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The SkySpace
This is my first review of a provider, so bear with me.
The SkySpace is a relatively new provider, with not much presence on LowEndTalk (except for 3 accounts each having a few posts). A bit of research shows that behind the 2 company are 2 guys from Wales with an online presence (such as active Twitter accounts), which gave me a tad more trust. I never checked if it was actually registered as an official company with the Chambers of Commerce.
Researching their history shows that the company originally was someone else's, and that it was sold somewhere in May this year.
I found their (cheapest) plan via LowEndStock.com, which offers the following:
$4 a year Hosted with OVH, in Beauharnois, Canada OpenVZ 128MB RAM with 128MB burst 8GB disk space 1 IPv4 address, no IPv6 (such a pity!) 100GB traffic/month
At this time, the plan seems to be out of stock.
The order & signup process went pretty smooth, only remarkable thing here was that they wanted me to state what I was going to use the server for. I don't mind entering this, but I don't really get the point of it (I doubt spammers or other malicious users will admit what they intend to do).
The confirmation e-mail of my signup had my password hidden, so that's a good thing. My order wasn't processed automatically/instant, I had to wait around 4 minutes (so no complaint there!). This was during business hours though.
Here comes the first negative point:
In the VPS server information e-mail it showed the root password I chose during ordering. In my opinion it should not show the password if I entered it myself. I already expected this though, so I chose an easy password to start with, to replace later on with a more complicated unique password.
So, the benchmark (dated 29th of August 2014) you've all been waiting for:
# wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1620 v2 @ 3.70GHz Number of cores : 4 CPU frequency : 3699.609 MHz Total amount of ram : 128 MB Total amount of swap : 128 MB System uptime : 13 min, Download speed from CacheFly: 15.6MB/s Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 21.3MB/s Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 46.7MB/s Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 12.4MB/s Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 13.1MB/s Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 8.09MB/s Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 7.66MB/s Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 23.8MB/s Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 26.8MB/s Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 45.0MB/s I/O speed : 197 MB/s
Because the provider is relatively new, I assume the node I am hosted on isn't utilized that heavily.
After adding the benchmark to my post I am actually surprised myself to see I got assigned 4 cores. I do not expect I will ever utilize them though. Let's just hope none of my neighbouring customers do use all 4 cores fully.
I then reinstalled the server for actual use and quickly noticed that the system clock was a bit off, it was set 36 seconds in the future to be exact. I immediately sent in a ticket on a Sunday (10AM UTC) and received a reply within 10 minutes that it would be fixed within 24 hours, which is acceptable to me. After 8 hours I received an additional reply stating the issue was fixed.
I also used an uptime monitor to check/monitor the uptime, set to check the server every 5 minutes. So far (after around 5 days) there has been no downtime. I understand that 5 days of uptime is not impressive, but I had worse performing servers before.
On the 4th of September I did another benchmark, results are similar to above, except for I/O speed, which was now 114 MB/s.
Overall, I'm quite liking the server and provider, and I hope they will stick around for a while.
EDIT: I noticed just after posting this topic, they actually scaled down the 4 CPU cores to 1 core. I guess it was a mistake. A pity that they did not inform me about it though.
Comments
Hello Aleksio,
Thanks very much for the review and glad you are enjoying the service so far. You will be pleased to know we will be sticking around. If you need the extra cores back at any time please feel free to open a support ticket, sure we can hook you up
Hi Steve,
I actually don't need the 4 cores, but a notification about it would've been nice. But thanks for the offer.