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Inferno

By laurence On May 17, 2013 · Add Comment

So the speed of the MonoRail Transports (MRT) have allowed me to finish Inferno in 2 days.

Quick thoughts about it. Great storyline, great piece of work, but I have a nagging suspicion that I have read the story a few years before somewhere. It felt very familiar as I was reading it, except I couldn’t pinpoint where I had read it before. Perhaps it’s just the style of the writing that was familiar.

Overall, great book, worth a read if you are spending alot of time on the MRT.

Why I’m switching from AlienVPS to DigitalOcean

By laurence On May 10, 2013 · Add Comment

So I’ve been a cloud nomad.

4 (or 3) years ago, I started thinking about hosting my blog, and using that as a motivation to pick up web programming. I bought the cheapest plan over at SingaporeHost.sg. 5GB disk space for SGD$8 a month. In fact, the earliest version of this blog was hosted there. After looking around, due to the fact that I decided I need to learn more than how to do programming in PHP, coupled with the fact that AWS had their 1 year free trial, I jumped over. Little did I know that their instances (micro-instance) had CPU stolen from them all the time. On top of that, the filesystem IO was starting to cost money, and there were days where I had around 50 cents worth of EBS IO. That was when I realised AWS wasn’t that good a deal. Then I jumped to Webfaction and it was really good. But I missed being root, and so I got another machine at AlienVPS. Was happy with their price points ($15/year, $4/month), and I got one of each VPS. They were using OpenVZ, and while that meant that some stuff required tricks to get around, you could get around it. Really slow customer support, but I reckoned with their price points, I shouldn’t expect too much.

Then came DigitalOcean. $5/month on KVM VPS with SSD for storage. It was the dream VPS service. Oh, and it’s on Tier 1 Bandwidth as well. And despite their cheap price, their customer service has an RTT of 10 minutes. Tried it on various occasions throughout the day, it has always been 10mins. And they even teach you how to set up VPN on their servers. What more can one ask for?

As of now, I have set up OpenVPN plus a couple of sites over to DigitalOcean, and I’m really glad I did so. And their new datacenter location in San Fran has an RTT of 200ms to SG, couldn’t have been happier.

Cheap US servers for OpenVPN from Singapore

By laurence On April 18, 2013 · Add Comment

Just some background stuff that might be useful in future for myself =P.

[Update 1: DigitalOcean now has VPS in San Fran (Link]
2 main options, AlienVPS and DigitalOcean

Specs

	AlienVPS	AlienVPS	DigitalOcean (New York)	DigitalOcean (San Fran)
Ping	267ms	250ms	409ms	200ms
Download Speed	1.28Mbps	1.35Mbps	1.35Mbps	1.35Mbps
Upload Speed	0.62Mbps	0.74Mbps	0.34Mbps	0.78Mbps
Price	USD$15/year	USD$4 a month	USD$5/month	USD$5/month

[Note, just figured out my test environment, NUS, actually caps traffic, hence the speeds are all pretty slow]

However, despite AlienVPS looking better on network end, they use OpenVZ to virtualise. Result is that you are unable to create you own swap partition, and some OS modules are not available [Not exactly a deal breaker as there are ways to get around it].

DigitalOcean use KVM (QEMU) and you can pretty much do most stuff with it, BUT you get only 1 core, and high RTT from SG [That is VERY bad if you are using it for regular web surfing].

Personally I’ve tried both, and I would say that AlienVPS in terms of performance is way better. However for the cheaper option, you may run into memory issues because the amount of memory is really lacking. Now I have set up the $4/month AlienVPS server with OpenVPN, and streaming videos from Hulu is pretty much smooth. Hulu on DigitalOcean (New York) is decent, but may lag at times. That said, DigitalOcean uses SSD, and if that’s what you are looking for (DB server and stuff), it could fit the use case of a cheap DB server too.