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Analysis - aruba and other surprises
These days benchmarks came up and I felt it was about time to have a new look anyway, so I did a little research. As I'm in europe that, of course, is my main focus but I also looked at 3 us targets (west/central/east) as well as for some asian ones plus down under and Brazil.
The providers I looked at are
aruba (IT1,IT2,DE,CZ,FR,UK), seflow (Lux), prometeus (IT Mil), hostsolutions (RO Ora), alphavps (BG Var I think), nodion (DE Fra), vstoike (RU StP).
The core targets are UK Lon, FR Par, DE Fra, IT Mil, RU Mos, RO Buc, GR (I guess Athens), and NO Oslo plus washington/dc.
In the extended Analysis it's all of the above plus us dal, us sjc, BR Sao, JP Tok, IN Che, and AU Mel.
NL wasn't tested because it's typically the same as UK Lon or DE Fra and I currently don't have a vps there.
For each provider/DC I ran the same 100MB download test to all of the a.m. targets.
As my interest wasn't a simple and blunt "and the fastest is" and as providers usually have better connectivity to some targets/region and worse to others, I made my work a little harder (and more useful I think) and looked for a good balance, too. My major focus there can be described as "I want good connectivity/speed within europe but also acceptable results to the east coast and if possible to Asia".
So, neither could a single good result get you the win, nor could it a really bad single result tear an otherwise good provider down.
Results of "winners" in their own country were excluded, so, e.g. for the target Italy the winner was compiled from all non italian providers/locations.
The winner is - surprise - aruba. The worst one, too, depending on location. Aruba DE, UK, and FR are leading - and I mean with a solid margin. aruba CZ was really poor and aruba IT1 and 2 were average.
Another surprise was vStoike who has really nice vps plus very good support/service. That's, however not their fault as pretty all pipes to/from Russia seem to be rather poor, probably due to them having lost their cross-ukrainian lines.
To show you what I mean: Speed to/from Russia was between 5 and 18 Mbps, which is about the same ballpark as Tokio or Melbourne!
No surprise with the best connected locations: London, Paris, Frankfurt with close to 1 Gbps and Italy and Romania somewhat behind in the 500 - 700 Mbps range (Max. Average is 30% to 50% of that).
The marks from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) and avg speed over all core targets (minus own country) are:
Provider Mark avg (Mb/s)
aruba DE 10+ 331
aruba FR 10+ 337
aruba UK 10 311
aruba IT1 6 97
aruba IT2 7 114
aruba CZ 1 17
seflowL Lux 8 134
alphavps 9 157
hostsolutions 8 127
nodion Fra 8 122
vStoike 2 24
prometeus 9 144
Please, keep in mind that this is only about connectivity/speed! There are other important factors to consider, such as VPS speed, support, multiple pipes and provider reliability - also of the pipes; aruba, for instance, "floats" and gets better and worse, hostsolutions tends to get better, vStoike will get considerably better once ukraine is cleaned up plus it's a rather well established provider.
Also keep in mind that while I tend to go for very low price at acceptable quality and all arubas are 1€ as is nodion, some of the vps are a little more expensive (btw, all are KVM, bhyve, or VM, none is ovz). Also some (like aruba) come quite well equipped with RAM and disk while others are somewhat less well equipped (e.g. nodion).
All in all the marks here would be considerably different if all factors were counted in. aruba, for example is not something I would recommend. Their panel is strange (but not bad), their support is ridiculous. On the other hand I wouldn't agree with those here who talk very bad about aruba. You get a lot of bang for your buck and if you can live with lousy support and changing bandwidth it's a good deal.
Hostsolutions has other strengths. They are growing like crazy and growing their pipes, too plus they are very flexible and open to pretty anything but still cheap.
Epilog:
a) if someone tells me where and how - without creating an account with google or the like I can publish a spreadsheet, I will publish all my data.
b) if any providers are interested they can provide me with a vps for a couple of days and I'll include them (OVZ not accepted).
Finally, if there is enough interest and enough providers who want to be included I'm willing to make the data into a small site that can grow and be linked from here as a subsite.
Have fun
Comments
Here's a list of hosts..
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kh1TZdtyX7UlRd55OBxf7DB-JGj2rsfWckI0FPQRYhE/edit#gid=0
E: https://uguu.se/ but it's only good for 24 hours.
