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Community Review: KnightSwarm 128 MB OpenVZ Monthly
KnightSwarm are a hosting company that are fairly new on the LEB scene. That said, they are a very professional company and I have high hopes for their prospects, LEB or not. The server I'm reviewing is an OpenVZ server and it performs very well (as you will see in this review).
Disclaimer: I am a friend of the owner of KnightSwarm but have not received payment or incentive for this review. It it was provisioned and tested on a standard node using a standard plan.
Basics:
The VPS plan is based in Chicago, Illinois and comes with 128 MB of RAM (192 MB burst), 250 GB of bandwidth (monthly) and 10 GB of disk space. The plan costs $6 a month which is fairly high when it comes to OpenVZ 128 MB plans. OpenVZ plans are managed by a standard SolusVM install (with SSL) and include commonly used templates in both 32 bit and 64 bit (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS). Torrenting is disallowed but IRC seems to be allowed making the plans attractive for people in need of a bouncer.
Support:
Setup was fast and the welcome email contained all information necessary to get up and running with the VPS. Support was fairly fast with a staff member adding the requested OpenVZ template very quickly (4 minutes). Support is a major selling point of this host (they offer phone and email support) and they do a great job!
Setup:
Once my VPS was setup I proceeded to install Debian 6 as normal (installing nothing but the SSH server). After it was installed I used Minstall to clean out any unneeded packages and to set up SSH login protection. The setup went smoothly and fairly quickly!
Defaults:
This section is obsolete as my setup process involves cleaning the server, resulting in the same results everywhere.
Basic Information:
/proc/cpuinfo showed a processor matching the plan description:
root@knightswarm:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 42 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 3192.900 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 0 cpu cores : 4 apicid : 0 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm bogomips : 6385.80 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: [8] processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 42 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 3192.900 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 1 cpu cores : 4 apicid : 2 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm bogomips : 6385.39 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: [8] processor : 2 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 42 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 3192.900 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 2 cpu cores : 4 apicid : 4 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm bogomips : 6385.41 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: [8] processor : 3 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 42 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz stepping : 7 cpu MHz : 3192.900 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 8 core id : 3 cpu cores : 4 apicid : 6 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida nonstop_tsc arat pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm bogomips : 6385.52 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: [8]
/proc/meminfo showed some standard results:
root@knightswarm:~# cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 196608 kB MemFree: 186296 kB Buffers: 0 kB Cached: 0 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 0 kB Inactive: 0 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 196608 kB LowFree: 186296 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 520 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 0 kB Mapped: 0 kB Slab: 0 kB PageTables: 0 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB CommitLimit: 0 kB Committed_AS: 0 kB VmallocTotal: 0 kB VmallocUsed: 0 kB VmallocChunk: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
Inode allocation was excellent:
root@knightswarm:~# df -i Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/simfs 5242880 12724 5230156 1% / tmpfs 24576 3 24573 1% /lib/init/rw tmpfs 24576 1 24575 1% /dev/shm
vmstat showed low system activity:
root@knightswarm:~# vmstat procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 1 0 0 186232 0 0 0 0 222 2026 0 1825 0 0 100 0
Comments
Tests:
Each test was run three times and the middle ranked test was picked.
The Cachefly test showed great results:
Ping Tests (IPv6 works!):
Disk IO was great:
ioping showed acceptable results:
Geekbench results were really good:
Online View: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/711612
UNIX Bench results also showed great performance:
Conclusion:
KnightSwarm offer a very solid but more expensive VPS range backed by excellent support (unseen elsewhere in the LEB community from what I can tell). The only fault I can find apart from price is the small ioping issue and this is being worked on (I submitted a report). I'd recommend KnightSwarm as they are a professional and helpful company with great support and performance!
Please give KnightSwarm a try and report on findings! Thanks for reading, tips and suggestions are appreciated!
Have a look here: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/2904
@maxexcloo thanks for the excellent review. After seeing your disappointing ioping results, I went investigating as to the cause. Write caching was disabled on that controller (even though it has BBU). This has been resolved, and you should have far nicer ioping results now.
'Tis true, you appear to have fixed it!
You mean to say "it was provisioned and tested..."
Thanks for the tip, fixed
Time to test a real provider.