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Preliminary NodePop review

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TL;DR: A few minor issues (few templates, misconfigured clock, few IPv6 addresses) and one big one (very slow outbound traffic). The network should be good from HE, and disk speed is good (for HDDs), but unless they can fix the network it's pretty much a no-go.

Ordering/client stuff:
The NodePop offer on LEB today caught my eye due to the company being located in my home state, so I decided to give them a go. So far, I'm not impressed. Here's what I have so far. First, the website is very basic, but clean, and I like it OK. Unfortunately, their dedicated server and colo pages are just contact forms, not order forms. Those services are doubtless resold anyway, but I would think at least with dedicated they could get an order form up. Their WHMCS has no branding, either theirs or WHMCS's, but it gets the job done.

Setup is instant, but there seems to be a 1-2 minute delay before any of their e-mails get to my inbox. From there, I could SSH in to the VPS, including over IPv6. This is a big plus for me, as well over half of the supposedly IPv6 capable VPSes I've purchased have had IPv6 issues right off the bat that I've had to ticket about. This worked right away, though as I noted on LEB, I wish they provided more IPv6 by default. I have ticketed about getting more, no response yet, but that was only half an hour ago, and it's midnight in NH where the owner(s) are from. Also, their server clock might be misconfigured: I opened the ticket at 11:11PM, but WHMCS records it as 7:50. All timezones aside, XX:11 and XX:50 are very different, either 21 or 39 minutes apart.

VPS Specs:
Network and disk speed are fine, except outbound seems to be throttled to something like 20Mbit. The speed test file linked in the LEB post is the same way. That's a very big strike right there, pretty much death dealing IMHO. DD tests give me ~90-110 MB/s, which isn't bad for HDDs.

OS Choices:
A few other notes: in ordering, the OS choices box doesn't show OS versions, just name and architecture. "Ubuntu" is 12.04, but I can't speak for the others. The SolusVM reinstall page matches up closely with WHMCS, though, so I believe you have CentOS 5 (just x32), CentOS 6, Debian 6, Fedora 17, Scientific Linux 6, Suse 12.1, and Ubuntu 12.04 to pick from. Not that great a selection, but it hits the major OSes, if not all versions.

Bottom line:
Overall, they have a "just getting started" feel to them. If my SolusVM username is any indication, they only have 13 clients including myself, so they are small. Summerhost? Possibly. However they do have a money back guarantee, so that's something. Their pricing for 256MB is OK, after that it goes up completely linearly - double the resources, double the price - though with a two-month prepay discount. Beyond the 512MB mark, their prices are more than I feel is fair, and even $6/mo for 512MB is a bit more than I prefer. Still, they are on the top-notch HE.net network, so that's good, though there is still the speed issue. I am curious to see how this host pans out in the long term; if they can get their network together the other issues are certainly minor enough that I feel they can do well.

P.S. This is "preliminary" because I have yet to see how ticket response times are, and I'm going to do a ServerBear bench soon.


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