

Reality of budget VPS services - datadon
http://www.justkez.com/reality-of-budget-vps/

======
jackowayed
I've actually had a pretty good luck with my $5 (base price $6) VPS I found on
lowendbox. It has 512MB of RAM

Part of it is expectations. I know I'm not paying anything for this box, so I
don't expect 100.0% uptime and the ability to run a high traffic service of
which I really care about the availability.

I just need a place that can run cron scripts, regardless of whether my
computer is on/online. And run screen so that it can download something that
takes a few hours. And I do have a webserver on there, host some very
unimportant things on there (like static versions of showoff slides from
presentations I've given ... I'm guessing they get hit by humans once a month,
though I guess I could check the logs), and occasionally I'll scp a big file
into the web directory for someone to download.

The uptime isn't great. Pingdom sends me emails about it being down basically
every month, but usually it's like 30 minutes. Uptime hovers right around the
99.9% that they guarantee. Sometimes pingdom monthly reports say it's a little
less. I haven't bothered to try to invoke the SLA to get my month's $5 back,
or whatever. For what I use it for, it works just fine.

If I were running a real website that I was invested in having people visit,
I'd go for Linode/Slicehost/AWS/etc for sure. But this is the cheapest way to
fullfil my needs for this box.

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Hrundi
Good article. I disagree with a few remarks.

While there is certainly a huge amount of fanboyism surrounding buyvm, most of
it comes from the stock scarcity.

I personally run 3 vps' with them (first three plans) and the performance has
always been far more than acceptable. I run an adult tube site that has
exploded in popularity due to a fun domain name and being one of the first to
post a leaked sex tape for a latin american actress. It can reach around 200
to 300 thousand uniques per month. Never had a load issue.

Of course, your mileage may vary. I could have ended up in a lousy node. Many
people outright abuse their service for portscanning, spam sending and what
not. Also, many people won't do this intentionally; they get infected through
ancient wordpress installations.

My experience has been worse with Burst. Their IO is acceptable but their
network is dismal. Ping times from aroud the world tend to confirm this.

Notes to take home:

ALWAYS make backups! If a provider goes deadool on you all of the sudden, you
should always have fresh backups in a remote site. Honestly, there's no excuse
these days. You can always get your money back if you file a dispute on
Paypal. I wasn't affected by the collossal Hostrail crash, but many people
were.

Lastly, always choose Xen over Openvz.

Edit: Forgot to add something very important: Avoid Hurricane Electric
(he.net) like the plague. They are an absolute fuck up of a datacenter.

~~~
nckbz
I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it
serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server
administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great.

I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any
day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or
Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows
to a crawl.

Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending
on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and
Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was
unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted
to just switch instead.

My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only
around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its
fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit
however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly
optimized site.

~~~
rkalla
I agree with you, but would point out that CmdrTaco hosts his new site (that
got front page on HN a few times) on a Micro on AWS.

He does a serious amount of caching (obviously) and offloaded all assets to
S3, but it looks like it is still possible.

