VPS

Purchased VPS last night.

WebFaction - great but expensive

This was originally driven by getting my PayPal account limited. Apparently this is not uncommon and a combination of losing my cards, moving address and then logging in with a Japanese IP address was enough to trigger the anti-fraud systems.

There were payments which I made which were obviously through PayPal, and some which I didn’t realise were. My webhosting is currently through WebFaction who are fantastic. But when I lost my card, they continued to try charging my old card every single day until I was able to update my card details. When the payment finally succeeded this triggered one of my bank’s anti-fraud systems resulting in a phone call to my bank to sort that out. It looked like that situation was resolved until the next month when my card got rejected again. Phone calls to my bank. No record of rejecting payment. Went round in circles for a while before realising that Webfaction use PayPal for their payments (not branded as PayPal, but it does say clearly in their blurb) and my payment was actually being rejected by PayPal because my PayPal account was limited.

Sorted this out with WebFaction and all kudos to them for their helpful and responsive customer support, but led to realising I’m paying too much for hosting I don’t use enough.

123 Systems - antiknowledge base

So I got a 256MB/10GB/500GB Linux VPS from 123Systems Solutions for $19 a year through a promotion on Low End Box. And now I have a login to a box which so far does nothing, and a very sparse looking control panel.

The sign up form gave me the opportunity to have webmin installed, so will go looking for that. I know I only have 1 IP Address so I won’t be able to run my own name servers. Probably don’t have enough RAM anyway. Can’t find anything in 123Systems knowledge base about setting up with their web servers except:

With Kloxo you can chose to run your own nameservers, which enable you to have custom DNS records like “ns1 and ns2.mydomain.com” or you can use the DNS servers we provide for VPS customers.

Though I am led to believe from someone else that their knowledge base has been copied and pasted from some other hosting company, confirmed by this bit:

If you want to stick with the HyperVM option please see the DNS instructions in the following document:

but no link given. (Googled it, found something similar).)

Determined not to log a support ticket just yet!