Thrust VPS experience: 3 weeks in

Up until recently I have been using Shared hosts for a few websites I have cooking. They provide a cheap, simple service which is great, but the fact that every time I want to set up a site I have to pay for it became a bit expensive and restrictive. I just wanted to do what I do at work, set a new virtual directory and drop the files in, and point the domain to that server. But obviously a dedicated server can end up expensive. So I started looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) which is basically a shared box, but you get your own installation of Windows or Linux to control as you like. Now, this can also get expensive and I was seriously considering £200-£300 a year for not brilliant specs.

So I Tweeted asking whether anyone had any suggestions. A few minutes later, a reply came in from a new startup called ThrustVPS. I went over to the website which, avast! a rare jewel, was a nice site. The prices were good and they supported both Windows and Linux servers. So I signed up. I didn’t pay much attention to how good support would be, how good the service would be. It was really a bit of a gamble. That gamble paid off. Here’s a quick rundown:

Support
I had a few issues at first. I emailed support, and 10 minutes later I had a reply with a solution straight away. In fact, a couple of times this has happened and each time it was resolved quickly, even when my question ended up well outside the scope of what they should be helping me with.

Service
Connection, speed and the reliability of the servers is excellent so far. I went for the Mystic plan for my Windows box, and Aquatic for the Linux box.

I recommend these guys highly, they are still small, they have servers in the US (west and east coasts) and the UK. I got a Windows install and have just got a lower end Linux install for my more PHP, Python, Rails projects. I’ll eventually move my blogs over there once I have a bit more time.