Millwood Online

VPS.NET is a new cloud hosting solution from uk2group. When I found out they offered Drupal via a Turnkey Linux, I thought I had to give it a try.

At VPS.NET you pay for nodes (a bit confusing with Drupal) each one costs £15 or $19, with the price going down the more you buy. A node is 0.4GHz dedicated CPU, 256MB RAM, 10GB storage, and 250GB bandwidth. The nodes can either be hosted in the UK or the US. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) can then be created from 1 to 18 60 nodes, this can be changed at anytime.

As shown in the image above I created a two node VPS with Turnkey linux, using the Drupal 6 on Ubuntu 8.04 template. After this page was submitted I was given the IP address and login for the server. When navigating to the IP address I got the Drupal installation screen, no need to setup Apache, PHP or MySQL. Turnkey also took care of telling Drupal the database details, which halved the Drupal installation screens.

It was literally 5 minutes from setting up the VPS, to logging into Drupal. Not only that Turnkey provides a load of modules, including CCK and Views.

This is by far the easiest server and Drupal installation I have done. For those not familiar with sys admin, servers, linux or Drupal this is a great service and I would really recommend it. Although personally I wouldn't use it, but that's just because I'm fussy and want to know what's making my server and Drupal install tick.

I am very interested in VPS.NET's other VPS templates, so will be playing with these over the next few days and will blog about them then, but initially they look really good.

VPS.NET also offer an API to manage the servers and node, I plan on making a Drupal module for this so you can manage your server from within your Drupal site.

For more screenshot have a look at my Flickr.
For more information on VPS.NET goto their site.
For more information on Turnkey Linux goto their site.