With FreeBSD, in order to be able to have automatic backups work, we were required to disable journaling on the disk. This will cause the disk speed to be much slower than our Linux distributions.
I just use Vultr and install from a FreeBSD downloaded ISO. No modifications to the base install at all and works as expected.
DO have screwed something up with their configuration if they need to make so many changes to make it work. No other VPS provider I have used that support FreeBSD (or OpenBSD for that matter) require any changes to the default install.
On UFS soft-updates have a lower overhead than soft-updates with metadata journaling. The downside of soft-updates without journaling is that it requires a background fsck to recover leaked space after unclean shutdowns. I prefer UFS2 SU (not SU+J) on FreeBSD for small systems, because SU+J is incompatible with UFS snapshots.
journaling generally interferes with dump(8). It seems odd that they would be using dump to do backups though, since they are virtualizing the OS.
The parent link to gjournal is weird too, since gjournal is not the same as softupdates w/journaling (SU+J). It makes me wonder if they actually disabled softupdates too.
I found a random post[1] about issues (unmapped io?) running i386 freebsd with su+j in virtualbox (apparently a virtualbox bug[2]).
So I enabled Journaling and that brought it up to 30MB/sec. Still a substantial difference vs 216MB/sec for Linux.. Something with the D.O. KVM HOST setup needs to be tweaked a bit - 30MB/sec is pretty poor quality disk throughput for SSD attached storage.
If you wish to have higher disk speeds, but not use backups, we recommend for you to remount your disk with journaling. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/gjournal-desktop/con...