
VPS Compare – compare worldwide VPS servers - rockair
http://vpscomp.com
======
rsync
This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:

In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract
datacenter work.

I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to
troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new
FreeBSD system inside of a directory.

Then a lightbulb went on ...

A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in
December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org
and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004,
I sold the company.

We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually
caught on.

JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS
Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is
too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...

The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked
and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".

~~~
chrisper
Are you the inventor of all virtualization we know today or VPS only?

~~~
justincormack
Virtualization is much older than that - it was invented in the late 1960s, I
believe at IBM.

~~~
chrisper
Seems like IBM was innovative back then. What happened?

~~~
sumedh
Bureaucracy.

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kijin
Needs an option for less than 1TB of bandwidth. Some of us just want to crunch
data and have no need for such large bandwidth. You even have an option for
1GB disk, so what about adding an option for 100GB bandwidth?

As another commenter has said, cores mean nothing unless they're dedicated to
my VM. There needs to be a better metric, but unfortunately it's very
difficult to "benchmark" a VPS objectively. Any ideas?

Is that 600GB of HDD or 600GB of SSD, or 600GB of SSD-cached HDD? Those are
all very different things, and the little icon to the left of the capacity is
neither noticeable nor searchable.

Big countries like Canada and the United States need to be broken down into
3-4 regions for latency-sensitive customers.

Users should be able to choose the currency. Right now you're second-guessing
the currency based on my location/Accept-Language/whatever and it doesn't seem
to be changeable.

Having a column for the virtualization platform might be useful for some
people. Is it OpenVZ, KVM, Xen-PV or Xen-HVM?

If anyone is looking for cheaper offerings, there's
[http://lowendstock.com/](http://lowendstock.com/)

If anyone is looking for unusual locations, there's
[https://www.exoticvps.com/](https://www.exoticvps.com/)

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pmontra
The filter by single country is not particularly useful. I'd like to search by
all countries (or checkbox some of them) instead of having to perform N
searches to find who's the best provider.

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hurin
If you really want this site to have useful rankings for anyone aside from
those looking to pay the bare minimum, consider gathering some additional
information:

a) Uptime statistics

b) Customer-Support ratings

c) Technical ratings (user assessment of various tools provided by the VPS,
ease of migration, etc.)

~~~
moe
This.

Small VPS are dime a dozen on Lowendbox.com. You can grab them for $1 and
below.

They tend to be unstable, slow as molasses, poorly supported, and the hosters
sometimes just disappear overnight (often to relaunch under a new name a few
months later...).

They are almost never worth the hassle since DigitalOcean will sell you a
proper VM for $5.

So _if_ you want to compare them, you need more creative metrics. A simple
"does this company exist for over a year?"-column would already weed out many
of the worst ones.

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IgorPartola
I would add the option to have sub-1GB RAM VPS's. Lots of them still are
offered in the 512 MB range. Include the option to filter by number of IPv6
addresses offered. Also, add a filter for virtualization technology and if
they use SolusVM or a custom control panel. Otherwise very cool and useful!

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joshmn
This is cool, thanks and good work. I'd love to see filterable OS support,
multiple IPs, locations... :)

There's also ServerBear.com which is a bit more detailed than this.

~~~
cbhl
public IPv6/IPv4/both...

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heyalexej
That's a great app. Some ideas:

    
    
      - I'm currently in Laos, but I think/operate in USD/€, not in LAK. Please give me the chance to decide which currency I want to see.
      - 1 GB as the lowest memory threshold leaves out plenty of good deals.
      - Sometimes we need a bunch of machines for a short period of time. Can I pay per minute? Hour? Day?
      - Which payment methods do they accept?
      - Maybe, if possible, the ability to see for how long they've been around. Cheap hosters tend to disappear often.
      - Maybe, if possible, uptime stats.
    

Edit: typos

~~~
tjbiddle
To add to your list: Virtualization type

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kbenson
Nice! There's a few things I would like to see and be able to filter by which
I can't currently though:

Minimum activity billing period: minute / 15 minutes / 30 minutes / hour /
day, etc.

Provisioning through API: yes / no

Number of geographic locations available (this gets tricky, depending on how
you treat country. Is it locations within the selected country, or total
locations?)

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dorfsmay
Not being able to scale memory down to less than 1 GB keeps a lot of good
offers out.

Also, missing Atlantic.net (at least in Canada).

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JimmaDaRustla
I use serverbear.com for comparisons

Will bookmark this one though.