Thanks for your hard work. If you are interested you can present your results using tableau public. They are not like google and their main focus is data representation (https://public.tableau.com/s/). It seems aruba is awesome.
Oh, thanks for the hints! Will look at them.
All the privately owned Aruba's DC (IT1, IT2, CZ1) are the worst. DE1, FR1 and UK1 are, well, Equinix's DCs. In Italy only providers close to mix-it can get competitive peering (but Aruba wanted to build an entirely new DC in a different region). In Czechia they went full low-cost it seems.
There is something strange going on with their CZ DC. A couple of weeks ago CZ was considerably better then both IT and even somewhat better then DE. I'll keep watching it.
where're the results for the extended analysis?
I'm still working on how to put them on the web. As soon as I'm done I'll provide a link.
@BSDGuy
Thank you so much but, you see, my stupidity is limited. Of course that crossed my mind but, too, it was obvious that that would hardly be a solution that could be presented and helpful.
I'm working on some acceptable way. Just a little patience, please.
@bsdguy Maybe the CZ datacenter is targeting mainly/only to domestic market? Did you try the speed inside Czech?
Here is unpleasant surprise with 1eur aruba. Sometimes connection hangs for 3-4 seconds. About 2 times per days.
Possible but rather improbable I think. As for testing inside: Quite the contrary. I even calculated the results excluding a provider/DCs own country; theory, however, for CZ as I didn't test a czech target.
You are aware of the geographic location of Ukraine and St. Petersburg right?
Further not sure what you are saying - the links covering Transnistria-Ukraine-Russia and Russia-Ukraine-EU are operational and humming fine (mostly covering backhaul to DECIX/AMSIX); just look at Retn or Rostelecom.
No. Before you woke me up I thought, St. Petersburg is in the Caribics and ukraine somewhere in Africa.
Moreover I always stupidly assumed that backbones are preferredly large rings rather than single lines.
As I happen to have reason to think that vStoike is a fine and professional provider (and major player in the region) I tried to find an explanation for their lousy connectivity.
Aruba is good for me.
The ridiculous support is, well, ridiculous, their demands i send them company registration papers in spite of the fact I am paying from company's account in the bank and no bank in EU would open an account to a non-existent company, there was no go with them, they insisted to charge (France!!!) VAT until I do, no matter the fact I was ordering from Romania.
I gave up and signed up under a fake name which is apparently fine with them, and for a year and some months I operate 2 1 Eur a month instances in UK and DE with very good results (for the money). At the time France VAT was lower than Romanian one so it was OK they charged it, but now the romanian is lower and they rectified that and charge correctly, so, perfectly for me, albeit illegal for them for the better part of the year. I hope they paid good fines for it.
It's #1/mo. It also runs on VMWare. You might as well be proselytising that "Water is wet".
Hurray, I've completed the masterpiece!
http://bsdguy.freevar.com/cheapvpstest.html
All ze numberrs ar zere. Even colours. I'm proud.
And don't you laugh at the lousy design. I'm a developer, not a webdesigner.
meta name="generator" content="Bluefish 2.2.10"
Very nice! What methods/tools did you use for making the table?
I guess Word/Office with auto table format and some color modifying?
You have to shame me, huh?
Well, I worked with a softmaker spreadsheet and than had the html generated through means I'd prefer not to talk about ... (If you have images in your head of me beating my neighbours wife and shouting "Type! Type faster, bitch!" you are not far off *g)
Once I had the skeleton I then coloured the whole stuff by hand. Using an editor (bluefish). I don't like them fat web designer IDEs. For testing I used netsurf.
If some providers get interested and want such test more often and with more providers and targets I'd script the process, though. To do it mainly manually is a pita.
Wrong guess. a) I don't have ms office. I use something better (Softmaker office. Have a look). b) I've seen office generated html. Yuck. So ... see above ...
Would love this.
Would also love to see that page changed into something atleast mildly attractive.
Nice table.
But, this kind of table can also be created easily in any kind of office (MS, Libre, Open, WPS etc.) as plain table and, then, with an autoformat (almost all offices do use similar to MS techniques). Then. a html convert to the table can produce the code, or, pasting it in another software like DM or a WYSIWYG editor. I have done it with very similar to your table results!