As a Fasthosts technology parter, I was lucky enough to tour the Fasthosts data centre last December. During the tour, I learned that they were planning on improving their VPS product this year with 1Gbps bandwidth and new storage VPS plans.
Fasthosts have a history of innovating in the more traditional (VPS/dedicated) server hosting market, and they continue this with their 2nd generation VPS product – known as “Edition 2.”
As with Edition 1, Fasthosts Edition 2 VPS are reliable, production-ready and enterprise-grade servers for hosting your websites, applications or anything else you need a cheap Linux or Windows VPS for.
As I alluded to in my original review of Fasthosts VPS, hardware specifications vary wildly on different cloud computing platforms.
With the Edition 2 VPS range, Fasthosts have continued their tradition of innovating with the latest hardware by using 3rd-generation AMD EPYC (Milan) CPUs.
Fasthosts protect all its VPS’ traffic with an external, shared firewall. You control what traffic reaches your VPS by adding rules to a firewall policy using the CloudNX panel.
You can create general rules that allow traffic from any IP address (e.g. HTTPS) or more specific rules that apply to a single source IP or range of IP addresses.
You manage your Fasthosts’ Edition 2 VPS within the CloudNX panel, accessible from within the Fasthosts Control Panel. This means if you have both CloudNX and VPS servers, management operations are now exactly the same.
You can:
With the addition of a snapshot feature in the Edition 2 VPS, you can now take snapshots (known as "images") of your Fasthosts cloud VPS to protect against data loss and recover from a disaster scenario.
While you can use the snapshot feature for backups, I strongly recommend you have other backups in place for two reasons:
Fasthosts VPS is a reliable, production-ready, enterprise-grade product for hosting your websites, applications or anything else you need a cheap Linux or Windows VPS for.
There are a few things I’d like to see implemented which (in my opinion) would make this the ultimate VPS offering:
When you spin up a cloud server, you think in number of (virtual) CPU cores and GB of RAM but the physical specifications of the underlying hardware are important – not all virtual cores are equal!
Fasthosts have built their CloudNX platform on enterprise-grade physical hardware. Each VPS I’ve used in the last 3 years has run on an Intel Xeon Gold CPU.
Fasthosts protect all its VPS’ traffic with an external, shared firewall. You control what traffic reaches your VPS by adding rules to your firewall using the Fasthosts Control Panel.
You add your allowed rules to a “firewall policy” and then assign this policy to your VPS’ IP addresses. This flexibility means you can apply the same policy to more than one IP address or VPS. If you change the policy, it automatically applies to any IP address using that policy.