~~~
notacoward
+1 for serverbear

In addition to basic info, it includes things like virtualization type and
even a bunch of benchmarks, all usable as filters or sort criteria. TBH some
of the variation in the benchmark numbers makes me wonder about their
methodology, but it's still a _very_ useful site.

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ruebenramirez
missing vultr - [https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)

~~~
jlgaddis
Click "Add Provider" and paste the URL?

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ohashi
If you care about quality of a company and not just the raw specs, you might
find
[http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare](http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare)
useful. It uses people's twitter comments to determine which hosting companies
people have favorable opinions of. (Disclaimer: I created it)

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tbrownaw
Where's the "can pay anonymously in bitcoin" option? I thought that was a
thing these days. ;)

~~~
jlgaddis
Honest question: is there legitimate demand for this for legitimate reasons?

I was big into Bitcoin about four years ago and work for an ISP nowadays. We
provide services as well and I've considered mail/web hosting/VPS/dedicated
offerings (on a small scale) with Bitcoin as a payment option but I don't want
to end up attracting the "wrong type" of people.

I realize that there are people who simply want to be anonymous and I'm
totally fine with that (I do run Tor relays, for example) but my fear is that
the majority of customers this would attract would be those that are "up to no
good".

Thinking out loud, perhaps a mail hosting service payable with Bitcoin would
be a good way to test the waters -- that is, we could take care of domain
registration, DNS configuration/hosting, etc. and allow access over Tor for
those looking for "anonymous e-mail" (although I'd be implementing pretty low
limits on volume, at least initially).

~~~
heyalexej
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pay with BTC. I love how friction-
less and easy it is, especially if you get partially paid in BTC as well for
your services. I love [https://bithost.io](https://bithost.io) and I guess you
could ask Scott if he had any problems so far.

He gives you a limit of 2 instances (droplets) on signup. You can then open a
ticket and explain what you intend to do and he gives you the desired number
of servers. I give him access to the apps I'm working on to remove any doubt
and be transparent.

I always think that malicious people find entirely different ways to get what
they want without even thinking of payment. Hacking a box for example.

~~~
Scottymeuk
Thank you :)

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nonuby
Be careful X core means nothing reliable, for 99.9% of VPS providers, they are
not dedicated nor rated and could be divisible by up to 2000 guests
(particularly with OpenVZ provider), at least on Rackspace, AWS, Azure the CPU
performance is generally within a specific range (variability due to minor
hardware config differences, and noisy neighbours, but appropriately
restrained). In addition 99.5% of these providers don't have the sufficient
knowledge to run a VPS operation, they purchase a few dedicated servers and
copy of SolusVM and WHMCS and hope and pray for the best.

~~~
jlgaddis
I work for an ISP and can put as many machines in our datacenters as I want
(within reason, of course) so I only have a few (small) VPSes nowadays. When I
used to have a bunch of them, however, I quickly learned to avoid anything
OpenVZ-based like the plague.

This is anecdotal, of course, but OpenVZ "feels" very much inferior and the
providers running OpenVZ (more often than not) very much seemed like fly-by-
night operations simply trying to squeeze as many VMs as possible onto a
physical host without any regard to performance.

~~~
IgorPartola
I've had the same experience. Xen and KVM seem to be best for predictable
performance.

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jedberg
Shouldn't AWS still count as a VPS? A reserved micro instance is cheaper than
most any of these options and serves the same purpose.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Not with the bandwidth requirement it isn't.

~~~
jedberg
How so? The definition of VPS[0] doesn't include a bandwidth part, and to be
fair, Amazon has a free tier as well (albeit small).

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server)

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I was responding to your "same price" point. If you include the bandwidth
they're asking for then EC2 rises in cost sharply.

PS - Huge fan of yours by the way. You should do another AMA on /r/SysAdmin.

~~~
jedberg
Ah, that makes sense and is fair.

> Huge fan of yours by the way. You should do another AMA on /r/SysAdmin.

Heh, thanks. I appreciate that! Maybe soon I will do an AMA.

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listic
Is there a way to change display currency?

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phantom_oracle
Very useful.

