NullifyNetwork

The blog and home page of Simon Soanes
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Due to a variety of my circumstances changing and the way the exchange rate was fluctuating I changed from having all-US servers to using rented dedicated servers from 1and1 internet - billed in UK pounds. Right now it's particularly appropriate with both the Euro and the Pound hugely devalued against the US dollar.

I didn't expect much - the plan I picked was half literally half the price I was paying before but I got a higher specification server, unlimited bandwidth with no concern about overages anymore or anything of the sort and a significant improvement on the latency to my Texas based servers (which is understandable given the speed of light, but the network is also less congested and I can regularly get 85Mbps and less than 20ms to the UK when testing it).

So I've been with them almost a year now and the availability has far exceeded that of my previous datacenter - I've had about 2 minutes downtime the entire time, so I thought I would mention it as it's relevant to a project I'm working on at the moment...

Fortunately that does mean I've not managed to see if their support is any good, but the service certainly is.

Be warned that their network setup is not really conducive to VMWare or virtualisation in general - they use 1 ip sized subnets and gateways that you can always access even though they aren't in your subnet through some TCP/IP stack tweaks (I think it's "All subnets are local" combined with the switches having some custom configuration, but I've not yet figured it out and it's the first time I've seen something similar done).  Their network does have a nice Cisco switch based firewall for every custom because of the strange setup though, and it lets you have public IP's from different subnets so it's got its advantages (no renumbering!).

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