Time certainly does fly… as such this is a three month review of the VPS service at allsimple. I picked up one of their VPS via LEB to host this blog and a few bits and pieces and have been pleasantly surprised with the results.
The closest equivalent retail package would be at a somewhat higher £11 p/m with the below limits. I’m paying £4.40 for 512MB Swap and 200GB bandwidth. The VPS I have sees 2x CPU cores (see below for full cat /proc/cpuinfo).
Linux Virtual Servers – 512MB VPS
512MB Memory
1GB Swap Memory
20GB Disk Space
400GB Data Transfer
General Information and Signup
The VPS offerings are Xen based, which is generally seen as a positive over OpenVZ, as it allows swap allocation and greater control of certain aspects such as kernel & modules to the purchaser.
Ordering is via a WHMCS billing system and payment via Paypal for card processing. A quick look over the site reveals a maintained if quiet forum (i.e. not filled with spam like certain other providers I could mention) and Web Hosting / VPS packages with sensible limits (i.e. ones the company will actually be able to make a profit on without rabid overstuffing of their systems / disregarding their customers).
I ordered on a weekday evening and order processing was quick within 10 minutes. The VPS can be configured via a simple control panel with the following OS templates provided.
- Debian Lenny
- CentOS 5.5
- Ubuntu 8.04
- Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS
- Lightweight WordPress on Debian using lowendscript
The usual basics such as reverse dns can be configured and there is a server console available via SSH. Reboots / Re-Imaging can be made via the billing system. It does not appear possible to make automatic upgrades to higher resource allocations although this appears to be due to the company wishing to ensure nodes do not become overloaded.
The host node appears of a suitable grade (Xeon CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz) and I have not encountered any immediate evidence of overloading or poor configuration (increased i/o wait load etc).
Uptime is published and has been generally good and whilst I didn’t request credit back in March (total uptime of 99.805%) there is an uptime SLA of 99.9% offering various levels of compensation for downtime. I’m not immediately able to locate any information on the RAID setup used on the host nodes or what degree of disaster recovery backups are in place.
A free 1GB of storage on a separate backup server is provided and can be activated via the control panel. Name Servers are available if you wish to use them.
Support and the Company itself
I’ve had cause to submit two request for support, both during the working day and both of which were resolved quickly with a courteous and technically comprehensive explanation of what had gone wrong. One involved a RAID problem on the host node and the other a networking snafu.
The company appears to be a limited liability partnership just under a year old. Some may wish to avoid small companies / those without a proven track record for various reasons, but providing you have a suitable off site backup regime in place I personally see no reason not to recommend them on what I’ve seen in the last three months.
If you found this review useful, please consider signing up via my affiliate link. This will provide me with a 15% credit.
Note: 05/12/2011 Allsimple appear to have been screwed over by their data centre and the servers have been unavailable for some hours whilst they are physically moved. Communication by email and twitter has been good.
CPUInfo
user@computer:$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2133.408
cache size : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 11
wp : yes
flags : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic sep cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc pni ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt
bogomips : 4270.03
clflush size : 64
power management:
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 26
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2133.408
cache size : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 11
wp : yes
flags : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic sep cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc pni ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt
bogomips : 4270.03
clflush size : 64
power management:
Disk Throughput (although please don't regard this as in any way definitive).
user@computer:$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=30k count=30k conv=fdatasync
30720+0 records in
30720+0 records out
943718400 bytes (944 MB) copied, 19.6883 s, 47.9 MB/s
It’s true that you can waste a lot of time on the internet, but whilst doing so, you can also come across some really interesting stuff. Such as 
