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February 4, 2008

RapidVPS has been good to me

I moved this weblog and my personal email out of the closet and onto a virtual private server last summer.  After looking around, I picked RapidVPS as a hosting provider.  They had good reviews and reasonably priced service.

After I moved, I was quite happy with the performance of my server, but increasingly unhappy with its reliability.  My server was sometimes down or hard to reach, and indeed it was in fact less reliable than it had been living on a Dell P3/550 in my closet.  When I contacted RapidVPS about the problems, they generally responded quickly, but the problems kept occurring.

In November I vented my frustration and sent a message to them.  I was "reluctantly unhappy," I told them. I got a response from Rick Blundell, the owner and chief tech person: what can I do to make you happier?  Make my service more reliable, please, I replied.

Today I just sent Rick another message thanking him.  For the last three months, my service has been everything I could want.  It just works.  No more slowdowns, no issues reaching it. It's been boring again, and that's just what you want out of infrastructure.

Doing server Infrastructure is hard work.  People only notice when it stops working.  When it works, they don't care.  I know; I've run server farms at CNN and EarthLink.  Problems happen. And sometimes fixing it can be difficult, frustrating, and expensive.

Rick and RapidVPS have made me a happy customer.  Thank you, guys.