All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Reliable VPS search
Hey all,
Before I knew better, I bought some VPS's from the other lowend site. Since then, I've come to realize that the hosts I chose have a good shot at not being around long term. If they are, I can do the math (now) and know they have to over-cram the servers full to keep in business. I get overselling, but hate being on a server that crawls.
I'm looking for something in the $40-$60/yr range, but not set in stone. It will be a low use hobby server, maybe a couple of very low traffic websites, and a maybe a few .nzb grabs via sabnzbd a week (personal usage only... won't be public)
So, I think here would be what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's way overkill for a hobby server, but I don't want to get close to any limits and rock the boat.
-- ~50GB SSD (NVMe)
-- 3-4 CPU
-- 3-4GB RAM
-- 1.0 GBps port
-- 1TB bandwidth (I've used 50GB on my most used VPS...reloaded OS/updates 25 times)
-- Datacenter: Not as important. I'm in the midwest, so Chicago is probably the closest.
-- Reliable company that won't end up on lowenddeadpool.info
-- Support that answers within 4-6 hours, not days.
-- CentOS 7 primarily, but nice to have other flavors (no windows needed)
-- OVZ or KVM. Only used OVZ so far, but if one is better for making resources available, that sound better to me.
-- DDOS: I think I'm my only traffic, so probably not.
Really, I want a good, dependable, fast, and always-there VPS that won't disappear on me when I take a nap.
I did see the KVM3 from Virmach...do this and stop looking?
KVM SPECIAL 3
$4.50 / mo
– 3GB RAM
– 2x vCPU
– 40GB SSD (RAID 10)
– 3TB Bandwidth
– 2/10Gbps uplink
– 1x Dedicated IPv4
– KVM/SolusVM
– Windows & Linux
Comments
BuyVM
/thread.
@FootKaput
my experience with the Virmach Chicago KVM (super-cheap Black Friday deal):
(Their standard offering in Chicago may be more performant than the $9/year Black Friday deal I'm on. That 3 GB deal looks good, easy enough to try it out for a month and see how it works for you)
buyVM NYC is indeed a great option - but may not be in stock right now ...
might check @TNAHosting for OVZ, possibly KVM, also dedis - since you and they are both in or near Chicago. Haven't tried them but haven't heard any horror stories and their prices are good so could be well worth a closer look.
One more reliable service I know about relatively close to Chicago (in Michigan) is mnx.io - monthly rates are way above LET price and out of your suggested budget, but are billed hourly so maybe a good option if you want to spin up a more beastly instance for heavy-duty chores just from time to time.
And another hourly provider that might work for your location is Lunanode (in Toronto and Montreal) - they have a very nice setup with many configurations for different needs, resizable storage volumes, snapshots, API, and several other more advanced features (load balancing, DNS, etc)
There's always Vultr or Digital Ocean (out of your budget for monthly - but could work out for short term hourly use)
I guess looking at options in Kansas City or even Dallas or Atlanta would make sense if you prefer location not too far from Chicago and for whatever reason don't find any that suit your needs closer by. (I'd be surprised to notice much difference for most applications.)
thats quite a chunky speced vps.
with a more flexible budget u could look at:
inception hosting (UK)
first-root (DE)
hostdoc (dallas)
hosthatch (LA)
vmhaus (LA)
UltraVPS (LA)
I appreciate everyone's insight.
I agree that my specs are high, but I'd rather pay for extra that I won't use instead of ordering less and hit resource limits and be a 'noisy neighbor'. Really the only time I saw loads jump was when changing PHP versions in CWP7.
I should add that I am in Europe a few times a year, so if midwest doesn't fit, east coast should be considered next.
Also, if there are coupons/discounts/promo codes, my lizard brain likes getting a deal.
If I stretch the budget, there are some recommended that might fit. Some only come with one core...is that enough? Also, many seem to just list "SSD" and not necessarily qualify that with NVMe. Does that matter?
Hosthatch: NVMe 4 GB
-$10
-1x 2.8+ GHz Core
-(100% dedicated)
-4 GB RAM
-35 GB NVMe SSD storage
-2 TB bandwidth
LA
BuyVM: Slice 4096
-$15
-1 Core @ 3.50+ GHz
-Dedicated CPU Usage
-4096 MB Memory
-80 GB SSD Storage
-Unmetered Bandwidth
-1 IPv4 Address
-Las Vegas, NY
UltraVPS.eu Cloud-30
-$10.18 / 9 euros
-2 CPU cores
-4 GB RAM
-50 GB SSD data storage
-2 TB data transfer
-1 IPv4 address
-10 IPv6 addresses
-Contract term 1 month
-Dallas/LA
VMHaus VMH-4GB-LAX
-$14
-4 CPU cores
-4GB RAM
-50 GB NVMe
-8TB transfer
-1 IPv4
-LA dataecnter
Ultravps has a yearly plan u might wanna take advantage of. I'm 3 months in the 2GB plan and still works well most of the time.
All above has good SSD speeds.
@FootKaput - it's refreshing to see request for low-end high-reliability willing to stretch budget for great justice
HostHatch has NYC location - I'm hoping they will do some deals in April. Might be worth trying their regular priced NVMe monthly in the meantime to see how it handles.
BuyVM usually has limited availibility around the 1st of the month - I've found https://buyvmstock.com to be useful for checking availibility
alphaVPS.bg also has NYC location - haven't tried that location but have been happy with their Bulgarian storage for low-cost high-reliability service.
Moving down the east coast a bit - TIL Atlanta is actually a bit closer to Chicago than NYC, as the crow flies at least ...
