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Vmhaus review - hint: fasssssst
Some of you might remember vmhaus's recent request for testers. That's how I came to get to know @vmhaus. Now, a little while later, I have a small 256MB KVM with them.
Before I go ahead, I first need to make some remarks about benchmarking.
The first one is that I don't use linux, so most widely used benchmarks aren't available for me. The second point is that that is probably actually an advantage because it forced me to think about the problem and to come up with my own solution. Which I did.
What I use is a function from the crypto-world, one reason being lazyness; It allowed me to reuse some work I have already done. But it also makes sense technically. Let me explain:
As I've learned in the 386 days, benchmarking is much about fucking the diverse make-look-great tricks of manufacturers. And it's about testing the relevant functionality. Looking at internet servers the relevant thing, besides connectivity/bandwith is not floating point performance but single thread and memory performance. And about trashing caches; what we're interested in is real memory performance and real CPU performance.
It just so happens that KDFs (key derivation functions. Think "scrypt") lend themselves perfectly to that kind of job. Being designed expressly to break caches and parallelism, they do simple integer operations, some bit fiddling, and to rather brutally use memory they are great for benchmarking.
The result:
On the vmhaus VPS the "torture test" benchmark took 9 sec.
For comparison: on an AMD Phenom, 2.8 GHz it took ca. 21 seconds and on a Xeon 56xx, 2.13 GHz it took ca 23 seconds. Both bare metal, not VPS.
So, the vmhaus VPS is more than twice the speed of your average VPS
.
Next test, hard drive. I'm no fan of complicated drive testing; after all, what I'm interested in is what the average application is going to experience. So a simple dd from /dev/zero must do. The hard drive result is slightly over 580 MB/s.
(Hint: they don't provide "ordinary" SSD but NVMe which, of course, is awfully fast)
Finally, my standard connectivity tests (in Mb/s):
UK_LON 680
AU_MEL 28.16
IN_CHE 33.24
DE_FRA 660
IT_MIL 300
FR_PAR 470
RU_MOS 30
BR_SAO 43.4
US_DAL 35.77
US_SJC 19.04
US_WDC 20.79
JP_TOK 34.75
RO_BUC 140
GR_UNK 120
NO_OSL 300
Summary: Awfully fast for a VPS. For comparison you may want to look at my multiple low end providers connectivity test -> http://bsdguy.freevar.com/cheapvpstest.html
As for support I can't say much because I needed very little. The contact I had, however, was always quite quick and friendly.
Prices are within the usual range but not particularly low, which, however is OK for me considering that you get really terrific speed. In case vmhaus would offer a LET special, say a 512 KVM VPS w/15GB and 3TB traffic for 25€ prepaid annually I would buy an additional bigger VPS right away. The same goes for a 1GB RAM, 15GB and 5TB for, say, 40€.
Note: All their VPSs come with (OVHs) DDOS protection, which might make their prices OK for those who need that.
All in all the best VPS I've seen so far. No single weak point. One exception, not for me but for people desiring large disk space, is that the disk space of their VPS are on the low side.
I'm impressed. Highly recommended.
Comments
I wonder if there nodes are the 2x480GB or the 2x1.2TB ? would be nice to know @vmhaus
Can you post your scripts or commands?
The disk test is a simple dd if=/dev/zero ...
The CPU/mem test is proprietary code written for a client which I may use but not publish or distribute, sorry. You can, however, grab scrypt or similar, and compile and run it for a quite similar test.
As for connectivity
The connectivity is a simple mksh script grabbing a 100MB file on a more or less common set of servers (typ. softlayer as used in other tests). I merely put together a set that looks sensible to me (in Europe) with some european locations, a few us of a ones and some "outliers" like Brazil or japan plus, of course (for me) one in Russia.
So, nothing special other than a reasonable cpu/mem benchmark.
P.S. Here's the script to test connectivity. On systems that don't have "fetch" just replace it by wget or similar.
I think 480GB he said from memory.
Thanks for the detailed review @bsdguy!
@bsdguy - can you share any tips for installing and running BSD on the vmhaus setup? I see they provide a FreeBSD 11.0 ISO mount available in the "Configure VPS" section of their control panel.
I'm not sure that I get your question. As you mention yourself, they do provide a current FreeBSD image.
In case you mean configuration there is nothing special. Just keep in mind that the disk isn't adX but vtbdX (no problem, the installer does it correctly).
Well noted, my test were with a default FreeBSD install (intentionally). So you need not do anything special to get it working. Just install it and that's it.
@uptime, under VPS Configuration, youll just need to select the FreeBSD 11 iso, Change the boot order to CDDrive, Reboot the VPS & Console to your vps using vnc to continue with the installation.
Ok, nice to hear it is a straightforward install. Thanks for the confirmation - looking forward to give FreeBSD 11.0 a try.
i don't know why, but i just named my latest BSD installation 'bsdguy'
Hahaha! Great. Thanks for the honour.
The BSD legend of LET
Just a side note. Windows 2016 iso is also available now. Do let us know if you need any other iso or custom ones and we will get it arranged!
Get me an iso of @Nekki's tentacle porn collection and we will talk. :P
Just ask @raindog308, i'm assuming they share.
Francisco
We usually watch together, actually.
2 men, 1 plex...
I also used 512MB package from @vmhaus and I agree with you. Speed and performance is good.