Heymman Servers 1 Year Review

[Mason]

It’s coming up on a year since I’ve signed up with Heymman Servers, so I thought it’s about time for a nice lengthy review.

First off, who the hell is Heymman Servers?

They’re a small outfit run by Francis de Lasalle that’s been in business since 2011. All their servers are owned, not rented, some network gear as well. They have a couple POPs in Kansas City (one with Joe’s DC) and a POP in Chicago with FDC Servers (and an upcoming POP in Amsterdam with Serverius according to their site).

The Offer + Onboarding

It was this WHT offer that caught my eye back in March of '17.

Server Specs:

CPU: E3-1240v3
RAM: 16GB DDR3 ECC
Disk: 4x 250GB Seagate Constellation ES.2 HDDs
Bandwidth: 30TB @ 1Gbps (later bumped to 50TB for free)
IP: /29 IPv4 (+$2/mo)
Location: Chicago, IL
Cost: $26/mo

I quickly snatched up one of the HDD offers and added a /29 subnet. The server was provisioned and details sent just three or four hours later while I was sleeping that night. I received a follow up as well saying they overlooked that I requested RAID5 and had installed the OS with RAID10. Not a problem. The server came with IPMI so I just did the reinstall myself the next morning. Noticed that IPMI didn’t eat up one of the IPs from my subnet, so that’s cool. Smooth sailing so far.

The network is okay. It’s single-homed Cogent. I’ve never had any issues using the full 1Gbps up/down, though at this price point I realize it is a shared link.

My Usage & Experience

The box serves as my main Plex box for family and friends since it is a powerful little box with tons of bandwidth in a geographically optimal location (speaking of… if anyone wants a Plex invite let me know, @Miguel and @WSS are already on there). Everything runs smoothly and haven’t run into any issues hardware-wise thus far.

The server gets constant daily use. Always chugging along downloading Linux isos, uploading to GDrive (where my Plex content is stored), and transcoding/streaming media. Worth every penny in my opinion.

While the network is single-homed, I don’t have any major complaints. Seen some network downtime (discussed later), but overall throughput, latency, and uptime have all been satisfactory. Plus you can’t beat that kind of bandwidth in Chicago at that price.

Issues & Support

Francis is a champion at keeping you aware of any issues and resolving them in a timely manner. There’s been a few planned network maintenance times, all of which were communicated at least a week in advance and were no more than 10 minutes in the middle of the night at a time.

I’m mostly impressed by the thoroughness with the details provided for a given outage. Instead of just saying, “ohh the network will be down tonight for a few minutes,” Francis takes the time to outline exactly what is going on – whether that be replacing specific routing equipment, what went wrong with a router configuration-wise, etc. At the end of each maintenance, a follow up explains exactly what occurred, how long the downtime was, whether any issues occurred during the maintenance, and so on.

I’ve only opened two tickets myself. Both of which were answered and resolved in two hours or less.

Two words: Premium Support

Benches + Stats

bench.sh

mrowe@elrond:~$ wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
Benchmark started on Thu Feb 15 11:43:23 EST 2018
Full benchmark log: /home/mrowe/bench.log

System Info
Processor	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz

CPU Cores	: 8

Frequency	: 3440.773 MHz

Memory		: 15982 MB

Swap		:  MB

Uptime		: 41 days, 19:55,
OS		: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Arch		: x86_64 (64 Bit)

Kernel		: 4.4.0-104-generic

Hostname	: elrond

Speedtest (IPv4 only)
Your public IPv4 is 185.191.xxx.xxx
Location		Provider	Speed

CDN			Cachefly	98.4MB/s
Atlanta, GA, US		Coloat		18.2MB/s

Dallas, TX, US		Softlayer	46.4MB/s

Seattle, WA, US		Softlayer	22.3MB/s

San Jose, CA, US	Softlayer	27.5MB/s

Washington, DC, US	Softlayer 	52.6MB/s
Tokyo, Japan		Linode		14.1MB/s

Singapore 		Softlayer	3.45MB/s
Rotterdam, Netherlands	id3.net		11.7MB/s

Haarlem, Netherlands	Leaseweb	41.1MB/s

Disk Speed
I/O (1st run)	: 123 MB/s

I/O (2nd run)	: 164 MB/s

I/O (3rd run)	: 145 MB/s

Average I/O	: 144 MB/s

nench.sh

mrowe@elrond:~$ (wget -qO- wget.racing/nench.sh | bash; wget -qO- wget.racing/nench.sh | bash) 2>&1 | tee nench.log

nench.sh v2017.06.01 – GitHub - n-st/nench: VPS benchmark script — based on the popular bench.sh, plus CPU and ioping tests, and dual-stack IPv4 and v6 speedtests by default

benchmark timestamp:    2018-02-15 16:50:27 UTC
Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz

