Was reminiscing about all the shit hosts and actually decent hosts I’ve used over the years that offered crazy amounts of resources and I started flipping through some old offers on LEB.
Who is the current king of the dirt cheap, high resource OpenVZ/whatever plans that are actually usable and stay online?
Ones I thought up - a few I actually still use/know people who are still using them:
Inception Hosting - $2-4/mo 6GB OVZ/2-3GB KVM Black Friday 2016 Promos
VPSDime - $7/m 6GB (OG plans, still have a buddy with like a 24GB plan that he loves)
ImpactVPS - $6/m 4GB resource pool, $12/yr 1GB 50% off specials
VirMach - Anything from a Black Friday promo (usability hopefully getting better with their recent change on abuse monitoring)
AlphaVPS.bg - Had some 1-2GB OVZ plans ($12-20/yr) and they were insanely fast/usable for the money
Haven’t used HostUs in awhile but I remember they always had some like 6GB OVZ monster for cheap. @Hetzner_OL is killing it right now in the KVM + NVMe side for resources to $$.
This. Even his LA SSD plans are really cheap with awesome disk IO performance (which makes me wonder if he runs it in RAID0). I haven’t really done any serious computing in my VPS (hence I can’t give a definitive review), but the “unlimited” CPU usage feature in the plans is great as well.
HDD plans list RAID next to them (1 or 5). So if I had to take a guess, I’d say he’s doing JBOD for SSD plans. Especially the AU plans which are running on an OVH Discovery offer, those boxes had 2x480GB SSDs and he’s offering 100GB of storage. So must be JBOD or RAID 0.
I’ve heard good things about the wishosting plans but have yet to use them. I’d consider one of those storage plans in BHS, but I’m worried about how oversold the storage plan is because he mentioned to someone on LET that he can’t stack them (may’ve been @Munzy who asked originally). What that tells me is he’s banking on most people not using the full amount of storage.
I buy storage plans to fit my current needs, maybe with 10-20% of buffer. So I’d want like 2 of them and I’m filling them up completely.
I’d say go for it but keep in mind I’d also recommend woot and alpha in some cases (only someone looking for toys to play with not servers to depend on)
I think when he says you can’t stack storage it would be a case of making sure the storage was stacked on the same node perhaps. Easiest way would be to open a presales ticket and find out if he can accommodate. I believe his system creates a resource pool as opposed to a single vps and there are cases where manual action on his end is needed for some things.
Edit: my experience is I had a 1.8tb storage kvm with encrypted lvm. The entire filesystem had less than 100gb free and I strongly doubt it’s oversold to any detrimental point. Reason for leaving that was the sys arm 4tb for $11/month was too hard to pass up
I really want to find a reason to try one of these since I’m in Australia. If I strictly needed kvm I’d be all over it but the $4 and $7/month hosthatch vz in Sydney has been flawless for me and after a ticket to enable fuse I had sshfs working. Is for plex, if I wanted to use encryption for nextcloud with storage by sshfs I’d go his Sydney kvm.
Which plans/promos? Every time I’ve looked, I’ve never been that tempted because there was always a better promo with a host I had more experience with and could trust to provide SOME performance
True, definitely possible. I’m moving right now to a 2x4TB EG-16 box so alright on storage for the moment, might try one out though for kicks.
I missed out on those… should’ve grabbed one when they were stocked.
If you’re ever looking for another check out the FlowVPS (@Brendan) NVMe KVM plans. Think he just posted a $7/4GB offer in Melbourne
LOL, not sure if trolling me or not here but I’ll bite anyway haha. Put aside the fact that it’s known they suck, they are cheap. I don’t want to link to them but if you go to woot’s website forwardslash 2018 there is a promo page. I couldn’t resist trying most of the services on that page for the hell of it. My honest experience is that when things work, they seem to work well. When things don’t work they really fucking suck. A waste of money in those cases, but people seem to focus on the bad which is why not many people say good things about them. I might be easily impressed, but $6/year for an IPv4, 512mb, 1.5tb @ 100mbit and 25GB HDD is impressive. Would I put anything business related or important on that? FUCK NO.
