VPS.net Review for MobLoSo

MobLoSo, Editor and Co-Founder, Dan Brady did some massive research and had read some great things about VPS.net and their powerful hosting system. I, too, researched VPS.net and found them to be a good choice. You can buy “nodes” which allow you to ramp up your server space when need be. So, say you have some hugely viral content, and POW! it gets on the front page of Digg or some other viral site and your traffic is huge, you can scale it up momentarily, so your site doesn’t succumb to the “digg effect” and crash your server, like we did on Dreamhost.

So, we decided on 3 nodes, at first. The total cost, around $54 a month. Not too bad, we can handle that. So, Dan and I try to figure out how to configure an empty server. Because that is what VPS.net gives you, a blank slate to work with. Since neither Dan nor I am a server admin, we struggled to figure out how to set it up properly. In fact, there is VERY LITTLE documentation on how to configure the server through them. So, I think it may be a ploy to get us to buy the Managed server account, which we inevitably did. And so, we paid them another $45 for setup, and $90 a month. Another $135 paid to VPS.net this month. $54 + $135= $189, so far… in the first month.
We initially tried, in vain, to set up the server on our own. Well, in the process, we racked up a 3 additional $9 fees for a server add-on called Softaculous. What Softaculous allows us to do is to install WordPress and over 100 other website software components to any website on our server. Well, we installed it twice on accident on a server that we configured wrong and had to start over. We were charged $18 for those. We installed the configuration once again and collectively, Dan and I said, “Screw this” and we went to managed services, so they would set up the server and get my sites ported over well.

They have done a TREMENDOUS job on porting the sites over, and getting things working on the site that we need. MobileLocalSocial.com is now faster than ever. They had to delete the server we installed, and reinstalled it correctly, which we probably would have done, had there been any real documentation for us to read. So, 2 more $9 fees were added.

So, roughly $200 has been charged in the first month… but one of the $9 fees hadn’t been paid for yet… and so they SUSPEND the Server this morning. Over $9.