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Top 3 things to look for In a VPS (except price)
victortruica
Member
When I first bought a VPS, I was sorry to have made the decision based on price only. I have discovered that from a business / time perspective, there are other factors way more important than pricing - of course price is important but since the VPS offer and competition is so big, there aren't that huge differences between providers.
Key factors I consider before buying a VPS are:
- Free trial - i want to be able to see what I'm using before buying
- Resource customizability - I hate prepackages. You get more of what you want and less of what you don't. I want to customize it myself
- Snapshots, backup and restoration - I want to take snapshots and restore them easily. With no extra chargers
Key factors I consider when running a VPS
- Networking - location and speed are critical for my visitors (and me)
- Company/staff/community support - the quality staff and/or existence of a community behind the provider assures me of (relatively) fast debugging and issue handling
- Server software packages - I want to be able to install server software packages with one click (e.g. bitnami / softacoulos). This can drastically reduce the time I spend on server configuration
This is based on my experience with VPSs so far, but I want to know what are other VPS users top 3 factors (excluding price) when considering a VPS provider ? Or not necessary 3 factors but what do you consider ?
Comments
Uhh no.
This usually means you're paying more because price per resource will be higher. This will only be cheaper in very specific scenarios. Prepaid packages are going to cost less the majority of the time.
Yea... unless it's a beta program snapshots are a feature that going to cost extra, or not be dependable enough useful/trusted.
Uhh thanks... I'm sure nobody knew that the speed and location of your servers were important.
Oh my god the staff matters??
Huh? You can install the stuff you said with a single command...
2/10
Thanks for the comment Jonchun, but you probably didn't get the idea of the topic.
I am curious on how other people consider their priorities when buying a VPS and I started with mine (that's why it's a "discussion", right ? ) .
And by OS Packages I meant "server software" as in containerized configurations (thats why I mentioned bitnami as an example).
For LE boxes: a) price/spec ratio and b) not GVA-like hosts
For Prod boxes: a) Stability b) Price
Number 1 factor for me is who runs the business or at least the sysadmin whom know what they are doing.
Just being realistic, we place our trust on them, and here at LET, there are quite a bunch of trusted owners / sysadmin
like Kujoe, Anthony Smith, Jarland, Devon B, Francisco, Aldryc, Dustin Cisneros, Mark Turner, Mc Phill, Maonique, JM Ginner and many more 
Location/Network/Ticket Responsiveness
I give little money, they give much server.
The server just needs to work.
I don't have "production" needs, since I don't run million view sites. One of my sites got a few thousand rednecks from reddit on digitalocean, but it held stable, otherwise it's a 100-200/day view site.
I've got other servers for other uses, so low end servers are good for more ips/vpns/proxies and learning, tweaking, destroying and so on.
But I look for reviews on google and lowendtalk before I buy from a provider. So what I need is:
-no major negative reviews
-reliable history
-acceptable performance/price
-I don't need support for myself // this will differ for bigger companies/businesses
Virtuality, Privacy and Servility
Almost not possible without one of these steps:
Most of the time trial VPS's are heavy abused by SPAM'ers, flooders / attackers and other scums
Money back guarantee is in place in case customer is not satisfied with service.
I usually look for stability and network and lastly specs.
If it's a LE*, there's only one thing for me to look at, that is 365 days refund guarantee. Aka. GVH.
Jokes aside, if it is a high end server then I would consider its uptime history, support response time especially hardware related, and mostly network.
But a normal $10 a year VPS, then I don't consider anything. Buy one, use it, if it works fine continue on, if not then just send in a cancel request. Nothing much lost.
Main: Ram, server power, stability.
Hobby: Ram & price. As long as it's cheap and works.
1) Uptime
2) No major performance issues (ie someone killing the I/O all the time or at random bursts)
3) support
dd/iops/uptime
Works for 90% of LETters
Free incoming bw being able to abuse cpu good connectivity
Including key features menitoned here, I would like to add two more which is 'Look for Managed or Unmanaged VPS Hosting' and other is 'How is User Interface of Control Panel'.
You can read in detail about it at http://thetechpanda.com/2014/01/09/effective-tips-choose-best-vps-hosting
This answer is going off my experience with a VPS for what I do personally, what I use a VPS for when I'm conducting business, and from the knowledge I have as a provider. I'd have to say:
1. Published Specifications:
This means the provider tells you exactly what you're getting. I don't like buying a VPS that has "4 cores" because that tells me nothing. I really like it when providers tell me the clock speed, what brand of CPU, the node they're running it on, type of RAM, etc. If it's RAID 10 I want to know if it's software or hardware. The less information the provider is showing, the more they're hiding. Always assume the worst if it's not published. For example, 2GB RAM could be 2GB DDR2 RAM or DDR4. 6 cores could be 6 outdated AMD cores shared across 50 people or 6 full Intel Xeon D cores. 50GB Disk could be 5400RPM SATA, no RAID, or it could be Hardware RAID 10 2015-line SSDs.