I think you’d find it slightly disappointing if you were to compare it to that beastly dedi lol, but for the price for 1.8TB of storage and no problem if you peg the CPU 100% with a decent network it’s an excellent deal. Depends what you are using it for of course. I’ve heard of people trying to use them as seedboxes and having issues. If you are using it for nextcloud or personal plex or something you’ll be fine.
I’m glad I did to be honest, but I’ve since taken up that drserver dedi with a 2TB HDD so that kind of allows me to rearrange my setup now, drop some VPS etc, I probably don’t need the entire 4TB but letting it go isn’t going to be easy. I’m surprised I let my $14 i7 polish dedi go to be honest lol
Thanks for recommending them, I’ve actually tried a couple of services in the past and they are too premium for me! They were flawless and perfect. I actually forgot all about them. Definitely add that to the list if he isn’t already.
Hmm. None of those woot plans are too appealing to me. I already have a $6/yr 512MB OVZ with ImpactVPS from a past promo, $7/yr from VPSDime back in the day, $X/yr 768MB KVM from HostHatch Black Friday, etc. All of which are extremely usable and fine for even more than just playing around.
Guess I’d rather just wait for the crazy deals a couple times a year to collect, if you needed something dirt cheap right now then I guess it’s an option. I’d probably just opt to pay more for like a ImpactVPS/HostUs/etc plan that’s available year round.
I was looking at the Wishosting plan to expand my media storage, mounting it on another OVH box. I just opted to upgrade the whole box though for the short term until I get around to putting together a big colo box.
I’ve added the FlowVPS plans. He also has a 2GB KVM NVMe in Melbourne for $11/quarterly
Oktay is still around, businesses seem to still be doing well (I get FAST ticket responses) and he lurks on LET. Need to get @Jarland to recruit him, maybe he’ll enjoy HB and hang around here a bit.
You have a good point with regards to there being plenty of other options. It’s good that there are options though, quite a wide spectrum of users, uses and services to cater for them.
What do you use to mount that remote storage? I’ve never tried NFS and SMB is not ideal, I use sshfs just with the -o allow_other, seems to work fine for feeding plex media to a different vps for the plex server (pretty hard to find a vps with performance and large storage all in one!) I have noticed with the sys arm storage servers though that sshfs really taxes the cpu and doesn’t allow it to max the connection, but in practice in hasn’t stopped anything from working. The only exception is with latency, from australia to my canadian storage server there’s around 250ms and that made a noticeable difference to the throughput.
I previously used SMB within OVH, worked well enough for personal use - but I was connecting to a KS with 100Mbps so it was alright with small files but anything over 1-2GB was miserable at times. Multiple connections were basically impossible.
I’m running Plex on an E3 that will regularly have 6-7 streams going on a weeknight nowadays, so running the main install off a VPS w/ remote storage is basically impossible.
Yikes, I’ll have to keep that in mind if I decide to expand my Plex further. I set up a little test plex setup using a shitty resource pool that comes with 1TB of HDD so I put one in NYC for storage and created 4 other ones in NYC, LAX, miami and chicago for plex servers. Once I got fuse set up they all worked perfectly at the same time transcoding 1080 mkv from the one VPS in NYC which surprised the heck out of me considering the shittiness of the provider.
My current setup is much more elegant, it’s the drserver 8 core atom with 2TB hdd, all the media just fits on the drive - the atom can handle 4 simultaneous transcodes just fine even with a couple of KVMs running. If I needed to expand that storage though, I feel like I could continue to sshfs to my sys arm storage and it would scale.
I can vouch for wishosting too. I signed up with them with Michael’s first offer on LET. Right now I have 4 servers with them. My first VPS has 840 days of uptime right now and still counting. I can’t say it never went down, but that’s a typical OVH network - going down a few times a year for few minutes. KIf it goes down you can expect that the whole OVH network is down too.
