Updates on changes and additions to www.thevpslist.com.
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Front Page Reorganisation
The front page now shows provider reviews as they appear. Hopefully the much wider layout will not cause trouble for anyone. Really, who uses 1024x768 resolution these days?
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The Speed to Asia
A common request is for a vps host with as low latency as possible. Reducing the latency between the surfers browser and the server host is good because that makes the web pages load faster. As a rule of thumb, for an ajax-heavy page, the latency must be < 300 ms for the site to feel "snappy."
But there is a very real physical limit to how low the latency can get, which is the speed of light. Say you have a server hosted in the US but have a large number of asian visitors. The distance between Singapore and San Francisco is about 14,000 km and the speed of light in optical cable is about 200,000 km/s. That means that, in the best case scenario, it will take 68 ms (14,000 / 200,000) from the time the user clicks on a link in Singapore until the request reaches your American server. Then it will take an additional 68 ms for the response to travel across the Pacific back to the surfer. In total, 136 ms will be wasted on transfer latency.
For a fast FPS game, that kind of latency is intolerable and would give asian players a huge handicap against Americans. For a web server with mostly static pages, it wouldn't be as critical although the difference would definitely be noticable. A great way to measure latency is just-ping.com which can ping a server from various locations around the world.
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Forum Buzz Feature
The new feature of the month is the "Forum Buzz" section on each VPS providers page. There you can find links to discussion board posts about the provider in question. Some of those links lead to in depth reviews of the hosting company, others to irate complaints and spam. Buyer beware, as they say.
The feature is implemented using Google Custom Search and Google AJAX Search API.
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New Fat Swedish Plans
With Secure Networks new plan VPS Ultimate Plus and VPS Ultimate, they take the lead as the Swedish provider who hosts the biggest VPS, memory wise. 12 GB RAM is more than most dedicated servers has.
It will be interesting to see what will happen to the VPS market this spring. Will other Swedish hosters follow Secure Networks and also start offering 10+ gigs RAM VPS:es? Time will tell.
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The Wonders of Slug Fields
Now all links have been slugified. This means that URL:s to objects are generated by taking the object name, converting it to lower case and replacing all special characters and spaces with dash. Fortunately, it was possible to keep all links Google already has indexed intact using redirects. Now I just hope the Googlebot will hurry up and spider all my new very pretty lower-case space-free URL:s.
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The Feeds Are Here
Look in the corner! RSS is here and you can now subscribe to my feed. Press the really big button!
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Site News Feature
The amazing news is that The VPS List now has a news feature. :) It has been created using the excellent django-diario Django application and the contrib.comments framework. On this combined blog/news feed you will shortly be able to read about news from the vps hosting world, hosting events and other information related to vps hosting.
I guess this is as good time as any to list some of the planned future features for The VPS List:
- A sidebar for each provider which links to forum discussions about that provider. Often, it is a good idea to evaluate a product by how much complaints it gets. :)
- Atom and RSS feeds of this blog and of user submitted provider comments.
- A page displaying the above information.
- A version of the site exclusively focusing on the Swedish VPS market.