BlueVM is another contender for the low end VPS community which has often offered some really attractive deals from time to time. The last 96MB review on them, however, turned out not to be that ideal, and there were a few questions about if my expectation on them were a bit too high. It has been a year since my last review for them, and I am curious if they have made any changes to their services after their site has changed to a very “blue-ish” appearance. Let’s take a look. Basic Information and Set Up As per the offer on LowEndTalk, here is what you get for 1 USD per month, which is pretty amazing price for a 256MB dedicated RAM + 256MB Swap VPS: As you can see, the price is really cheap for the resources given, particularly the amount of guaranteed RAM and swap space given. BlueVM Read More
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VPS Review at June 15th, 2014.
Harry from CloudShards approached me almost a year ago (last day of October last year to be exact), asking for a review on CloudShards. However I failed to respond to it until February of this year (sorry for the delay in response to many of the readers of 96MB, the review requests are simply piling up and unfortunately, I am a one-man team with a day job). As I was working through the pile, Harry sent another reminder wondering if I could give him an ETA. I did not realize until a few days later when he posted this is 96MB VPS offer on LowEndTalk. As rarely any providers are actually offering small VPS these days, and this is actually what was 96MB all about initially, I decided to jump the queue and review this particular offering first. Basic Information and Set Up As mentioned on the following advertisement on Read More
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VPS Review at October 20th, 2013.
There are a few providers in the low end VPS community which are constantly ranked among the top providers, such as BuyVM, Ramnode and Prometeus. Unlike other providers, who seem to focus exclusively on the low end VPS market, Prometeus is also caters to the more serious business clientele by offering what they call the “Biz” plans. Those plans are most likely slightly more expensive than the regular plans, but should have less number of VPS to share the physical server and has more restrictions in terms of what can be run on the server to ensure the best service experience for everyone. However, is it really as good as what have claimed to be? Let’s take a look. Basic Information and Set Up Thanks to LowEndBox, I was able to take advantage of the special offer from Prometeus on their Biz Xen plans, which is normally outside of the Read More
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VPS Review at August 20th, 2013.
CatalystHost was recently reviewed on 96MB by one of the readers, jcaleb, and normally it is not customary for me to review VPS that has been reviewed not very long ago. However, I made an exception to this one partially because jcaleb was focusing on the customer service aspect of CatalystHost and I would focus a bit more on the “objective” aspects of it, and also because it is rare to see a relatively “new” provider receives almost nothing but positive reviews on major forums on the low end VPS community. Therefore, when they have made the 2GB RAM plan available (yes, it seems to me almost every single major providers is now running this plan), I have decided to get one myself and check it out. Basic Information and Setup As per their advertisement on LowEndTalk, here is what you get for 7USD per month: Note that even though Read More
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VPS Review at August 8th, 2013.
One of the trends that I noticed among many VPS providers with large client base is always they have more negative reviews. I guess one could always attribute that to “it is easier to make one person happy but difficult to make a million”, or, from the customers’ perspective, “when a VPS provider gets too large, they don’t care about each individual customer, since 1/10 is a huge loss but 1/1,00,000 loss of customer is next to none. For example, Googling “Burst.NET negative reviews” and I am sure you will be able to find quite a few of them. Virpus, which is based in WholeSale Internet in Kansas City (but has recently expanded to other cities as well), is another VPS with quite a large client base and obviously, searching for their reviews shows more negative reviews than the positive one. At 96MB, I try not be driven by the Read More
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VPS Review at July 14th, 2013.
Sometimes, I felt that VPS business is a combination of experience and skills and perhaps even more importantly, luck. I have to say that on the front-end of luck, EaseVPS probably has a rocky start compared to many other providers, such as DDOS Attacks, fake service down alerts and inevitably some unhappy customers. However, now they have been in business longer, has anything improved? Let’s take a look together. Basic Information and Sign Up The plan I have signed up was a year ago, on this post on LowEndTalk, and the “Small” VPS plan is now replaced by the following: However the price could be brought down to 7 USD per month as per the posting on LowEndBox here. The plan that I have had comes with the following resources: The sign up is a standard WHMCS interface with no SSL, and seems to be hosted on a separate domain Read More
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VPS Review at June 20th, 2013.
Recently, there seems to be more and more providers offering either pure SSD-based VPS or SSD-cached + HDD based hybrid VPS. Although normally comes with very limited hard drive space, SSD-based VPS are promised to have amazing disk I/O speed and is suitable for I/O intensive applications such as databases. However, are those magical SSDs really as good as they have promised? Is the sacrifice in storage space really going to bring you the fast and stable disk I/O? Let’s take a look with VPSBlast. Basic Information and Sign Up As per their advertisement on WebhostingTalk, here is the resources you would be getting for 2.50USD per month: Note that this plan is not offered directly on their homepage and if you order directly on their homepage, the smallest plan is 512MB of RAM and 10GB of SSD space for 10 USD per month: Slightly below the slider bar, they Read More
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VPS Review at May 4th, 2013.
Preface The low end VPS market has received quite a bit of “shock” recently when DireVPS, which is an subsidiary of OpenITC/XenVZ, announced that they would be selling what they called “carefully oversold” VPS, offering 4GB of RAM at a price of less than 7USD per month. Soon after that, we saw a lot more offering from other VPS providers offering VPS at such an incredibly low price. Clearly DireVPS was the leader in this change and how have they been doing recently? The most valuable contributor of 96MB, jcaleb, has decided to sign up with them and take a look. Thanks jcaleb and without further to do, let’s take a look at his review: Introduction 2GB OpenVZ has been more and more common nowadays, that many providers shoots up that offer from time to time. But last February (2013), OpenITC surprised the LET/LEB community by giving a new landmark Read More
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VPS Review at April 5th, 2013.
Preface It was always great to see yet another refreshing review from one of the 96MB readers, jcaleb. The last host reviewed by him was Prometeous, which is arguably one of the oldest and most respected player in the low end VPS market. The host to be reviewed today, on the other hand, is a relatively new entrant in the play field. Without further delay, let’s take a look at this great review. As per the last review, only slight formatting have been done by me, so all credits goes to jcaleb. Thanks jcaleb! LET/LEB is now crowded with so many host, all trying to stand out and be successful. One company that caught my attention is CatalystHost, as they are very proud of the quality of their service and how they treat their customers. Quoting the owners in their LET offer. As always, the most important thing that I Read More
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VPS Review at March 19th, 2013.
It is a Friday evening and while I was browsing on the LowEndTalk and came across of this post. Instantly I thought it would be an interesting challenge for me to write an review given only a 4 hour window for me to try out the VPS (and another 2 hours to do the writing on a sunny Sunday morning). Granted there will be many shortcomings for such a review, since I might just be lucky to hit a “good” 4-hours window on the node, however I thought it would at least offer the 96MB.com readers some insight of Linode, who’s price is way beyond the standard LEB pricing, without sacrificing my own wallet so much. So without further delay (since I only give myself two hours of writing time), let’s get started. Basic Information and Set Up According to this blog entry on Linode, the process for a 4 Read More
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VPS Review at March 10th, 2013.