HW with the additional bonus of lower ping times. We have a “km1000” from KeyWeb.de (which I notice is already out of date, it’s a pity that the slightly cheaper km800 wasn’t available a month ago!), essentially the specs are 2.66 GHz P4 with 0.5GB of RAM and the difference in usability between this and the old VPS is huge.

Generally I suspect our problems with the JVDs VPS may have been related to them packing more VPSes onto one system; this probably happened as soon as they were bought out by a larger company a while back.

The changeover has also given me a chance to do a few nice things I’ve wanted to get around to for a while, like setting up services such as Apache and bind in chroots. Itemising the improvements:

• VPS -> BigIron
• 128MB RAM -> 512 MB
• 3 GB Disc (200MB free) -> 73 GB (65 GB free!)
• who knows shared CPU -> 2.66 GHz
• 90ms ping -> 35 ms ping (joy!)

The RAM is one of the more important bits and that’s just because of bloody spam, our spam filtering is easily the most memory hungry thing we run and along with all the other services we were right at the 128MB limit on the VPS and wanted to push more features into anti-spam but couldn’t (and doubling the RAM on the VPS would have more than doubled the cost!). The dedicated machine is a lot more expensive than the VPS. The JVDs VPS was 20 USD per month, this server is something like 50 EUR a month – around 65 USD but that’s not too bad considering most US offerings are pegged at 99 USD and UK offerings are around 50 GBP.

Good stuff.