For a recent project, I needed to find reliable server hosting with good
connectivity inside India. After doing some research, I decided to use
E2E Networks, which offers
reasonably-configured virtual servers at good prices, and has
well-connected hosting facilities in Delhi and Mumbai.
The server was commissioned within a few hours of paying for it, and E2E
support has been consistently responsive and helpful. I had no trouble
setting up the server the way I wanted (despite being their first 64-bit
Debian squeeze VM), and it's been working nicely ever since (three weeks
now), with no network or service outages that I've noticed.
Upon request, E2E hooked me into their Zabbix monitoring setup, so I get
SMS alerts if anything breaks, and my client's IT people are entertained
by nice graphs of CPU and RAM usage (which are mostly flatlined near the
X-axis, so the sudden spikes when I compile something or a cron job
kicks in are causes for much excitement).
One minor oddity is that their accounting process depends on ssh-ing to
your server as root every five minutes. That, plus the five-minute
connections from zabbix_agent to Postfix and nginx, make for quite a bit
of noise in the logs.
E2E's carefully-chosen peering
arrangements deliver on their promise of low latency in India. I'm
used to 300–500ms latency while accessing servers in Europe and
the US, and was pleasantly surprised at how much nicer it is to ssh to
a server that's only 50–70ms away.
It's too early to say anything about long-term reliability, but all the
signs so far have been promising. E2E is worth a good long look if you
need hosting in India.
(Aside: Net4India were another option that my clients considered, but
they did themselves no favours by quoting twice the price for much less
hardware and a ridiculously inadequate 10GB monthly bandwidth usage
allowance. But I will treasure the memory of their area manager's smug
answer to my question about actual bandwidth: Infinite!
)