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Vultr vs Virmach for cheap hosting
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Vultr vs Virmach for cheap hosting

Hello LowEndTalk!

I recently came across the 10 dollar per year deals from Virmach. I already have a 3.50 dollar/month VPS with Vultr which is perfectly fine but because I use it as an occasional webserver, the Virmach plan is cheaper and has better specs with 768mb of ram and 20gigs of storage compared to the 10gig of disk space with Vultr

On one hand, I get a better dashboard, better support for more money. But with Virmach, I get better specs for less money.

What do you think is a better choice? My primary use case is just hosting a webserver and a filehost to share and host files.

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Comments

  • @PerryPal said: But with Virmach, I get better specs for less money.

    Historically, Virmach has had much more restrictive limitations on CPU, I/O, network usage, and a very aggressive anti-abuse detection system prone to false positives. I believe they're toned it down and worked out most of the issues in the past year, but I'm not the one to test the limits. Vultr is probably the clear winner as to which provider would let you utilize their services to the fullest.

    That being said, for a simple webserver and file-host, I think you'd be fine with Virmach. As always, if it's a high availability service, plan for what should happen when it goes down and keep backups.

    Thanked by 1kkrajk
  • Go for Virmach. If availibility is really important, you probably want more than just a single Vultr VM. CDN, IP failover, etc.

    Anyway, you will get close to 100% uptime with Virmach from my experience.

  • @ben47955 said:
    Go for Virmach. If availibility is really important, you probably want more than just a single Vultr VM. CDN, IP failover, etc.

    Anyway, you will get close to 100% uptime with Virmach from my experience.

    Ah thanks. Thats all I need. I will be making offsite backups.

  • @Bertie said:

    @PerryPal said: But with Virmach, I get better specs for less money.

    Historically, Virmach has had much more restrictive limitations on CPU, I/O, network usage, and a very aggressive anti-abuse detection system prone to false positives.

    What do they do when you exceed limits?

  • @PerryPal said: What do they do when you exceed limits?

    Usually, step are
    1. They open ticket asking to reduce your usage.
    2. Shutdown VPS
    3. Suspend VPS
    4. Terminate

    If you don't act like a dick, thing don't go further point 2.

  • @ben47955 said:

    @PerryPal said: What do they do when you exceed limits?

    Usually, step are
    1. They open ticket asking to reduce your usage.
    2. Shutdown VPS
    3. Suspend VPS
    4. Terminate

    If you don't act like a dick, thing don't go further point 2.

    Thanks for your answers, just currious about maximum 50% CPU usage for 15 min. As far as I know (by currently owning 4 vps with them), their VPS already have CPU reduced to around 25-30% of normal CPU, so why I can't use all of CPUs or at least 50% all the time? Some metric applications required a little bit heavy CPUs and may easily pass 50% threashold in some high load situation.

  • @ben47955 said:
    If you don't act like a dick, thing don't go further point 2.

    Oh that sounds pretty reasonable. Thanks Virmach seems perfect then

  • Vultr feels much reliable than Virmach, but Virmach gives much more ram.

  • @elliotc said:
    Vultr feels much reliable than Virmach, but Virmach gives much more ram.

    This is my VPS with the worst uptime. I'm paying 0.95/y for that. Show me Vultr with better.

    Thanked by 1merlinvn
  • @ben47955 said:

    @elliotc said:
    Vultr feels much reliable than Virmach, but Virmach gives much more ram.

    This is my VPS with the worst uptime. I'm paying 0.95/y for that. Show me Vultr with better.

    Google have downtime last month, virmach is more reliable than google now.
    Reliable is not about uptime but... Reliable. Virmach feels more like a workshop, and vultr is a corporation.

    Thanked by 1kkrajk
  • waynechriswaynechris Member
    edited January 2021

    If you don’t care about the operation quality of the website and just want to put some pages, please choose virmach,
    If you are running a major business website, you care about the quality of the operation, and don’t care about money, please choose vultr
    I have used both of these two vps. Vultr's support ticket response is relatively fast, vps migration is convenient, and virmach is like a lighter that is often lost by me. It is cheap and a necessities of life. Based on this price, don't ask too much high

    Thanked by 1merlinvn
  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited January 2021

    I've found VirMach to be fast and reliable. Vultr's CPU can actually end up slower than VirMach's unless you get their "high frequency compute" VPSes (which start at $6/month, not $3.50).

    @PerryPal said: What do they do when you exceed limits?

    They have an automated system that opens a ticket, and I think you get several warnings before they do anything drastic like throttle or shut down your VPS. I think their limits are quite reasonable these days... I doubt they'd flag anything if you use a lot of CPU for just 20 minutes or so. I have daily backups which do a lot of disk I/O and CPU usage (compressing, encrypting, and deduping data with Borgbackup) every night and I've never been flagged by their system.

