basri.my

This would be my last review for the Exabytes Windows VPS. I have subscribed to 3-months free trial VPS since 20th June 2010. It has been more than a month and I think it’s quite a fair period for a review.

I have been writing few posts about Exabytes Windows VPS before, so this article will try to summarize all of them in one full review.

My first post, was really on response time by Exabytes team, packaging and download/upload speed. The response from support team is fast I can say. In term of packaging, it is quite attractive with the introduction of 3-months trial, and latest published price is also quite good with 30% discount of a one time. The upload/download speed is fair, but it can be better.
Score:-
Support team…. 9/10
Packaging… 7/10
Upload/Download speed… 5/10

My second post, was the result when I compared Exabytes Windows VPS with what the other will see on any VPS service. It is generally on pricing, business reputation, money-back-guarantee, positive feedback from current customers, number of domains allowed and what type of control panel. Exabytes does match up to this expectation.
Score:-
Benchmarking to customer expectation… 7/10

Later on my third post, I compared Exabytes plan against plans by it’s competitors that are Shinjiru, Acme & IPServerOne. In my opinion, Exabytes wins over Acme & IPServerOne, but it need to reduce the price to match Shinjiru, or on the other hand keep the price as is but upgrade the specs to better one.
Score:-
Exabytes vs. Shinjiru… 3/10
Exabytes vs. Acme… 6/10
Exabytes vs. IPServerOne… 8/10

My fourth post, was about using the VPS as a speedier torrent download machine. It means:- installing a torrent client, download some movies, and later download those files locally to your machine via FTP or a web server. Please take notes, Exabytes does not allow this. There was also some misunderstanding due to different interpretation of rules by different staff of Exabytes. At first, I was informed that running a seedbox is not allowed, but running a download client is OK. But somehow my VPS was cut-off from internet later due to the fact that running a download client also is defined as abusing the policy. Well that was OK with me, it was just an experiment and it has failed.
Score:-
The VPS makes torrent speedier… 9/10
The VPS allow torrent client… 0/10
Exabytes being clear with it’s own rules… 4/10

My fifth post, was about using the VPS as a proxy server. We use proxy server to protect our security when browsing the internet. Normally a proxy server will make your connection to internet slower, but in this experiment it was not.
Score:-
The VPS is good for a proxy server… 10/10

Later I reviewed Exabytes Windows VPS as a VPN Server in my sixth post. Please follow this post to know why does anyone need a VPN Server. In this experiment I found out that when connected to this VPN Servre, my download connection is a bit reduced and that is normal, but shockingly the upload speed was doubled up.
Score:-
The VPS is good for a VPN server… 10/10

My seventh post, was about running a trading robot with Exabytes VPS. I opened a demo account and get my robot trading it day and night with this VPS. The purpose of using VPS instead of a normal PC is critically on reliability. Traders are not willing to risk their money for sudden interrupted power supply at home, so a VPS looks like a good alternative. However during my experiment with Exabytes Windows VPS, it looks like the reliability will be an issue. At least twice in 2-3 weeks time my VPS has been restarted unintentionally. The other thing is sensitivity. Due to the misunderstanding case where my VPS was cut-off from the internet, my robot stop trading and I have floating trades which risk some amount of money. This is the last thing any trader would like to hear from any VPS provider, and I think Exabytes should take this feedback positively.
Score:-
Reliability for mission critical activity… 1/10
Staff sensitivity to customers… 3/10

After seven posts, I hope that I already give some pointers to the potential Exabytes Windows VPS potential clients. Remember, it’s hard to find a superb and perfect 100% service from any provider. What we can do is to compare from one provider to the others, and suit it with what we really want. My general satisfaction level with Exabytes Windows VPS is 7/10 and I would recommend it for normal daily use. If you do ever need a mission critical machine, you might want to consider a dedicated server with a premium management service.

Using VPS to run 24/7 trading robot

I am myself is not a Forex trader, however I know that some traders are interested in running their trades using a robot. A robot is a customized script sitting on a PC and watch for opportunities to open or close a trade for profit. Why run it on VPS when I can run it on my own PC?

1. A PC is a PC, you will need it for other tasks, reading email, browsing, etc. Sometimes your wife might want to log in to her Facebook and unknowingly close your robot.. now what?

2. Remember at your home, there is a possibility for blackout. A robot won’t run without electric power.

3. Cost, electricity bill will raise up, your PC can get burnt for overheating (will it be?)

Okay so I have downloaded the Metatrader and use a demo account. The result is here:
http://basri.my/forex/fxopen/statement.htm

NOTICE: this is not a robot test, it’s a VPS functionality test, if the robot fail to get me profit I will still be happy as long as the VPS is running smoothly

I will keep this post updated…

—————————–
Updates:

8/7/10 8:01pm – Metatrader client and my robot run smoothly for a day and made 5% profit. However due to some misunderstanding, the VPS connection has been disabled for few hours and the robot was not able to do what it is suppose to do during then. Luckily the last trades were quite successful. Scary right, what if it is the real 10K money that I put in? Luckily it is a demo account.