CPU cores:    8

Frequency:    3400.265 MHz

RAM:          15G

Swap:

Kernel:       Linux 4.4.0-104-generic x86_64
Disks:

sda  232.9G  HDD

sdb  232.9G  HDD

sdc  232.9G  HDD

sdd  232.9G  HDD
CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB

2.296 seconds

CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB

3.929 seconds

CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB

1.001 seconds
ioping: seek rate

min/avg/max/mdev = 74.0 us / 275.5 us / 22.9 ms / 896.9 us

ioping: sequential read speed

generated 4.62 k requests in 5.00 s, 1.13 GiB, 923 iops, 230.8 MiB/s
dd: sequential write speed

1st run:    120.16 MiB/s

2nd run:    107.77 MiB/s

3rd run:    119.21 MiB/s

average:    115.71 MiB/s
IPv4 speedtests

your IPv4:    185.191.228.xxxx
Cachefly CDN:         100.14 MiB/s

Leaseweb (NL):        12.67 MiB/s

Softlayer DAL (US):   2.58 MiB/s

Online.net (FR):      16.74 MiB/s

OVH BHS (CA):         44.51 MiB/s

All disks pass SMART tests and each currently have 34771 hrs (~4 yrs) of power on time. No reallocated sectors.

Geekbench Result

Uptime Report -

Network Usage Since Inception -

Pic of the server (SSD-variant):

Rating

Hardware - 8/10
Support - 10/10
Performance (HW+Net) - 8/10
Price - 9/10
Overall - 9/10

Closing Thoughts

I’d highly recommend Heymman Servers to anyone needing a high-bandwidth, low-cost, centrally-located (US) machine. The support Francis provides is top-notch (would love to see him come around HB). I don’t think I’ve seen any stock since I purchased this box so it appears others are holding on to their machines as well, but if you do get the chance to jump on an offer, go for it!

Edit 1: Messed around with the formatting
Edit 2: Added bandwidth charts and uptime report

[Miguel]

@Mason

It’s coming up on a year since I’ve signed up with Heymman Servers, so I thought it’s about time for a nice lengthy review.

First off, who the hell is Heymman Servers?

They’re a small outfit run by Francis de Lasalle that’s been in business since 2011. All their servers are owned, not rented, some network gear as well. They have a couple POPs in Kansas City (one with Joe’s DC) and a POP in Chicago with FDC Servers (and an upcoming POP in Amsterdam with Serverius according to their site).

The Offer + Onboarding

It was this WHT offer that caught my eye back in March of '17.

Server Specs:

CPU: E3-1240v3
RAM: 16GB DDR3 ECC
Disk: 4x 250GB Seagate Constellation ES.2 HDDs
Bandwidth: 30TB @ 1Gbps (later bumped to 50TB for free)
IP: /29 IPv4 (+$2/mo)
Location: Chicago, IL
Cost: $26/mo

I quickly snatched up one of the HDD offers and added a /29 subnet. The server was provisioned and details sent just three or four hours later while I was sleeping that night. I received a follow up as well saying they overlooked that I requested RAID5 and had installed the OS with RAID10. Not a problem. The server came with IPMI so I just did the reinstall myself the next morning. Noticed that IPMI didn’t eat up one of the IPs from my subnet, so that’s cool. Smooth sailing so far.

The network is okay. It’s single-homed Cogent. I’ve never had any issues using the full 1Gbps up/down, though at this price point I realize it is a shared link.

My Usage & Experience

The box serves as my main Plex box for family and friends since it is a powerful little box with tons of bandwidth in a geographically optimal location (speaking of… if anyone wants a Plex invite let me know, @Miguel and @WSS are already on there). Everything runs smoothly and haven’t run into any issues hardware-wise thus far.