    Thanked by 1merlinvn
  • @elliotc said: Google have downtime last month, virmach is more reliable than google now.

    Reliable is not about uptime but... Reliable. Virmach feels more like a workshop, and vultr is a corporation.

    What is you definition of reliability ? Availability maybe ? Like I said previously, if you want high availability you will need a more complex architecture than a single vps and vps provider would not matter that much considering I'm implying at least two different provider.

    Virmach give you enough bang for your buck and that should be enough for home project.

    Thanked by 1Erisa
  • @ben47955 said:

    @elliotc said: Google have downtime last month, virmach is more reliable than google now.

    Reliable is not about uptime but... Reliable. Virmach feels more like a workshop, and vultr is a corporation.

    What is you definition of reliability ? Availability maybe ? Like I said previously, if you want high availability you will need a more complex architecture than a single vps and vps provider would not matter that much considering I'm implying at least two different provider.

    Virmach give you enough bang for your buck and that should be enough for home project.

    I am not saying that virmach is bad, I just want to point out that they have different market niches.

    Thanked by 1Bertie
  • @elliotc said: I am not saying that virmach is bad, I just want to point out that they have different market niches.

    Of course, different pricing too. But I would be willing to include Virmach as Vultr in any complex architecture.

  • Of course @VirMach dude.

  • BertieBertie Member
    edited January 2021

    @ben47955 said: This is my VPS with the worst uptime. I'm paying 0.95/y for that. Show me Vultr with better.

    Uptime is just one aspect of reliability. I have over a dozen Virmach services and at any given moment, at least one service is either delinked from my panel, DHCP is broken, HTML5 VNC doesn't work, a migration from OVZ is botched, etc.

    Virmach is great for the price you pay and I'm certainly not complaining that my $5 VPS has some minor difficulties in usage, but it's not really the most reliable by a longshot. This is compounded by Virmach threatening to levy $30 invoices if you submit a ticket for something that "we're aware of and handling".

    But that service is worth $10/year for a reason, and you get $10's worth of service. Not much more, not much less. Answering a single ticket might cost them $5 worth of manpower, negating any profit from that service.

    OP makes it sound like they're okay with a slightly less reliable service for a service that's a quarter of the price.

    Thanked by 1pluush
  • @Bertie said:

    @ben47955 said: This is my VPS with the worst uptime. I'm paying 0.95/y for that. Show me Vultr with better.

    Uptime is just one aspect of reliability. I have over a dozen Virmach services and at any given moment, at least one service is either delinked from my panel, DHCP is broken, HTML5 VNC doesn't work, a migration from OVZ is botched, etc.

    Virmach is great for the price you pay and I'm certainly not complaining that my $5 VPS has some minor difficulties in usage, but it's not really the most reliable by a longshot. This is compounded by Virmach threatening to levy $30 invoices if you submit a ticket for something that "we're aware of and handling".

    You call the worst of Virmach, that a bit unfair. You probably don't keep a dozen vps at Vultr to do any comparaison, but they have their issues. About ticket, it's not 30$ but 15$. I don't think they are that dick about that. They can't expect everyone to keep reading a thread of many pages for many week of course, but checking the status page before creating ticket seem legit. They uses strong word, but they are reasonable about that.

  • BertieBertie Member
    edited January 2021

    @ben47955 said: You call the worst of Virmach, that a bit unfair.

    It's unfair to say that I have small issues with Virmach regularly? I'm not sure my experiences/issues at Virmach are invalidated because I don't idle 12 VMs at Vultr.

    Virmach has problems. They're not major problems and it's not a bad provider. They have great deals and I'm happy to purchase and host non-critical things with them.

    Virmach is a great company that fulfills a niche in the budget VM market, but fanboying over Virmach and being offended when your favourite provider isn't called perfect isn't really productive.

    Vultr on the other hand, fulfills a niche in the budget/mid-range cloud infrastructure market, and caters to businesses. You pay more, and you expect more from Vultr as a result. Vultr is not dramatically better than Virmach, but in my opinion, it is better overall (while Virmach might be better in terms of cost/service ratio).

    Thanked by 2pluush willK
  • If you want to test some code or let your VPS idle, VirMach is fine. If not, go for Vultr. Moreover, read this thread carefully before going for VirMach. It seems there is very limited support, even months without responses if there are issues:

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/169065/virmach-since-you-could-not-solve-the-problem-could-you-refund-the-order/p1

    Thanked by 2Bertie pluush
  • HxxxHxxx Member
    edited January 2021

    Wanted to jump in and say that...
    1- You can't simply compare Virmach to a Titan like VULTR. Simply you can't. VULTR is at the level of (or even greater than) Linode and DigitalOcean. VULTR parent company is a datacenter (Choopa). The comparison of Virmach vs VULTR is so wrong at any level, is like comparing AWS with Bluehost, VULTR been the AWS in the example.