If there is no RAID type listed on the package details it’s JBOD as @Harambe pointed it out. According to my knowledge the ‘awesome performance’ you mentioned is not due to RAID-0, but low amount of VMs on a single node.
You’ve got quite the impressive network of services running on budget dedis/VPS’s. Gotta ask though, 454 days of uptime on your Proxmox node - you running KernelCare or something on that, or just YOLO’ing the system updates?
Also random but somewhat related to the thread. Saw ArubaCloud in your list and it made me think of the 1 Eur VMs and then that reminded me of the Ikoula birthday promo. Grabbed one in NL and it’s pretty decent for the money.
1 core/1.7GB Ram/50GB SSD/100Mbps unmetered (appears just outbound is capped)/EU-only (FR or NL I believe are the only options) for 1 Eur/mo: Ikoula One public cloud
Ikoula promo bench.sh (NL location)
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CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2261.176 MHz
Total size of Disk : 48.9 GB (3.5 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem : 1498 MB (100 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 951 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime : 3 days, 2 hour 26 min
Load average : 0.01, 0.04, 0.00
OS : Debian GNU/Linux 9
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 4.9.0-7-amd64
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I/O speed(1st run) : 458 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run) : 446 MB/s
I/O speed(3rd run) : 486 MB/s
Average I/O speed : 463.3 MB/s
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Node Name IPv4 address Download Speed
CacheFly 205.234.175.175 43.4MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP 106.187.96.148 5.22MB/s
Linode, Singapore, SG 139.162.23.4 3.91MB/s
Linode, London, UK 176.58.107.39 44.5MB/s
Linode, Frankfurt, DE 139.162.130.8 46.0MB/s
Linode, Fremont, CA 50.116.14.9 4.36MB/s
Softlayer, Dallas, TX 173.192.68.18 8.33MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA 67.228.112.250 4.25MB/s
Softlayer, Frankfurt, DE 159.122.69.4 45.4MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore, SG 119.81.28.170 4.03MB/s
Softlayer, HongKong, CN 119.81.130.170 3.82MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course YOLO’ing I guess you mentioned that in shade of Meltdown & Spectre attacks. It’s my private environment and I believe that the stuff I run is fairly trusted. It’s not like a system that was running for years with the same apps will magically be vulnerable. For Meltdown & Spectre attack to occur it’s mandatory to install something that will actually perform the attack. The system is not vulnerable from the outside, thus I can sleep safely. Moreover I’m backing up my containers daily and I keep the backups for 20 days, so I have the ability to rollback hijacked containers backwards 20 days.
Holy crap. Thanks dude. It will land on my uptime monitor soon I dunno if my currency exchange is instant tho. Hopefully I won’t miss on that deal. Is iKoula in France?
Atta boy. lol. Was just curious, no judgment here I have a few personal boxes that I haven’t bothered updating yet - for the same reasons you outlined.
Also have a habit of asking these types of questions because maybe someone will share a free/cheap tool that does live kernel updates or something.
No worries. Just randomly thought of it when I saw Aruba in your list.
Yeah, Ikoula is based in FR. I have an old account from their old dedi promos on LET and paid via PP, was delivered instantly. Basically it gives you a credit for a vmSmall or whatever they call it, then you can launch in NL or FR.
Old CPU, but lots of SSD space and decent network - still a pretty great deal for $1.20 or whatever the conversion is today.
I guess you mentioned that in shade of Meltdown & Spectre attacks. It’s my private environment and I believe that the stuff I run is fairly trusted. It’s not like a system that was running for years with the same apps will magically be vulnerable. For Meltdown & Spectre attack to occur it’s mandatory to install something that will actually perform the attack. The system is not vulnerable from the outside, thus I can sleep safely. Moreover I’m backing up my containers daily and I keep the backups for 20 days, so I have the ability to rollback hijacked containers backwards 20 days.
I dunno if my currency exchange is instant tho. Hopefully I won’t miss on that deal. Is iKoula in France?