The server gets constant daily use. Always chugging along downloading Linux isos, uploading to GDrive (where my Plex content is stored), and transcoding/streaming media. Worth every penny in my opinion.

While the network is single-homed, I don’t have any major complaints. Seen some network downtime (discussed later), but overall throughput, latency, and uptime have all been satisfactory. Plus you can’t beat that kind of bandwidth in Chicago at that price.

Issues & Support

Francis is a champion at keeping you aware of any issues and resolving them in a timely manner. There’s been a few planned network maintenance times, all of which were communicated at least a week in advance and were no more than 10 minutes in the middle of the night at a time.

I’m mostly impressed by the thoroughness with the details provided for a given outage. Instead of just saying, “ohh the network will be down tonight for a few minutes,” Francis takes the time to outline exactly what is going on – whether that be replacing specific routing equipment, what went wrong with a router configuration-wise, etc. At the end of each maintenance, a follow up explains exactly what occurred, how long the downtime was, whether any issues occurred during the maintenance, and so on.

I’ve only opened two tickets myself. Both of which were answered and resolved in two hours or less.

Two words: Premium Support

Benches + Stats

bench.sh

mrowe@elrond:~$ wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
Benchmark started on Thu Feb 15 11:43:23 EST 2018
Full benchmark log: /home/mrowe/bench.log
System Info
Processor	: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz

CPU Cores	: 8

Frequency	: 3440.773 MHz

Memory		: 15982 MB

Swap		:  MB

Uptime		: 41 days, 19:55,
OS		: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Arch		: x86_64 (64 Bit)

Kernel		: 4.4.0-104-generic

Hostname	: elrond
Speedtest (IPv4 only)
Your public IPv4 is 185.191.xxx.xxx
Location		Provider	Speed

CDN			Cachefly	98.4MB/s
Atlanta, GA, US		Coloat		18.2MB/s

Dallas, TX, US		Softlayer	46.4MB/s

Seattle, WA, US		Softlayer	22.3MB/s

San Jose, CA, US	Softlayer	27.5MB/s

Washington, DC, US	Softlayer 	52.6MB/s
Tokyo, Japan		Linode		14.1MB/s

Singapore 		Softlayer	3.45MB/s
Rotterdam, Netherlands	id3.net		11.7MB/s

Haarlem, Netherlands	Leaseweb	41.1MB/s
Disk Speed
I/O (1st run)	: 123 MB/s

I/O (2nd run)	: 164 MB/s

I/O (3rd run)	: 145 MB/s

Average I/O	: 144 MB/s

nench.sh

mrowe@elrond:~$ (wget -qO- wget.racing/nench.sh | bash; wget -qO- wget.racing/nench.sh | bash) 2>&1 | tee nench.log
nench.sh v2017.06.01 – GitHub - n-st/nench: VPS benchmark script — based on the popular bench.sh, plus CPU and ioping tests, and dual-stack IPv4 and v6 speedtests by default

benchmark timestamp:    2018-02-15 16:50:27 UTC
Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz

CPU cores:    8

Frequency:    3400.265 MHz

RAM:          15G

Swap:

Kernel:       Linux 4.4.0-104-generic x86_64
Disks:

sda  232.9G  HDD

sdb  232.9G  HDD

sdc  232.9G  HDD

sdd  232.9G  HDD
CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB

2.296 seconds

CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB

3.929 seconds

CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB

1.001 seconds
ioping: seek rate

min/avg/max/mdev = 74.0 us / 275.5 us / 22.9 ms / 896.9 us

ioping: sequential read speed

generated 4.62 k requests in 5.00 s, 1.13 GiB, 923 iops, 230.8 MiB/s
dd: sequential write speed

1st run:    120.16 MiB/s

2nd run:    107.77 MiB/s

3rd run:    119.21 MiB/s

average:    115.71 MiB/s
IPv4 speedtests

your IPv4:    185.191.228.xxxx
Cachefly CDN:         100.14 MiB/s

Leaseweb (NL):        12.67 MiB/s

Softlayer DAL (US):   2.58 MiB/s

Online.net (FR):      16.74 MiB/s

OVH BHS (CA):         44.51 MiB/s

All disks pass SMART tests and each currently have 34771 hrs (~4 yrs) of power on time. No reallocated sectors.