    2- You compare companies by market target. AWS is usually compared with Google Cloud and Azure. VULTR is compared with Linode and DO. VULTR targets developers same as Linode and DO. Provides a highly custom (in-house developed) control panel with Cloud like features.

    You could compare Virmach with Racknerd for instance.
    Personally and with big respects to these two brands (Virmach and Racknerd)... I wouldn't use them for anything production/business/serious.

    If you means business, and you are running critical stuff skip ahead and start with VULTR, DO, Linode. You could also consider other providers like RamNode (which like Virmach started small but now are in a whole other plane) and also Frantech / BuyVM which is one of the few with an in-house control panel and infrastructure (Francisco is kind of a genius).

    I would even say if your budget is bigger do the jump to the big boys: AWS / Microsoft AZURE / Google Cloud. Usually when you are running something critical, mentioning any of these three in a conversation with partners gives you advantage, is the "proven solution" at corporates.

    Some of you guys probably won't understand and is ok since most here are just hungry for cheapo unusable services. Then when something goes to shit as usual... threads with "my VPS at x shitty provider is down, I'm paying 2 dollars a year and I'm losing MILLLLLLIONSSSS" start to appear...

    2cents

  • BertieBertie Member
    edited January 2021

    @OliverScott said: Moreover, read this thread carefully before going for VirMach. It seems there is very limited support, even months without responses if there are issues:

    Yikes, some of these responses are quite arrogant. I was open to giving Virmach the benefit of the doubt, but I guess that's something to think on.

    Thinking about it, it's quite silly to prevent users from changing the email address on the account as well unless they "paid for a support package".

    Thanked by 1pluush
  • vu has a better line, there will be a better network experience. The CPU performance of vu is higher, while the vir limits the performance of the cpu more. vu's hard disk read and write speeds are generally better. In general, vir is more suitable for novices to practice. If you want better service quality ,vu is recommended.

  • Virmach always says that they are pure SSD disks, but their TOS does require that the average IOPS in any two hours cannot exceed 80. This threshold is lower than ordinary HDD hard disks. If you want to carve your data on a stone , Please choose VirMach.

    Thanked by 2Bertie levnode
  • VirMachVirMach Member, Patron Provider

    @abiaolaoge said: Virmach always says that they are pure SSD disks, but their TOS does require that the average IOPS in any two hours cannot exceed 80. This threshold is lower than ordinary HDD hard disks. If you want to carve your data on a stone , Please choose VirMach.

    We're going to update that with better verbiage/figures. There's no case in the last 5 years where someone has actually been suspended or even powered off for 80 IOPS. It scales based on your package size, and the minimum is significantly higher than 80 IOPS. This figure was from a long time ago, when we also offered HDD services and that was for a brief period of time.

    It is meant to be there as a bare minimum where we can begin looking into taking action, but I can understand why there's concern.

    @OliverScott said: It seems there is very limited support, even months without responses if there are issues

    In the 30 days following our Black Friday offer, about 75% of people received relatively normal response times, and 25% received delayed responses. The #1 longest wait right now are those tickets regarding billing as we had issues with Alipay, that we automatically resolved and there are still many of these requests open. For billing tickets.

    Special offers are sorted differently, and they generally receive responses after our normal support level packages (unless it's an emergency situation.)

    @Bertie said: have over a dozen Virmach services and at any given moment, at least one service is either delinked from my panel, DHCP is broken, HTML5 VNC doesn't work, a migration from OVZ is botched, etc.

    • About 0.6% of services faced some "delinking" issue.
    • HTML5 VNC was broken for some time after SolusVM update. We pushed an update to all servers, but about 3% of nodes are still experiencing some level of web VNC issue. Services are still accessible via any other VNC application in these cases.
    • Network issues are rare. We did have a recent issue with nullroutes from the datacenter. This, unfortunately, did incorrectly affect 0.005% of customers (where they received a nullrouted IP on their new service.)
    • Migration from OVZ to KVM was definitely not perfect. Major issues were extremely rare, but more prominent than we had hoped or seen in testing.

    @Daniel15 said: I've found VirMach to be fast and reliable. Vultr's CPU can actually end up slower than VirMach's unless you get their "high frequency compute" VPSes (which start at $6/month, not $3.50).

    We understand that our hardware is getting outdated and working toward using processors that do end up also being better than any advertised benchmark I see from Vultr. For the bulk of special offers and potentially KVM Lite services though, we might not end up going with the same brand new hardware, we'll see.

