[tlug] VPS providers in Japan

[Mark Karpeles <mark@example.com>]

Hi everyone,

I've been on the TLUG list for years, but haven't had the chance to ever come to a nomikai due to work being much more busy than expected (especially in the last 3 years).

Either way rather than talking about that let me talk about my experience as a Linux user in Japan. When I arrived in Japan I had troubles finding good dedicated servers or VPS services that would be in Japan (good ping) while providing service in English. I did try Sakura Internet, GMO Cloud and others without much success.

While back in France I used to work with providers with a much more simple scheme (similar to domain names: if you don't renew it expires) and much cheaper (dedicated server with GMO was crazy expensive - and didn't provide the distro I wanted).

So after all those years we have setup our own space in a datacenter, with a fully redundant (Cisco based) network we believe our network is good enough to offer  dedicated servers/VPS service (container based only) with things I couldn't find in Japan at first:

• Cheap VPS servers that can be expanded up to 200GB of ram
• Flexible payment with server having an expiration date, you can renew before, or if you don't renew the server simply expire (no "you have to pay" letter)
• Simple interface in English or Japanese
• Re-install in a few clicks through the admin panel
• Different linux distros (for now CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo, plus cpanel - and easy to add some)
• Rescue mode (yes, that thing that can save your life when you messed a kernel upgrade at 1am on a weekend). I was surprised to see that out of all the providers I looked at in Japan, none had a rescue mode.
• API to control every aspect of every server (we're still working out the documentation on that one)

We've had a lot of fun creating this service, and went as far as setting up 20Gbps links between the host servers and Internet (using two Cisco Nexus 5000 switches, that both act as a single switch via Cisco vpc, which means if one switch dies the other one takes over thanks to LACP).

The actual VPS technology is just qemu+libvirt, with a custom frontend to libvirt. Disk images are stored on a glusterfs cluster with 2 replications total, and a geo-replication to another datacenter outside of Japan for disaster recovery.

Either way rather than brag about this I would be wondering if anyone would be able to help by testing the service and provide feedback.

The service is at https://www.forever.net/ - if you reply to this email after creating an account and used the same email when registering to forever.net that you use to post on TLUG, I'll add a free 2 "units" (2GB of ram, 100GB of disk) vps for one month to your account.

Thanks,

Mark