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!