11/7/10 11:01pm – I just came back from my home town after taking leaves since last Friday. I can’t wait to check how my trading robot was doing since then, so I did take a peek at the statement here during my travel back to my home. Ah, I must mention that I can’t use my Blackberry internet during my break due to coverage issue, but that was another thing. My last check, the profit is about 8%. So as soon as i can get my hand on my PC, I started the Remote Desktop session and login to the VPS. Ouch, there was an unplanned shutdown notice right in front of me. I don’t know why, but the VPS just was restarted.

Just like what you and me are thinking, yes, the trading robot also stopped. I got about $1700 floating negative P&L.

Phewww… this sudden shutdown is not good. I should put Metatrader to auto start when Windows is loaded.

14/7/10 2.36am: Finally the curse on my demo account has over. The floating trades with losses at $1700 turns to $5xxx and luckily the trend just reversed today and my robot has fulfilled it’s function by making me profit about 11% as per today.

19/7/10 7.58pm: The demo on first server still accumulating profit at 30% after 2 weeks. I started another demo on second server to see how it will be doing on different MetaTrader server.

22/7/10 2.27am: Once again my VPS has restarted and leaving my open trades floating down to -$3k. I decided to end my experiment with MetaTraderon Exabytes VPS.

Based on my experience, this VPS perhaps does not meet the requirement of a mission critical application such as a robot trader.

Using VPS as VPN Server

VPS – Virtual Private Server
VPN – Virtual Private Network

They are both totally not the same thing.

First, why on earth that anyone do ever need a VPN?

1. Anonymity – believe or not, every time you log in to the email, or browse to any ‘hot’ sites, remember that there is a big brother watching. You are not private at all. The ISP will be able to tell what are you doing online. To make things worst, just go and browse using public Wi-fi facility at KFC or your neighbor’s. Every single thing you type is readable in a plain text.

2. Different IP – sometimes your IP is banned for something, purposely or not. Or you might not be able to access Paypal or or you cannot enter some websites due to their policy. VPN can bypass this barring by providing you new fixed IP.

3. Cheap, low cost, networking setup – small businesses who would like to have a complete networking between branches, yes this is it!

.. and a lot more reasons why would anyone need it.

So in this experiment, I have setup a VPN using OpenVPN. It is free and quite easy for use. First I have installed the server software at my VPS. Create the keys and distribute it to the clients. Every clients must have the key to get connected to the VPN box. However I must tell you, that I just connect to this VPN using a single client and never test client-to-client connection. I tried to ping the server, even though I get connected to server and browse happily using the server’s IP, I did not manage to ping the server’s private IP. I think there must be something wrong with my installation and got nothing to do with Exabytes server.

The VPN is running, and it is still running for weeks already. I must say that the VPS is quite stable, and never reboots unnecessarily.

If you concern about the browsing speed via the VPN, this is my testing result:

I did not surprise me when the download speed get lowered a bit, but I was impressed to learn that my upload speed was doubled!

I will keep on monitoring this.

Hosting service review MUST be accompanied by side-by-side comparison against their closest competitors. So I decided to compare Exabytes Windows VPS with the plans offered by Shinjiru, Acme & IpServerOne. It should be fun to know what the others are also offering us.

This comparison is based on 1 common measure, that is the range of price from RM190 to RM230.

Exabytes vs. Shinjiru:

Shinjiru beats Exabytes in term of disk space, memory and bandwith. However Shinjiru will charge you for a control panel. Although there is no setup fee, it is obviously RM11 more expensive than Exabytes.

Exabytes vs. Acme:

I found that Acme is quite expensive, notice that RM250 setup fee which is RM200 more from what Exabytes offers. If you turn this into RM20 excess compared to Exabytes monthly rental, it will take 10 months to make it break even with Acme monthly rental. Acme bandwidth is a little tight.

Exabytes vs. IpServerOne:

Even though IpServerOne does offer an unlimited bandwidth, but the storage is only 20GB. They also charge for setup and control panel. Unlimited bandwidth does sounds good, but do you really need it? If you ever do, perhaps the 640MB memory will not be enough to match up the application that normally needs unlimited bandwidth (photo & movie hosting for example – it is memory intensive).

The basic thing in choosing VPS plan does really depends on what types of application that you need to run. For example to host multiple heavy websites, you need more memory. So happy VPS-ing!

It’s not really my second day with Exabytes Windows VPS, it’s rather my second entry in my series of evaluation.

I googled around, looking for what do people expect from a windows VPS. Let me share some points, and put Exabytes Windows VPS in focus.

1) Pricing

Exabytes offers 3 different pricing that are RM119, RM219 and RM319. Generally, people agree that we can get good VPS at $60 or less, which is about RM216 or less. So I think the 1st and 2nd plan is good already in term of pricing, and the 3rd one is OK since it’s best specs available.