    These are the currently planned future nodes:

    128GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, Ryzen 9 3950X @ 3.5GHz, 4x2TB NVMe (RAID 10.)

    @ben47955 said: Usually, step are
    1. They open ticket asking to reduce your usage.
    2. Shutdown VPS
    3. Suspend VPS
    4. Terminate

    If you don't act like a dick, thing don't go further point 2.

    @Bertie said: Historically, Virmach has had much more restrictive limitations on CPU, I/O, network usage, and a very aggressive anti-abuse detection system prone to false positives. I believe they're toned it down and worked out most of the issues in the past year, but I'm not the one to test the limits.

    Currently, our anti-abuse system related to I/O and CPU does the following:

    1) Ignores usage in certain cases completely.
    2) Throws out the first case if it's below a certain threshold.
    3) Provides a light warning.
    4) Potentially provides a second warning.
    5) Provides another warning, but this time with a powerdown.
    6) May repeat the step above any number of times to avoid going to the next step.
    7) Suspends the service in extreme cases (almost never, mostly disabled.)
    8) No termination occurs, outside of customer cancelling or not renewing.

    Nearly all cases of CPU related power-downs are with the customer being at 99% or more CPU usage for at least 2 hours. Average I/O related powerdowns seem to be around 5,000 operations per second over many hours, although it ranges from around 200 to 80,000 (with some outliers here and there.)

    Once we roll out the Ryzen 3950X packages, we'll basically have a 4x improved CPU to RAM ratio so we can potentially allow people to essentially have "dedicated" CPU on those packages, but we'll see. And since it will be NVMe's we can be much more lenient on I/O as well although I'd like to think we already are pretty lenient. Everyone gets to use multiple times more I/O over something like 6-8 hours than their share of disk space on the node. This means if the sevice is 100GB disk and the node has 8x1TB SSDs in RAID10, you could basically burst to 3-5x 100GB/4000GB, or as much as something like 12.5% of all available estimated disk operations for your 2.5% share of the disk.

    @Bertie said: Thinking about it, it's quite silly to prevent users from changing the email address on the account as well unless they "paid for a support package".

    We just had to do this, I'm sorry.

    For whatever reason, the percentage of customers requesting email changes is astronomically higher on special-only accounts. We received a thousand plus of these requests, just to put it in perspective, compared to maybe 50 of them over the entire year otherwise from standard accounts. There are also other security concerns involved. It was well thought out and it's the only solution we can implement until we code something smarter to deal with them outside of letting a customer change it automatically with little to no requirements.


    I hope that's overall some helpful information.

  • Hello VIRMACH

    My VPS has an error in running a necessary program. Two similar errors in the past 20 days have caused me heavy losses. Yesterday, a professional checked and found that the error was:
    [2021-01-06 06:56:51.152] [error] [main] AES-256-GCM is not available on this CPU

    the CPU in that machine is very old and doesnt support encryption used

    cat /proc/cpuinfo is model : 13 AND model name: QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)

    Confirmed, no aes in flags,so I need to change the server or throw away

    Would you pls help me to deal this VPS

    Palyafc

  • @bobe said:
    Hello VIRMACH

    My VPS has an error in running a necessary program. Two similar errors in the past 20 days have caused me heavy losses. Yesterday, a professional checked and found that the error was:
    [2021-01-06 06:56:51.152] [error] [main] AES-256-GCM is not available on this CPU

    the CPU in that machine is very old and doesnt support encryption used

    cat /proc/cpuinfo is model : 13 AND model name: QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)

    Confirmed, no aes in flags,so I need to change the server or throw away

    Would you pls help me to deal this VPS

    Palyafc

    :| This is not a helpdesk thread.

  • @bobe said:
    Hello VIRMACH

    My VPS has an error in running a necessary program. Two similar errors in the past 20 days have caused me heavy losses. Yesterday, a professional checked and found that the error was:
    [2021-01-06 06:56:51.152] [error] [main] AES-256-GCM is not available on this CPU

    the CPU in that machine is very old and doesnt support encryption used

    cat /proc/cpuinfo is model : 13 AND model name: QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)

    Confirmed, no aes in flags,so I need to change the server or throw away

    Would you pls help me to deal this VPS

    Palyafc

    If you are running shadowsocks, I recommend using chacha20-ietf-poly1305 encryption algorithm for better compatibility

  • Thank you!

    I am not using Shadowsocks

  • @VirMach said: These are the currently planned future nodes:

    128GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, Ryzen 9 3950X @ 3.5GHz, 4x2TB NVMe (RAID 10.)

    Which location(s)?

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