Sun, 07 Mar 2010

Goodbye RapidXen, Hello Linode Virtual Hosting

About 18 months ago, I grabbed a couple of virtual hosts from RapidXen after reading some positive reviews of their services and prices. The prices are good and—for the first year or so—the service was pretty good too. So I extended my initial contracts, added a third VPS to the mix, and started hosting some of my services on these things.

Late last year, the wheels fell off the RapidXen service. Outages became longer and more frequent. Information about what was happening became impossible to get until well after the event. Then, because they were unhappy with their provider in one of the locations I was using, they announced a move to another city and another provider.

Fair enough, and maybe even a good thing. They at least gave plenty of warning about the move, announced that there’d be several hours of downtime while the equipment was removed from the racks in one place, put into trucks, and transported 400 miles south.

But the downtime and the outages were much longer than stated, and no explanations were offered until weeks later. Apparently, provider A refused to let them unbolt the servers in the old datacentre, hence the resulting fiasco. I can live with things going wrong. I understand that problems are sometimes out of people’s control. What I can’t tolerate is a complete failure (or refusal) to communicate truthfully to affected customers the real state of affairs.

So, despite the pain involved in moving my services elsewhere, I started setting up alternatives. Step 1 was to acquire a Linode once one became available in Fremont. There were some glitches with payment, but the Linode people were remarkably prompt to respond to my queries and fixed things effectively. And later there were a couple of difficulties where I needed customer support and that was also almost instant and solved the problems nicely.

After running the Linode for a while and finding that it was reliable over a few months, I recently migrated most of the services I had been hosting with RapidXen to the Linode and that appears to be working well.

And, so as not to have all my eggs in the one basket again, I also acquired a second Xen-based VPS from a friend in Chicago, and I have migrated some other services to it, also successfully. The third string to my bow will be to use either Amazon or Google to host some other bits for me, but the final decision on which way to go is still in the future.

So I’m feeling much happier about the state of my Internet presence now. And I’m also feeling much better about my off-site data backup arrangements. All in all, the recent changes seem to be a good thing.

Posted at: 17:53

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