Deth

I was cleaning up my email a bit last night and noticed my invoice for my current host, LaunchVPS . It got me thinking how the hosting here has always just worked for me over the past year and a half or so that I’ve been using them. Typically the only thoughts on products or services people ever really post are bad experiences or being a paid shill I am using my affiliate link but why wouldn’t I? I try to leave positive reviews on things here when I see fit and this is one of those cases that I think it’s appropriate. Rather than complaining I would take my payment elsewhere.

First things first I have to admit that I really haven’t had any bad experiences with any hosts I’ve used. I have had close calls where I’d switched to a new host just to try something new or had different requirements and accidentally timed my migration just right to avoid problems. Take Razorservers for example. I’d switched away from them just before they were sold and customers got fucked over. I just seem to have pretty good timing that way.

Getting back to what this post is really about now, I had a dedicated server which was overkill for what I needed at the time. I had changed my mind about something I was going to do. I was looking for something cheaper and happened upon Launch VPS and saw they had fair prices, supported FreeBSD and were in Philly so I gave them a try, I’m partial to hosts in Philadelphia because it’s like supporting my old area and go Eagles! I also like to try to support smaller less known companies when I can and as long as they can fulfill my needs and LaunchVPS does everything I want it to do and does it well.

When I first ordered it the setup was fast enough. At this point I can’t say I remember how long the initial setup took because that was quite a while ago but it was ready the next morning when I woke up. My first impressions of the control panel were that it was great for what I wanted. Not overly pretty but certainly functional enough. I’m a fan of keeping things more simple.

My VPS seems to be pretty fast. It’s definitely powerful enough for my needs. Technically it’s overkill now that I switched over to Hugo (best decision I ever made was to get a way from WordPress and PHP.) No I need to run hugo and upload my site. I’ve also finally switched to using pkg for FreeBSD rather than building ports myself so that helps a lot. I had used a discount code I found so I pay $13.03 a month for 4gb of ram, 2 cores and 40gb of disk space. I have the KVM virtualization which is slightly more expensive but I need to use that version if I want to run FreeBSD so it was a no brainier for me to choose KVM. FreeBSD has not let me down in the ten years since I switched over to it. Actually it’s been a bit longer than ten years.

I haven’t really noticed any slowdowns. The disk seems pretty fast to me so I have no reason to doubt it’s what they say it is. I haven’t actually bench marked it nor do I care about benchmarks. I just want something that works well for my workload and my VPS has been more than fast enough for that.

It certainly seems to be fast enough with a stable and solid network connection. I can’t remember having any network glitches other than that time level3 was down and that was half the internet being down.

There has been no downtime that I have been aware of that wasn’t of my own doing. I tend to sometimes go into things without a plan but this is just more or less hobby stuff for me so it doesn’t really matter. I learn by doing. I break things at times but between the snapshots and my back ups and their console I’ve always been able get things going again so it’s no an issue.

They offer backups for a reasonable price but I don’t use them since I use tarsnap for my backup purposes. I do use the snapshot option on their control panel before major updates. The snapshot seems to stay around for a long time so it’s technically like a backup. I wouldn’t depend on it

I haven’t used customer service so I can’t really speak on that. I would call not needing to ever contact customer service in the past eighteen months or so a good thing. I am not one to contact customer service for help with my own screw ups but the tools (snapshots and HTML5 console have been all I have needed to fix them.)

I would highly recommend this VPS provider from my experience with the service I’ve had and the very reasonable prices. In my experience with my server it has always just worked and that’s exactly what I want out of a host. Give them a try if you’re looking and think they’ll fit your needs.