2. Price:
For you it might be cheaper price, but I always go for the "appropriately" priced. If you're getting something that's way too good to be true - chances are, it's too good to be true. Other than a few sales, if the provider is publishing extremely low prices for extremely high specifications, that only means they're overselling at an extreme level. And overselling either means more abuse that's not dealt with, negligent overselling, or it means harsh policies. It also means they're going to cut back on support and not pay decent people a decent wage to provide decent support. It will most likely be outsourced support agents who have no technical background, or a one-man company with no technical background. You might have to wait forever for a response. The business is making less money, so they pass on the same level of service for what they're getting paid. There are a few exceptions, but most providers will not be amazing and amazingly cheap.
3. Policies and Support:
Skim over the terms of service - know what you're getting and what strings are attached. Then shoot in a support ticket and ask questions. See how they respond, how quickly they respond, how well they respond to your questions. Get comfortable with what you're purchasing before you purchase it. There's one thing I can tell you: if a company cannot even provide pre-sales support that doesn't suck, they won't be able to provide technical support. So refer to points 1 and 2 that I made: ask them questions about their specifications if they do not have everything listed, and maybe even ask what makes their service worth it if they're more expensive than the average provider. Remember, the same hardware all pretty much costs the same. It's the policies and support that makes one company different from the other.
I basically have the same key factors for VPS Companies.
Except that I don't really need snapshots. Something I need regarding customization is taking less Bandwidth for more HDD/SSD Space.
Regarding Free Trial even a refund policy is enough for me. I really hate it when Servers have bad networking which results in serious ping variations.
Location, performance, uptime.
What I actually don't need is that Snapshots, I hate extra charges for it, I keep My Own Backup in My Own Way. Also Prepaid Packages are Okay. I like it more to install Softwares by myself rather than One Click Tools.
When renting a low-end VPS it is mainly on spec/price and lack of negative reviews. They are so cheap that I can signup for a month for less than sandwich and a drop it at a moments notice if there are immediate problems or if service degrades significantly. I have a few that are paid for annually, but these are still cheap enough that it is no great loss if the die or performance falls through the floor.
I wouldn't trust this - it would be open to abuse and therefore to high resource contention (I/O, bandwidth, CPU) when people do abuse the offer.
I can't say that bothers me at LE prices. If one hosts packages aren't suitable then I can look elsewhere. I do find that for my storage needs plans tend to be CPU/RAM heavy (so I'm getting more other resource than I need just because I want more space) but again at LE prices that isn't too significant and I've yet to see a flexible plan that works out cheaper anyway so I might as well have the extra resource available should I need it in a hurry later.
For backup and DR purposes I don't need this: nothing I care about on my VPSs isn't already redundant and backed up elsewhere. If a particular small VPS, host machine, or whole provider bites the dust I can replicate any content pretty easily. Things would be more hassle for the larger storage VPSs and dedicated servers mainly due to the time required to replicate the amount of backups stored on them but quite possible as everything is out there at least twice, usually thrice or more for key data.
For tinkering: I wouldn't expect an LE provider to give me control of any snapshot facility they have, snapshots either take space or impose extra I/O contention or both. Anything that might require snapshots and rollbacks (testing builds/changes and so forth) is something I'd do on a local VM anyway.
Is there enough space, memory and claimed CPU power for what I intend to use the VPS for? If I intend to do something memory intensive I'll prefer KVM over OVZ as IIRC it is harder to oversell memory with that.
Does it provide the OS template close to what I want as my starting point which for me is usually stock Debian Stable (or at a push OldStable). The option to entirely roll my own install is one better, of course.
What do other people say about the host? (preferably people in the UK/EU as their transit requirements are more likely to be similar to mine than people elsewhere in the world)
Considerations are of course different for more expensive options but even $10/month (that you can get Atom servers with 500G of storage for from a few places) is in the "try it and see" category unless there are sign-up fees. Above that facilities (power control for dedicated boxes and so forth) and network reliability & support response times (gleened from reviews or my own experience) become much more significant tissues.
I can see that a lot of people are not agreeing with this "free trial" thing and maybe that didn't reflect my thoughts exactly. I really enjoyed when I had 5$/10$/X $ free "credit" to spin up a VPS just to get the feeling of environment. I agree that it's prone to abuse, but you are limited in that amount that you're spending your credit on (e.g. like in DO) - and their monitoring probably picks up fishy things like X000's requests / s indicating a DOS or something similar.
That's actually interesting to consider - how would providers limit / fast-detect abuse on free VPS trials ? But I guess that's for another discussion
Free Trial = 100% risk of abuse.
Free Trial means you are asking abusers to abuse your server.
We're not saying you are wrong to have that preference for what-ever reason you do, just that we think opposite for various reasons. The risk is your's to judge!
Actually the risk dynamic there is a little different, at least at DO's current size. They have the scale to swallow a certain amount of abuse so that they can detect and deal with it in a timely manner with minimal disruption to the rest of their users. It would be a drop in the ocean (thankyou, I'll be here all week).
A smaller operation renting low-end VPSs from a small collection of hardware hosts is not in a position to be able to do that.