Quick review of very cheap RU VDS from ihor.ru

A while ago I got another Russian VPS because I was seriously disappointed by justhost.ru. Front-up: The VDS tested here seems to have the same disease I learned to hate with justhost; it seems that quite a few Russian VPS providers swap a not very active VPS out to disk so whenever say a DNS or SSH request comes in the VPS needs to be "woken up" which makes it feel sluggish. I guess they do that to be able to put more VPSs on a node. I'd like to state though that it's far less grave with the VDS benchmarked here from "ihor.ru".

The VDS (dedicated vCore) under test is a 1 vCore (on intel 5620), 512 MB, 10 GB spindles (SSD is available too but about 60% higher price), unlimited traffic @100Mb/s (~theoretically ca. 36 TB) for an incredible ca. €15.50 ($17.00) per year if payed annually.

System info:

Machine: amd64, Arch.: amd64, Model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5620  @ 2.40GHz
OS, version: FreeBSD 12.0 and 12.1, Mem.: 473 MB
CPU - Cores: 1, Family/Model/Stepping: 6/44/2
Cache: 32K/32K L1d/L1i, 2M L2, ? L3
Std. Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
          pse36 cflsh mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss sse3 pclmulqdq ssse3 cx16 pcid
          sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline aes hypervisor
Ext. Flags: tsc_adjust syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm lahf_lm

Although the 5620 obviously is an old processor AES and some other goodies (e.g. tsr, sse4.2) are available. Nice for that price.

Processor & memory:

                   Avg - Low High Dlow Dhigh Span
Single core: 187.45 -   175.26  196.68  6.50    4.92    11.43
Multi core:  218.19 -   198.89  227.67  8.84    4.35    13.19

Not bad at all. justhost's 50$/year VPS has a single core result of ca. 151 MB/s (but 2 vCores), so this ihor.ru VDS actually has better processor & memory performance. I'm absolutely satisfied by that (again, this is a VDS with a dedicated vCore for far below €20). Plus it's quite stable (low span) which confirms that it's really a vDs.

Disk:

Seq.Wr: 46.10  -    44.57   47.02   3.33    1.98    5.31
Rnd.Wr:  4.65  -    4.52    4.89    2.73    5.24    7.96
Seq.Rd: 301.53  -   232.55  352.36  22.88   16.86   39.73
Rnd.Rd: 351.21  -   238.53  421.88  32.08   20.12   52.21

That's where the low price shows. The writing results are poor but the reading results are OK for spindles. On the other hand there are quite many jobs, like DNS and even some http(s), requiring very little writing, so I don't care, in particular as the reading speeds are perfectly acceptable. If you want a faster disk shell out about €10 more per year and you'll have an SSD. Btw, the justhost disk speed wasn't a lot better.

Network:

GR_UNK: 14.82   -   5.20    32.50   64.90   119.35  184.25
US_SJC: 8.87    -   3.20    21.40   63.91   141.35  205.26
OK_LON: 65.88   -   42.20   80.10   35.95   21.58   57.53
DE_FRA: 60.48   -   8.20    83.10   86.44   37.39   123.84
BR_SAO: 12.80   -   3.60    24.00   71.88   87.50   159.38
FR_PAR: 30.45   -   6.50    85.40   78.65   180.46  259.11
US_WDC: 22.33   -   1.90    39.90   91.49   78.66   170.15
RO_BUC: 48.92   -   33.10   59.70   32.33   22.04   54.38
AU_MEL: 16.35   -   15.30   16.80   6.42    2.75    9.17
IT_MIL: 39.78   -   7.10    85.00   82.15   113.66  195.81
SG_SGP: 14.43   -   1.70    27.60   88.22   91.22   179.45
US_DAL: 9.33    -   3.30    35.40   64.64   279.29  343.93
RU_MOS: 100.77  -   94.00   102.40  6.72    1.62    8.34
JP_TOK: 9.55    -   3.00    26.10   68.59   173.30  241.88
NO_OSL: 48.37   -   7.60    85.50   84.29   76.77   161.06
IN_CHN: 23.27   -   18.60   28.70   20.06   23.35   43.41

Nothing to write home about but not poor either. If you don't need good cross-Atlantic connectivity it's even quite OK and about the same level as justhost.ru.

Now again keep in mind that we are talking about something well below $2 per month! And you even get a dedicated vCore (which equates to a hardware thread I guess). Not bad at all. Actually I'm really pleased with my new Russian toy. Maybe interesting for some, you can get that VDS series in many sizes up to 10 dedicated vCores, 24 GB mem. and 240 GB HDD or SSD.

Support: I didn't have many issues yet but FWIW their usual response time has been about 2 hours. In English, well noted and actually helpful instead of mindless boilerplate bla bla.
They have their own panel it seems but it's easy to find ones way and it works fine.

Verdict: If you need a small, quite reliable it seems, quite fast (in its price range and faster than justhost)) VDS and you can live with spindles plus want quick and helpful support, you should absolutely have a look at ihor.ru. AFAIC I have finally found a nice cheap Russian host (for higher end stuff also have a look at Veesp). Don't know if ihor.ru has a representative here at LET though.

(As usual, sorry for my poor formatting)