Try cross-posting on a thread on lowendbox.com.

~~~
matheweis
Also webhostingtalk.com

In fact, if OP could scrape the VPS deals forum from there, that would be
super cool ( do something that doesn't scale. ;) )

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noir_lord
I can't imagine not using Linode as my default option.

They are without doubt my favourite IT company, in 7 years with between 3-4
and a lot more instances I've had to talk to them exactly 3 times (once for a
query, once to ask for a bandwidth cap change and once related to billing).

They set the standard for me at this point.

~~~
evook
But independently from your selected location linode is routing through the
US. That's a bummer for way too many possible customers with sensitive data.

------
puzzlingcaptcha
OVH classic 1 has 10GB hdd not 25GB. Would be nice to be able to see the
virtualization method in the table (vmware/openvz etc).

It would be also nice to be able to show all products from a region, e.g.
western Europe, northern Europe and so on (I don't care if it's in FR,DE or
NL)

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dan1234
Seems to be missing all of the Digital Ocean UK prices. Also would like to see
what OS flavours are offered, what networking options (private net, IPv6
range, IPv4 costs etc), hide plans that use non-SSD, which providers offer 2FA
logins, backup costs.

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plutonium
nice site! It'd be cool to see a filter for virtualisation type as well.

maybe not terribly useful, but I wasn't able to open the site at first.
[http://api.vpscomp.com:3000/geo/checkme](http://api.vpscomp.com:3000/geo/checkme)
was 500'ing with something like 'undefined cca3'? I disconnected my VPN and it
worked. Reconnected and it still worked, so I lost the exact error (oops).
defaulting to USD when the country can't be detected (or the native currency
for the VPS) would be nice.

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ternaryoperator
Surprised that intovps.com is not on the list. One of the earliest VPS
providers, and still one of the least expensive. 2TB traffic, 30GB HDD, 1GB
RAM, $10/mo.

~~~
thejosh
Same price as DigitalOcean, are they SSDs?

~~~
s_kilk
I just looked them up [1] and they don't mention ssds, however they appear to
give four cores by default, which may be more important for some workloads.

[1] [http://www.intovps.com/plans.html](http://www.intovps.com/plans.html)

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mbrownnyc
Problem: Can't choose currency. Why? I'm in Antigua and all pricing is
rendered in XCD, but I'm a USD user.

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simonebrunozzi
Question for everybody: why would you choose a VPS over a "cloud" server (e.g.
AWS, Azure, GCE)? Why vice versa?

~~~
noblethrasher
Short answer: VPS are (usually) cheaper, and you have _total_ control.

Longer answer: There are basically two approaches to scaling software: Either
you build/simulate better computers (vertical scaling), or you deploy more of
them (horizontal scaling).

Dedicated hardware lets you build or simulate having a better computer (e.g.
FPGAs, or using a network driver that is ideal for your traffic patterns, or a
heavily tuned JVM). On the other hand, the cloud lets you quickly add (or
remove) computers in response to service demand.

VPSs just split the difference (though they are usually closer to the vertical
side of the equation).

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sanemat
I want vagrant-"provider". I use digital ocean, because there is vagrant-
digitalocean gem.

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jerguismi
Seems to miss quite many providers, such as (most importantly) hetzner online.

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tsaoutourpants
Add flag for Tor friendly :)

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cglee
Is there a similar thing for dedicated hosting providers?

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Toast_
you might want to add vultr btw. i know they seem to have a bad rep as a clone
of DO, but i was really happy with their performance.

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Mandatum
Add filter for ALL countries

~~~
onestone
Also for continents. E.g. I'm interested in a server in Europe, don't care if
it's in France, Germany, Netherlands, or wherever.

~~~
rockair
Thanks for your comment, i plan to add this feature.

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grubles
No vultr, huh. :/

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wantab
This doesn't give any idea about the quality of any of these hosts. Many of
these are already well known so it's not much help.

------
curiously
ovh classic 1

1gb, 10tb, 25gb....what the hell? this is like way better than digitalocean
and I thought DO was the cheapest.

~~~
icebraining
It's OpenVZ, not full virtualization. That means you have no control over the
kernel (e.g. can' t upgrade it, can't fully reboot), and it's said - but I
can't vouch for it - that it's more susceptible to "bad neighbors".

They have full virtualization (the VPS Cloud plans), but it's much more
expensive.

Here's a thread on Lowendtalk about VPS Classic plans:
[http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/37835/ovh-
classic-1-vps...](http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/37835/ovh-
classic-1-vps-any-good)

~~~
curiously
word...it was too good to be true.

