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Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting
- josephb 15y agoFrom the article: > Linode http://linode.com http://linode.com - expensive, no IPV6, really fast network @ 11.9 Mbps Actually Linode have IPv6 support in 5 of their 6 locations :-)
- webfuel 15y agoI 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 http://imgur.com/BLmCH
- spqr 15y agoIt is way too easy for these providers to fake the results of "the speed test". Just re-route the URL to a local resource or have all users go through a local proxy which caches the speed test file... the results of the test will be phenomenal but will not in any way reflect the reality of transferring files on the host's network. I'm not saying they're doing that, just that the methodology of using a single URL to wget is way too easy to cheat.
- bbunix 15y agothanks, corrected.
- Gussy 15y agoFrom one of my Linode 512's in Fremont I get 89.0MB/s running the "test" in this blog post.
- LoneWolf 15y agoAnyone here who knows/has experience with Hetzner? http://www.hetzner.de/en http://www.hetzner.de/en
- drats 15y agoI would like to see a review as well, they get mentioned a lot but I've not actually seen a recommendation.
- angerman 15y agoIf 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 15y agoProbably that's why I encountered the limit of about 100 reqs per second when was stress testing my hetzner VPS from the outside.
- LoneWolf 15y agoAs long as the default ones are open and without restriction I wouldnt have much problems.
- prib 15y agoCan only speak for their dedicated servers. We have one there for almost two years now. Excellent price for the hardware you get. Had a few support requests (nothing hardware-related), all answered in a few minutes. Very good control panel too. Know a few people using their dedicated boxes for quite some time too. All happy. :) Recently we leased a Kimsufi/OVH dedicated box with ProxMox installed. Similar price (without setup fee) and it's been running without an hiccup. Had to make a phone call to support about a billing issue (my mistake) and it was immediately resolved. From my experience, it doesn't get much better quality/price wise than these two, in Europe.
- LoneWolf 15y agoI checked kimsufi, the prices look pretty good for the specifications, can you say for how long you have that one?
- regularfry 15y agoIt's a shame to just write off KVM like that, but to each their own, I suppose.
- axx 15y agoas mentioned above, futureVPS supports KVM (but they're in germany).
- darklajid 15y agoSo 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 http://secure.empire-hosting.net <<< Ah well.. Let's look at the other recommendations of that list, I guess.
- waitwhat 15y agoJust because the welcome email contains the password in clear doesn't mean that they permanently store the password in their database unhashed.
- darklajid 15y agoFirst of all: I didn't claim that (although, yes, maybe that kind of got implied). [1] But I even think this practice is useless. They just sent my password in cleartext. It sits now in my inbox and I have to delete it or I store my unprotected password. And - for what exactly? Does that serve any purpose? I just entered it a second ago. So I question the usefulness of that approach and consider this very first contact unprofessional. YMMV and all. 1: Just tried the 'Forgot my password' dance and it they don't retrieve it at least: Received mail with link to site which sends a mail with auto-generated password to log in. A bit weird, but well..
- waitwhat 15y agoDeleting an email really isn't that onerous a task, but you are of course free to use whatever criteria you wish to judge a host. And as you point out with the "forgotten password dance", access to your email account gives an attacker access to your hosting account anyway (although not stealthily).
- darklajid 15y agoAgain, I didn't claim it is. This was the very first contact. Sending me passwords (same for 'temporary ones' after a reset. I consider that a cumbersome process whereas I consider the initial mail just plain "wrong") delivers more than just the text over this channel. I read between the lines "Here's your password again from 2 minutes ago. File it away" which again is nothing I consider a good idea. The impression is that they write the digital form of a post-it note of the password for my monitor. Is it a big issue in itself? Nope, probably not. But it certainly ruined the first impression for me and I'll walk away now. I shared that part because others might (or might not) agree and to potentially save like-minded people a registration.
- obilgic 15y agoso his suggestions are cheaper than aws's spot instance(5$/mo 600mb)?
- mjdwitt 15y agoBecause 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.
- lucaspiller 15y agoAre 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.
- EwanToo 15y agoRackspace UK's cloud offering is pretty much a VPS with a nice API - it works well and is cheap. Brightbox.com also do good options for UK based VMs
- dpritchett 15y agoSame here. I have an $8/mo prgmr.com VPS and a $10/mo. Rackspace cloud instance. Both running Ubuntu LTS with similar options, but the Rackspace box has more disk and is generally more responsive. Given the "I'm gonna break something" feeling I get when using the Xen console on prgmr coupled with my desire to kill and rebuild VMs regularly I'll probably just stick with Rackspace in the future.
- gbrindisi 15y agoI am an happy Quickweb (http://quickweb.co.nz 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 http://www.lowendbox.com)
- victorneo 15y agoFor those in Singapore (or neighboring countries), try ExpertVM (http://expertvm.com/ 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).
- someone13 15y agoDoes anyone have any experience with FanaticalVPS? I've heard good things - apparently they don't oversell, for one. http://fanaticalvps.com/ http://fanaticalvps.com/
- mjwalshe 15y agoThis is spam
- ique 15y agoI'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 http://directspace.net/webhosting/vps/inventory.php
- api 15y agoPart 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/ 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 15y agoPart 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 15y agoThose 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.
- abstractwater 15y agoI'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 http://arpnetworks.com
- mrinterweb 15y agoI 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.
- tzs 15y agoRackspace is comparable in price and configuration to several of those he mentions.
- silasb 15y agoWhat? No Chunkhost. I signed up for the beta and now pay for a Xen machine with 512 MB of RAM for only 14 dollars.
- lucb1e 15y ago"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 15y agoProbably 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...
- ilaksh 15y agoIt 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.
- valladont 15y agoFunny 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 15y agoHmm, 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.