HostUs.com offers Atlanta location - they've been in business for a while with decent rep on LET so worth a look I think. (I have not yet tried them myself)
ExtraVm has high-clock CPU offers in OVH's new Virginia DC - good stuff
@cybertech mentioned UltraVPS.eu - they are indeed quite solid with nice prices for longer-term deals - don't confuse with UltraVPS.com (a totally different company I know much less about)
@HostDoc's Dallas offers (with NVMe + HDD) seem like potentially an excellent match for your requested specs and budget. Check for "flash sale" deals on https://hostdochost.i.ng or maybe even see if they can give you a custom quote for your specs.
I don't have long-term experience with @HostDoc to say very much about reliability except so far so good - they seem to be on a good trajectory for a newish provider.
As for vmhaus ... they were acquired by the venerable mythic-beasts.com last year. I've had a nice little VPS on their London node for a while - ever since their stuff in Canada was unceremoniously seized by the Mounties. Good stuff I think but ... as with anything else - and some things more than others - you pays yer money and you takes yer chances.
also might consider that while KVM generally will cost a bit more than OVZ especially for high-spec configs - it may be better choice for your use case, for several reasons. For instance - if long-term support for the platform itself might ever become an issue.
Considering your use case, I believe the LA-BBox2 from Letbox @key900 is your best option.
2 vCPU with 2GB RAM and 30GB Nvme storage and a 256GB block storage and 3TB monthly bandwidth at 1Gbps uplink for $6.70 a month (KVM)
The specs are good enough for your use case and the 256GB slower block storage (it shows up as another partition in the system) is great bonus to put your nzb grabs. Just mount that partition as your home directory and you are set.
I don't know of a better combination you can get for your requirements.
@uptime I'm a big boy now (most of the time) and not afraid to pay for what I want...as long as it's a good, solid deal.
The BuyVM cores are powerful, here's a geekbench of their $7 slice: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/12285193
Found this one from @HostDoc :
Dallas NVMe SSD Offers
Dual Intel Xeon GOLD 6128
2vCore @ 3.4Ghz
3GB RAM
1GB Swap
40GB NVMe SSD Storage
1 IPv4
/64 IPv6
3TB Bandwidth @ 10gbps
£4.90 | £45/y
Looks like a solid package in Dallas. There are a lot of offers out there from @HostDoc...is this one at the top of value, or is there one I may have missed?
Really appreciate all the feedback. Thanks!!
@HostDoc is definitely a safe bet. I think the rest are better in some ways and worse in other ways so if you are comfortable with this option there is no need to spend too muh time nit-thinking.
Go for it! You can always try monthly first
Did I mention it even supports Nested Virtualisation?
@FootKaput I think you'll be quite pleased with the Dallas deal
It's a low-end fact of life that there's will often be a (seemingly) "better" deal somewhere in the past / present / future ....
That said, the @HostDoc offer satisfies a good mix of your requirements - really does looks like a good match to me. The combination of a noticeably fast CPU, disk, and network left me feeling pretty pleased with a similar deal I jumped on about a month ago.
I've purchased the plan with HostDoc. Pending setup now.
Really appreciate everyone's help!
Obligatory bench.sh output. I was hoping for better I/O numbers for the drives, but it FEELS fast, and that counts a lot for me. On my cheapo VPSs I would regularly see 1.3GB/sec...but guessing that will change as more clients are added. Network speeds are best I've seen:
Network is fast my man
I am not happy with your IO.
Could you run it 3 times in a row?
Also, passthrough was not enabled in case you want nested virt or better AES. I have enabled it but a reboot would be needed for it to be active.
@FootKaput I'm guessing apparent speed of OVZ using ploop might involve system cache before comitting to disk - though I'm not exactly sure. OVZ does impose less overhead than KVM in general (containerization vs full virtualization.)
I'm used to seeing sequential write speed around 600 MB/s on the Dallas node using this test to commit 256 MB to the disk (using LVM on top of LUKS encryption)
Some people prefer to test with larger sizes but this works for me at least to compare performance on different systems.
I'm generally (more or less) okay with anything over 100 MB/s really (as it shouldn't be a bottleneck for writing data that's coming in over a 1 Gbps port) but certainly other scenarios might want faster disk for database etc. And for some purposes I can live with less than that - for HDD even on a dedi I might expect to see 30 MB/s or lower (kimsufi ...)
for ssd on KVM (with LVM on LUKS) I'm generally expecting something in a range between 250 to 500 MB/s
I've found the HostDoc Dallas NVMe compares favorably - others I've noticed recently include HostHatch (Amsterdam storage) and CrownCloud (Frankfurt storage), vmhaus (London NVMe) and ionswitch (Seattle NVMe), also Subnet Labs (Seattle storage).
At some point I start to wonder what I'm actually testing on the storage boxes (cache?) and am satisfied that fast enough is fast enough ...
I'm not complaining about speed, rather, I don't know what my expectations should be. It seems snappy and responsive. This is also my first KVM, so I don't know if there are settings I need to put in place. I installed CentOS7 and CWP7 so far.
I rebooted (via terminal), and ran bench.sh 3x.
And the second test:
Try a higher filesize.
And since I'm in cli, here's nench:
Cool - here's what I'm seeing (on Debian 9 installed from ISO) doing the 256 MB dd every 10 minutes for the last hour:
which is what I'm used to.
Hopefully the Doc can help get you Optimized
@uptime I don't doubt he will.
@FR_Michael:
first-root is good stuff - with fast connection to Hetzner for more storage
Sooo you are the one doing all the traffic to hetzner?
Looks at least consistent now. Maybe you hit a limit. Might want to check iops with fio as iops are the big plus on nvme!
No boss it wasn't me - I've been idling my kvm like a champ!
dirty little lier ...
Thanks.
I was worried for a second there.