
Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting - bbunix
http://blog.maclawran.ca/96882258
======
valladont
Funny that.

Using the advice of this site I signed up for an empire hosting account.

Selected the server and options I wanted, submitted my billing information and
got four emails welcoming me and informing me that my account had been
created.

Logged into the back end to be informed that my ip address had been baned and
I could not access the system.

Contacted support via the live support widget and was informed that to be able
to access my system I would have to disconnect from the proxy I was using and
use the ip address my ISP provided.

The proxy I was connected through is a linode server that I run and manage,
the proxy connection was an SSH Dynamic proxy because I was sitting in a
coffee shop.

When I am using public wifi I secure my connection over SSH and route all my
browser data through that secure link.

Because I control both ends of the link (my laptop and the 'proxy') I trust
that connection more then I do the owners of a wifi hotspot.

I was informed that I would be unable to use the empire hosting account I
created unless I direct connected.

Canceled order.

I will stick with Linode, which has NEVER given me a single issue and whos
service seems better.

 _edited to add_ With them being nice enough to send me back my password in
clear text I am glad I used the ssh proxy.

~~~
Nick_C
Hmm, thanks for the warning. I have a forwarding proxy set up for the exact
same reason as you. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that I couldn't use it.

------
api
Part of why this can be so cheap is density.

The Parallels Virtuozzo / OpenVZ container-based approach to virtualization is
just so infinitely more efficient than hypervisor-based virtualization. It's
really, really staggering. We use it where I work for internal virtualization
and have done tests with _thousands_ of containers on a box that could hold at
most 20-30 KVM-based hypervisor instances.

If you look into the deep tech details, it becomes immediately obvious why
this is the case. It's too bad this isn't in the mainline Linux kernel. There
is an effort called LXC, but it is behind OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, especially in the
security department.

The only disadvantage is that you can't run your own kernel, but for 99.9% of
Linux applications this does not matter. You can do quite a bit inside a
container: OpenVPN, IPSec, Fuse, IPTables, bridging, etc.

For personal hosting, I've had very good luck with this one:
<http://alienvps.com/>

I have their "abduction" plan -- a very very cheap one not advertised on the
homepage. It's very small, but I've managed to cram a stripped-down MySQL and
Lighttpd LAMP stack in there for my personal sites. You can't beat the price,
and so far I've had no downtime or issues.

~~~
moe
_Part of why this can be so cheap is density._

This is also the reason why performance is usually beyond terrible. Most of
the cheap VPS hosts are extremely overprovisioned and not very well
maintained. There may be the odd gem (I haven't tried alien), but $130 buys
you a rackspace VM for a year nowadays, so I don't see the point of even
bothering anymore.

~~~
api
Those are business problems, not tech shortcomings. Poor performance is due to
horrendous overselling, while poor maintenance is due to being cheap.

You don't _have_ to oversell like that. It doesn't change the fundamental,
unavoidable fact that containers are a far more efficient way to virtualize
than hypervisors for fundamental architectural reasons. An OpenVZ-based hoster
that didn't oversell ridiculously would be cheaper and faster than a
hypervisor-based host.

With a hypervisor you are running an entire kernel within a simulated machine
within another kernel. That will never be more efficient.

------
josephb
From the article:

> Linode <http://linode.com> \- expensive, no IPV6, really fast network @ 11.9
> Mbps

Actually Linode have IPv6 support in 5 of their 6 locations :-)

~~~
webfuel
I just did the speed test on linode (Atlanta) and got 52.1 MBps. I can't say
enough good things about their service.

<http://imgur.com/BLmCH>

------
ilaksh
It would be nice if there were a web site with a recommended tool that you
could install on your VPS and then when you ran it it would upload your
results directly to a comparison page. That way you could compare the cost to
the performance of each service.

It could run that network test he mentions in the article, and hdparm,
something to check CPU load, gather info on the CPUs and memory and whether it
was using Xen or OpenVZ or whatever, maybe try a few benchmarks.

------
darklajid
So I thought I give empire-hosting a try to play with a cheap box.

>>>

Thank you for signing up with us. Your new account has been setup and you can
now login to our client area using the details below.

Email Address: my.mail@address

Password: YepYouGuessWhatWasRightHereInCleartext

To login, visit <http://secure.empire-hosting.net>

<<<

Ah well.. Let's look at the other recommendations of that list, I guess.

~~~
waitwhat
Just because the welcome email contains the password in clear doesn't mean
that they permanently store the password in their database unhashed.