FWIW, I am still skeptical given the amount of complaints you see about the
Micros on the EC2 forums regularly. He could have just gotten lucky I suppose
(as far as his neighbors on the host).

~~~
nckbz
Yeah, I'd believe it. In full disclosure I run my personal blog off an Amazon
Micro instance. Its a Fedora instance running passenger, nginx, and rails. In
production mode with assets cached it absolutely serves requests at a decent
speed. Absolutely painful to run an integration test or development mode
though. Probably just my fault for using Fedora and not the default "Amazon
Linux". However, I setup a client with a small instance running RedHat and
never experienced any latency.

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citricsquid
VPS hosting is the new shared hosting; so many applications and platforms
exist that it's easy for anyone to get started operating a VPS hosting
company. I could rent a dedicated server now for $200, install SolusVM and be
a fully functional VPS host within a couple of hours and the majority of
"budget" vps hosts are these. They don't have the funds to build a real
business (like Linode), they just install some widely used software and off
they go. They are limited by the software they use (whereas a company like
Linode is limited by its engineers) so when things start to go wrong their
response is to penalise the customers not make the engineers work harder and
achieve more.

------
rkalla
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a host with a nicely spread out
global presence?

I am aware of the big players (AWS, Linode, Softlayer, RimuHosting) but they
all seem to have shortcomings that don't make anyone particularly ideal and
I'd love to avoid a combination of all if I could.

I am looking to minimize network latency and maximize disk space with memory
and CPU being secondary concerns. More or less think CDN edge location
requirements.

For example:

    
    
      AWS - Speed to China and AUS/NZ from the Singapore region 
      is subpar. Speed to Japan from Singapore is much worse 
      compared to the Tokyo region directly. Managing many  
      images in many regions across the AWS stack can be time 
      consuming.
    
      Linode - Their CA datacenter (hosted by HE) has a terrible 
      reputation and uptime. I love that they normalize their 
      bandwidth pricing across all data centers though. Disk 
      space is an issue for us (media distribution).
    
      Softlayer - Looks solid, nothing for the AUS crowd or 
      Japan/Chinese users.
    
      Voxel - Not cheap, again nothing for AUS/NZ crowd.
    
      RimuHosting - Doesn't buy enough in EU/AUS to offer budget 
      bandwidth pricing, the London bandwidth is horrifically   
      expensive.
    
      JoyentCloud - Single data center at this time.
    

These are all nit-picks, each of these services are great and I've hosted with
them at different times and been very happy (other services like SliceHost and
VPS.NET have been bad/very-bad - respectively) but I am curious if I am
missing a single host that could meet most of these requirements that I just
don't know about yet?

For example, I had never heard of BurstNET or BHost or A Small Orange until
reading this thread... so I'm hoping I might be missing some fantastic host
somewhere with medium/large VPSs or small/medium dedicated solutions.

~~~
inopinatus
Since you seem concerned (as I am) about AUS/NZ performance, it's worth
repeating the unconfirmed gossip that Amazon have a closed tender out for a
pair of Sydney data centers.

Ninefold are also in Sydney and doing a good marketing job, and I know several
first-class engineers that have been involved in their setup and have made
only positive remarks on their potential (with the usual caveats around
Australian market scale being an issue).

~~~
bigiain
I'm cautiously hopeful about Ninefold, but keep in mind they had some serious
(multiple day) downtime a month or so back. I'm sure they'll get on top of
their operations soon enough, hopefully before Amazon becomes the local
gorilla-in-the-corner in the local market...

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rmoriz
We are very satisfied with dedicated systems from
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-ex) and <http://ovh.co.uk>

That said we run kvm on every box and run all customer and own apps in
different VM managed (all managed by chef). So we're kind of running our own
inhouse VPS-hosting-service.

We can achieve ultra-low-per costs per VM (as regular VPS providers would
charce) but in the position to be the "root" customer of the box. We can
decide which virtualization stack we want to use etc.

------
ridruejo
The ultimate budget VPS is an Amazon instance. You can be relatively sure that
it is not going to go under. You can run one free micro instance
(<http://aws.amazon.com/free/>). You can scale as needed easily, both in terms
of file system and CPU by simply rebooting your EBS to another instance type.
You can have reliable, incremental snapshots. And finally, you have a great
ecosystem of vendors providing AMIs for nearly all OS versions and popular web
apps (like my own, <http://bitnami.org/stacks>)

~~~
pieter
Amazon isn't really budget. The free tier is nice, and the tiny instances are
priced ok, but beyond that they're quite expensive for a VPs. The nice thing
with AWS is the scaling and the supporting infrastructure, but you do pay for
that compared to more basic VPS offerings.

~~~
rkalla
Just a reminder to everyone that prices out the flat On-Demand rates of
Amazon, a 3-year reserved instance price is 48% cheaper than OnDemand.

So if you know what your deployment needs are, take the On-Demand price and
roughly divide it in half for your real cost-per-month (with a majority paid
up front).

If you don't know what kind of deployment you need, then yes, running
everything on-demand can be pricey compared to alternatives.

~~~
sorenbs
Is that a fixed price for the next 3 years then? I would expect normal prices
to at least be cut in half 3 years from now as hardware gets cheaper.

~~~
ridruejo
You pay a fixed price for the reservation and then per-usage fees. Usage fees
will drop as Amazon reduces them, but the reservation is a one-time deal

------
mappu
Interesting that the author had trouble with BuyVM - my instance seems to be
working out pretty well and i've recommended them to some friends. $15/year is
incredible, i've had no trouble with support, and they just quietly sit there
hosting rtorrent and nginx.

There has of course been some limited downtime.

EDIT: Uptime statistics hit 99.99% this month.
<http://buyvmstatus.com/info/34> On top of that, the Frantech Announcements
feed is pretty good at explaining the state of their datacenter, maintenance,
node migrations etc

------
kd1221
Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent
alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive
dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2
but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.

