I’ve migrated most of my sites / services away from Slicehost this week. I guess the trigger was a combination of the Rackspace migration news, and the desire for lower latency to the server. I’ve been with Slicehost for around 3 years with an almost perfect track record (at least when I don’t let a process use up all the memory and the OOM killer).

I was originally looking at Crucial Paradigm due to lots of positive feedback and good prices. However their prices are really only good for new customers as the double RAM offer is not extended to upgrades/download of plans, which could cause some problems if you ever want to resize your VPS. They also specifically disallow game servers in thier AUP (which is a problem as I’m currently running a Minecraft server).

I tested the new iiNet VPS which is located in iiNet’s WA data centre. While the pricing is good, I wasn’t unhappy with the performance of the Virtuozzo based system (I was unable to run a Minecraft server with a single user without the load > 4.0), and the latency from Melbourne wasn’t exactly great.

I’ve now switched to MammothVPS 1 and so far it’s been a good experience. Their data centre is in Sydney and has a fairly low latency for Melbourne and Sydney users2 and their plan offerings are very flexible and are competitively priced for an Australian based server. They use Xen (like Slicehost) so there’s much less risk for over selling.

  1. Yes that’s a referral link.
  2. On a iiNet ADSL2+ connection in inner Melbourne the latency is just 23ms. A TPG ADSL2+ connection in outer Melbourne was much higher at ~60ms.