~~~
throwaway64
can we please stop having this conversation every time a plain text password
is mentioned, its a bad idea to have a recoverable password, in any form, the
end.

<http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/>

~~~
Confusion
It's not helping that you give the wrong explanation. The issue here isn't
that the password is recoverable, because you don't know whether that is true.
It may as well be properly bcrypted. The problem is that they sent you the
plaintext password you just entered via email.

------
lucaspiller
Are there any good alternatives to Linode in Europe? I've been using them for
years any not had any issues, I'm just wondering if there is anything cheaper,
and also thinking about redundancy.

Most of the VPS providers that I've seen are US based, which means 150ms+
pings, which isn't great for SSH.

~~~
gbrindisi
I am an happy Quickweb (<http://quickweb.co.nz>) customer. They are cheaper
than Linode and they have some nice micro vps offers too.

They are also providing hosting services to LEB (<http://www.lowendbox.com>)

~~~
jrnkntl
.co.nz (New Zealand) doesn't sound like a reasonable alternative for Europe.

~~~
waitwhat
Their servers are in the US, UK, and Germany. <http://quickweb.co.nz/supa-vps-
plans.html>

------
LoneWolf
Anyone here who knows/has experience with Hetzner? <http://www.hetzner.de/en>

~~~
angerman
If you prefer to have your VPS shielded behind a heavy firewall, why not. But
in case you ever intend to do outgoing calls from the server on ports other
then the default (80, 443, ...), prepare yourself to do some wrestling with
the support and have the IPs of the hosts you want to connect ready. And it
/will/ take some time. That's just one of the issues I had to repeatedly deal
with. (Consuming some foreign service).

~~~
SergeyHack
Probably that's why I encountered the limit of about 100 reqs per second when
was stress testing my hetzner VPS from the outside.

------
ique
I've been using DirectSpace [1] for quite some time now and I see no other
mention of it.

I signed up when the 512mb instance was only $4/mo, but it seems they've upped
it to $8/mo now. Anyway I haven't experienced any significant downtime or bad
performance, but then I'm not doing anything important on it. I also have no
clue about their customer service level since I've never used it.

[1] <http://directspace.net/webhosting/vps/inventory.php>

------
lucb1e
"These virtual machines, called Virtual Private Servers (or VPS's), are cheap.
You can get your own instance of linux for very very little money. Like $10 a
month, sometimes less."

The Dutch company Versio (domains, shared hosting, dedicated, vps, colocation)
hosts VPSes from as little as €5,-/month. You need to pay in 3 month terms,
though. I don't really mean to adverstise, but why did this page make it to
the HN homepage?

~~~
bbunix
Probably because I posted it at like 4 am on a Sunday... and it's obviously
not a rigorous comparasion - more like a walk through a swamp...

------
victorneo
For those in Singapore (or neighboring countries), try ExpertVM
(<http://expertvm.com/>).

I have been using them for hosting small Django sites and running SVM
classification without any issues. It's cheap if you want to have a VPS to
play around with different OS-es (you can reinstall a new OS via the control
panel).

------
mrinterweb
I would have liked to see some other factors weighed as well such as type of
CPU used for systems, disk IO, service APIs, management tools. Considering
that ~10Mbps was considered to be "blazing fast", I find the internet IO
benchmark to be spurious. I just ran the same test from a Linode in Dallas and
18Mbps.

------
abstractwater
I've been using ArpNetworks for a year now and I am very pleased with their
service. $10 a month minimum, lightly loaded servers, and they also support
OpenBSD and FreeBSD on KVM (beside linux) which is great (and rare). Very
responsive support too.

<http://arpnetworks.com>

------
regularfry
It's a shame to just write off KVM like that, but to each their own, I
suppose.

~~~
axx
as mentioned above, futureVPS supports KVM (but they're in germany).

------
someone13
Does anyone have any experience with FanaticalVPS? I've heard good things -
apparently they don't oversell, for one.

<http://fanaticalvps.com/>

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silasb
What?

No Chunkhost. I signed up for the beta and now pay for a Xen machine with 512
MB of RAM for only 14 dollars.

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tzs
Rackspace is comparable in price and configuration to several of those he
mentions.

------
obilgic
so his suggestions are cheaper than aws's spot instance(5$/mo 600mb)?

~~~
mjdwitt
Because AWS's prices have to be more expensive in order to offer the huge
increase in flexibility and instant scalability that you don't get with these
cheaper VPSs.

------
mjwalshe
This is spam

