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Review of DelimiterVPS's HP BL460C Dual X5150.
Hey guys,
I posted benchmarks here.. http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/20213/serverbear-delimitervps-hp-bl460c-dual-x5150-16gb-500gb-30-mo/p1
Now it's time for a review as my month is nearly up in about a week.
So.. in the beginning there was light..then there was delimiter..never mind.
It was great. It really was in the beginning. Then again I was just screwing around so if things broke.. cool.. fine by me man.
When I actually tried installing stuff like hypervisors..well I couldn't. Their network seems so bad to Comcast that iLO doesn't even work properly. It sucks rubberband balls. The page response on it is terrible... or just plain errors out. Best of all, if the connection to iLO is bad then you can't install from any remote ISOs because it'll drop midway through any installs. So I'm either stuck using their limited installers or an idling dedicated.
So why didn't I open a ticket?
Ah, but I did.. on the 25th. I danced around with the tech for about 30 minutes then he opened a ticket supposedly to the data center with my traceroute and ping results.
"We have a ticket still open on this with the datacentre, we'll follow it up when the day staff arrive there." This was said on the 28th.
No response till date. I asked if there was an update later that day.. no response.
I mean at least their billing works? I asked if pro-rated refunds were possible and she said no, but the cancel 3 days before the due date..
Don't think I'll quite be renewing this one.
Maybe I got a bad egg?
Mixed and jumbled.. I know sorry kinda rushed.
Comments
Their network to comcast was the exact reason I requested a refund. Cogent -> comcast produces 100+ ms ping.
It sucks dude.
My honest opinion on them: They need to get their sh*t in order. MarkTurner does his best for customer support here, kudos to him, but there's only so much you can do for a company that's as bad as that. It takes 1-1 1/2 weeks to provision a dedi, the network is bad. Although, then again, they are fairly low spec servers, so it's not too suprising.
I've been looking to buy my first dedicated server. It will be extremely underused so specs aren't too much of a concern. Delimiter is 1 of 4 I am considering. It's a bummer to see so many negative reviews on them and it definitely gives me more to think about. I agree with @Void_Whisperer that MarkTurner does an awesome job at customer support and PR on LowEndTalk and he's part of the reason they are part of my top 4.
One think people have to understand is that when you rack hundred of servers at the same time all kind of s... storms happen. I would recommend some patience until the offer expires and the issues are ironed down.
At 20$ per month with IPKVM, 16gb RAM ,,, i think we can afford patience ...
I can't really complain at $20/month either. I'm curious to see how the network will be in the coming months.
Weird I'm on comcast and I can use the ilo. It's not amazing but not bad. Uploading an iso over a residential connection to an ipmi system always sucks.
My ping ranges 70-130ms, but it's not noticeable when I'm doing anything that isn't pinging or requiring low latency.
Comcast is just bad end of...
I have absolutely crap connection to my iLO.. Sometimes it even errors out. But that's kinda what I expect considering I'm in Australia.
Other than that, my Dedi's network is almost too good. (using too much BW)
At $20, I'm happy.
@David_P - your comments don't really make sense. You are complaining about performance of the ILO network but not about the servers network. Its the same network.
Unless you have a decent connection and that does not include Comcast broadband (sorry - but just from talking to colleagues in the US who use Comcast at home, they tell me its a low grade oversold network), then you could get virtual media to work over a DSL line. I have remote reinstalled a server in that very same facility using the same ILO from my home (BT) DSL line in the UK. It was chronically painful, but it did work.
Think about what you're doing, its worse than an NFS mount over DSL connection, the virtual media does not upload the disk to the ILO, it literally translates the read requests into a TCP packets which hit a Java applet on your computer (ie the virtual media applet); which then accesses the ISO you've mounted and sends it back.
First problem - MTU/fragmentation, all these Java virtual media systems require 'ideal' conditions, read corporate networks not shared cable/DSL service running at a few Mbps. Even if I was installing across my office network to a server in our internal server room, I would not use virtual media, I'd PXE boot or use a USB key.
Second problem - if that Java applet running on your local computer doesn't respond fast enough to the request, the server will see as a disk error. Multiple disk errors and the install fails.
If you have a specific ISO you wanted to use which was not available from our long list of operating systems and variants, then the easiest solution was to ask Delimiter to locally mount it for you in Atlanta. That way you can use the ILO to remote control your server whilst the 'disk' is locally served.
I'll give you another insight, Comcast customers in South and West seem to have no problems using this (or haven't complained yet). Comcast customers in the North and North East all have issues. It comes down to the way Comcast interconnects with third party networks, there is congestion across almost all of the N/NE interconnects whereas from my digging around their West and Southern interconnects are substantially less congested.
What were actually trying to install via virtual media?
It looks like they have improved the connection from Charter. It was 70ms a few weeks ago and now it's down to 22ms. I live 12 miles from the data center.
@Xenos - we're doing an immense amount of work on our network at the moment.
Actually it's probably just because no one has complained. I'm in Atlanta and have Comcast and pings/throughput are horrible when going over Comcast, however I have ways around that and I know you guys are working on things so I haven't complained. I just route my ipv4 traffic over a VPN with RamNode and all works well after that.
@petris - can you PM me a traceroute from your Comcast connection to your Delimiter server and another from your Comcast connection to Ramnode. If that connection is good then there is no reason we don't pickup those routes.
I'm using Cox from SE VA and getting 25-30ms pings with no issues.
Charter is pretty good for the most part, sometimes it can get a little high but with them working on it I imagine it will only get better.
I should actually rephrase that from "well" to "better", the odd thing is that it appears to be going through Miami when going over the vpn, though. PMing you now.
There was packet loss on the iLO but not on the server..the server network seems good enough. Explain that?
Comcast is a monopoly where I live in Cali. AT&T is worse. Only two options here.
PXE boot is your guys list correct?
Maybe I'll try this before I leave you guys.
I believe I am considered in the "west". I declare your network sucks rubberband balls so far. XD
XenServer.. VMware 5.5 and what not.
Edit;
Found XenServer on the list..yay..let's see how this works.
BMC web interfaces seem to be slow no matter what. Whether it be iLO, DRAC, IPMI...whatever. Those web portals are half-baked development jobs at best. They certainly work but not without their security issues, slow responses, and a myriad of other issues.
My Comcast connection is fine except for traffic that routes through Cogent. The Cogent links in New York that Comcast and a lot of ISPs in the Northeast US route through have always had bad latency. That being said I was able to use IPMI and load an iso on it just fine. Just high latency especially during the evening hours. @MarkTurner had mentioned to me via PM that they were working on better routing with Comcast and get away from Cogent. Is this still the case?
@Kajak - we've made and are making a number of routing policy changes. We have a conference call with Comcast next week in Atlanta to discuss peering. We meet their requirements for peering in terms of traffic/interconnect points but its question on how long it takes to set this up. In my experience in Europe, these agreements can be put together in days with some companys and months with others.
Irrespective, we are looking at better routes into Comcast, I expect Level 3 will be able to provide this as a stop gap.
Yea I have never seen an issue with hosts that use Level 3 so that would likely provide a nice improvement.