2) Business reputation and customer base

“With the current Exabytes serving more than 32,000 clients from both Malaysia and overseas and generating RM8.5 million revenue yearly, Chan has more to tell than all these commendable numbers.” Read more.

That is totally awesome, and the reputation is not questionable. How many of those 32,000 subscribing to windows VPS? I don’t know, but there must be something really good with this hosting company that make those clients still loyal.

3) A good VPS provider will always come with 30 days money-back guarantee

Well, I don’t need to elaborate further, at this moment Exabytes is far better then that, they give VPS for 3 months for free.

4) Number of positive feedback

At the moment, there are no feedback yet for the VPS since it’s still in trial period, but I think there will be a lot very soon.

5) Number of domains allowed

My benchmark competitor’s plan does offer 10-30 domains per plan. However in my 2nd plan VPS trial, I found that it allows 50 domains. It’s good if you are planning to host multiple websites.

6) Control panel

Exabytes offer DotNetPanel. It’s quite convenient and very straight forward. I captured a screenshot for those who are looking. With the control panel, managing your domains and database is easy.

Okay let me be honest, I am quite interested to take the challenge by Exabytes. This Malaysian web hosting company is asking their clients to evaluate their new Windows VPS plan. Let me be brief on the plan, there are 3 plans available;

VPS1 Windows 25G space, 250G bandwidth, RM119/m
VPS2 Windows 50g space, 500G bandwidth, RM219/m
VPS3 Windows 75G space, 750G bandwidth, RM319/m

I picked VPS2. Why not VPS3 with better specs? It simply because I want to try the VPS which is I might want to confirm subscribing later on. It suit my requirements, and my budget. I will possibly will be using this VPS once this evaluation is successful.

Telling the truth, this plan is quite a surprise to me. At first glance, I thought it just another promotion that require us to pay in lump sum for example half a year and then qualify for 3 months free VPS, but guess what, I was totally wrong. Exabytes do really offer their VPS plan for FREE, except small RM50 for setup. Well, it is a truly good a deal, so without hesitation I filled up the subscription form yesterday morning at at 9.59 AM. Remember it was Sunday. Let us see how fast Exabytes can respond to a client request. I paid the setup fee using Paypal and receive confirmation email at 10.02am. The payment is approved now, so I just need to wait for account details email.

9.09pm, I received account details. IP address of the VPS, username & default password. Without wasting anymore time, I logged in to the VPS via Remote Desktop Connection. The authentication was fast.

First thing I was really eager to do was, to check for the internet connection speed. I am not a networking guy, so I did what best to my knowledge only. Using default web browser IE8, I logged to www.speedtest.net. IE8 security level for internet zone was quite high, it did not allow me to install flash player which is required by speedtest.net. I am not really good in IE8 settings (actually I don’t use IE at all on my PC), so instead of wasting my time tuning the security level, I decided to download Mozilla Firefox. After few attempts (IE8 did not allow to download Firefox due to different web mirrors), finally I got Firefox installed. Now I can have speedtest.net running. Here it is;

Remember this VPS is on 10mbps shared internet port. I know speedtest.net will not be giving the exact result. It’s just a good to see stuff.

One of the reason that I want to use VPS is for downloading purposes. I just bought a Real HD Player and I have a 500G external hard disk to be filled up. So I guess I need a lot of movies now. My daughter, she just love to watch cartoons.

I have a premium rapidshare account, so the download should be good. I am using Rapidwarex as the download manager. Let us see if my expectation is met here;

Now see that I get 245kbps speed. It’s not quite good to me. I can get about 150kbps on my normal streamyx connection (1mbps plan), so I guess a connection from data center should be much better.

Now, what about uploading speed? To test this I configure the IIS to point to a virtual folder which contain the files that I downloaded. I just need browse to this address from my PC and download it. I am using Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) for this. So see it in action here;

Okay see that I got about 200kbps download speed, meaning upload speed for the VPS. Still not quite good, because I can get about 150kbps on my PC direct to rapidshare without VPS. I was expecting it to much more better because the connection is in the country.

So that’s the end of my evaluation for the Day #1. I will come out with another report soon.

Here are my feedbacks to Exabytes for Day #1:-

1. Activation time is fast – it’s within same day! Congratulation.

2. Free 3 months trial is without commitment is something very good and honest from you. Not many providers will do that if they are not confident with their service, but Exabytes proven that they are ready to meet clients expectation.

3. If it is possible, try to setup IE8 default to medium security. High security will make it denies to almost anything that we want to do online except a simple text browsing. Yes, I don’t use IE and I don’t know where to configure the security. Perhaps setting up Firefox as other option is appreciated.

4. Download/Upload speed should be better. I know it is not fair to make Exabytes answerable for this due to some other factors that will influence the result, but perhaps better download speed will be your very selling-point compared to the competitors.

Meeting you soon on other report on Exabytes VPS Try & Win!