~~~
dangrossman
Are you sure that's the right move to make? Do you no longer need the
resources of even a single dedicated server? At even 2-4GB RAM requirement,
you would not be saving money buying a VPS over renting a server.

A Linode 4096, where you're sharing CPU and disk IO with all the other users
on the physical server, is $159.95/mo.

For $159/mo you could rent a Xeon 3230 quad core, 4GB RAM, 2x250GB HD server
from Softlayer with more than 4x the bandwidth allotment and a better data
center with a larger support staff.

~~~
kd1221
We deliver video content. We have a CDN that properly encodes and serves our
content. All I need is to handle the HTTP requests for the "directory" of
videos. A shared environment would probably be fine. All the 4GB servers seem
to have most of their RAM dedicated to caching when I check what free -m gives
me. Our physical disk space requirements are low. As I shift more of our
content to the CDN, our bandwidth needs are decreasing as well (from 12TB/mo
to 7TB/mo since I started optimizing).

I inherited this setup, so to me it looks like the servers are overpowered.
Also, the customer service is terrible, which is the primary reason for
wanting to leave them. I want a service where I can easily requisition and kit
out new servers quickly in an "a la carte" fashion.

I have 3 servers running on EC2 already using micro instances. They're mostly
to handle minor services (email list subscription/requeuing for all the web
properties, payment processing postback handling, etc.) They've been up for
nearly a year without any problem.

I've been leaning toward EC2, but I wanted to hear what else is out there.

~~~
dotBen
_All I need is to handle the HTTP requests for the "directory" of videos._

Have you considered just using Amazon S3, especially now they offer full
'httpd'-like functionality (no more bucket XML listings if you try to visit
the root of the domain).

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-
website-...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-
amazon-s3.html)

If you are running a CDN in front to stream the content, this sounds like the
best solution to me. You could probably get away with Reduced Redundancy
Storage too if you have backups.

------
sjs
Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS
providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace
Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?

~~~
wx77
Well as someone who has used quite a few VPS servers over the years from a
plethora of providers I must say at this point in time Linode is probably the
best bang for your buck with all the utilities and uptime it provides. The
only thing about Linode is you must not order from the fremont datacenter and
you have to subscribe to the status updates to realize what's going on.

The only thing that a more expensive provider will give you that linode does
not is server management which can be useful but I don't really mind sysadmin
at this point in time so I can't really review that.

~~~
malbs
+1 to linode - in the past I opted for cheap options, and suffered, but after
experiencing the management tools and infrastructure linode has in place, I'll
stick with them at the more premium price.

------
mogston
After lots of downtime across three of my VPS' at VPS.net i'm opting to
migrate all of them to one box on the Rackspace Cloud. I'm not a server admin,
nor do i want to be, so the attraction of the new 'Managed Cloud' is all that
much stronger.

I have used Voxel.net in the past, and their technical support team are
absolutely amazing. Always willing to go that extra mile. Uptime was also very
good.

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pxtreme75
I had a very poor experience on the past with a cheap hosting provider.
Actually it really does not matter if it is shared hosting or a VPS -- at the
end of the day you get the service you paid for. Currently we use
Rackspacecloud with very good results. Their control panel has a few glitches
but my support experience was out of this world.

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dashr
SolarVPS has servers in New Jersey and Los Angeles for $5-40 that I've been
using for a years. Like Rackspace (4 cores), these small boxes also have up to
16 cores. Great for mysql replication, code repos, distributed data nodes.

------
msh
I have been using a 15$ vps from www.tektonic.net since 2004 and have been
happy. I run a few personal sites and sometimes test code. They have been down
1 to 2 times a year which IMHO is fine for the price.

------
DiabloD3
Heh, the performance comparison linked to in that article is kinda worthless
since it leaves out RapidXen, one of the largest bare bones VPS providers.

~~~
swah
Rapidxen is more expensive than Linode when you get to 512mb ram... that can't
be budget :)

~~~
DiabloD3
Yes, but Linode oversells their machines more. You get what you pay for.