Geekbench Result

Pic of the server (SSD-variant):

Rating

Hardware - 8/10
Support - 10/10
Performance (HW+Net) - 8/10
Price - 9/10
Overall - 9/10

Closing Thoughts

I’d highly recommend Heymman Servers to anyone needing a high-bandwidth, low-cost, centrally-located (US) machine. The support Francis provides is top-notch (would love to see him come around HB). I don’t think I’ve seen any stock since I purchased this box so it appears others are holding on to their machines as well, but if you do get the chance to jump on an offer, go for it!

Very interesting. Might want to invite them to come here @Mason?
I’d definitely pick a box like that for such price, even if it’s single homed, wouldn’t an issue at all…

I haven’t seen recent offer threads from them. I wonder if they could do it here this time.

BTW: Excellent review, love the format you’ve done there!

[Mason]

@Miguel

Might want to invite them to come here @Mason?

Definitely planning on extending an invite. Would be cool if he has more gear to unload that’s around the same price as my server (might have to pick up another box… )

@Miguel

I haven’t seen recent offer threads from them.

Yeah, seems they post sparingly on WHT. Most of the recent ones have been trying to push their $300/mo 4x E7-4870 monster, which in itself is a fantastic deal.

[WSS]

When I saw that, my first thought was “Where’s the ISA header”?

[imok]

I have the same too!

PREMIUM. I’d only wish it has 32GB RAM.

[imok]

@Mason

The network is okay. It’s single-homed Cogent. I’ve never had any issues using the full 1Gbps up/down, though at this price point I realize it is a shared link.

I don’t know too much about networking (yet). Is the “single-homed Cogent” thing true today?

BTW, I saw the SSD variation in stock yesterday. I almost clicked the Checkout button but I only kept staring the screen while thinking what I was going to do with it.

[Mason]

@imok

I don’t know too much about networking (yet). Is the “single-homed Cogent” thing true today?

Yeah, it is. Tracerouted from a ton of different boxes, all using cogent links. Honestly, I don’t really see any reason to change that though. Tons of bandwidth, good reliability, cheap for him which means cheap for us.

@imok

I saw the SSD variation in stock yesterday

AND YOU’RE JUST TELLING ME NOW!?!?!?!?! I probably would’ve bought it and regretted it, so it’s probably for the best

[imok]

I’m sure it was there only for a minute or less. I was going to post but it happened so fast.

[Jarland]

Cogent seems to be in their prime. What they were when they were junk, level3 seems to have been happy to take over.

[gordon]

Nobody is eating off of that $26/mo. Nice spec.

[crotaphiticus]

Sorry for the asking in an ald topic but does someone have clue what mb (or sort of) is it?

[Mason]

Re-responding to this since we had to restore a backup on HostBalls…

@crotaphiticus

Sorry for the asking in an ald topic but does someone have clue what mb (or sort of) is it?

It’s a SuperMicro X10SLE, which slide into one of these monsters -

[wtfcook]

This beast is available as of now

[Daniel]

@wtfcook

This beast is available as of now

Wow, that’s ridiculously good for the price.

[Mason]

Keep in mind, while you do indeed get 1Gbps unlimited with that monster E7 config, the traffic mix is single-homed Cogent. So you’re not getting a good bandwidth blend, but that’s why the prices are rock-bottom!

FWIW, I don’t have any complaints about the network and it has been solid for the past 2 years serving as my primary Plex box for myself and about 30 others I’ve invited to it.

[Daniel]

@Mason

the traffic mix is single-homed Cogent

I know that Cogent used to have a fairly poor quality, cheap network (back when their slogan was “home of the $4 megabit”), but they actually seem relatively reasonable these days. I haven’t encountered any major speed issues with services that use Cogent transit.

[Jarland]

@Daniel

@Mason

the traffic mix is single-homed Cogent

I know that Cogent used to have a fairly poor quality, cheap network (back when their slogan was “home of the $4 megabit”), but they actually seem relatively reasonable these days. I haven’t encountered any major speed issues with services that use Cogent transit.

I’d take ‘em over level3 in a heartbeat. How times have changed.