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

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

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

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

NinjaHawk is probably not one of the VPS providers who provide aggressive prices in the LEB community (which is in contrast, of, say, ChicagoVPS), and quite frankly speaking the pricing that they have, without discount at least, is definitely in the “premier” range. Although this is definitely not the first non-LEB VPS provider I have ever reviewed (you can see some of the examples here, here and here), since personally I feel that it is a matter of personal choices that some people would simply like to pay more for one reason or another (even though I do encourage readers like you to get the most work done using the least amount of resources), I definitely have higher expectations on the non-LEB providers. So how is NinjaHawk holding up with regards to this, especially after one of their founding members has left? Let’s take a look. Basic Information and Set Read More

Preface I woke up this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see a review from a long time Low End VPS community member jcaleb (who has done many good deeds in the community, including the most recent ones here) has sent me his own review on one of the Low End VPS providers that was on my to-do list. Thanks so much jcaleb! This is the first time time I am posting a review that is done by a community member so please feel free to share your thoughts on the comments below and depending on the feedbacks, I may be more than happy to post more reviews from the reputable community members in future. Disclaimer: jcaleb has provided review using his own test VPS and I have not done any verification (nor any change, other than some minor formatting) on his review. However being a very reputable member of Read More

Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone has had a good break, had spent some time with your family and friends and had a pretty good break! And to me, I have been spending days taking a mini-vacation and spend some time to think and plan for the next year, and one of the items that I have had for my 2013 To-Do list is definitely to keep 96MB going so that readers like you would be benefited from the VPS review that I have been writing! Most of the time I do a review either because the VPS business has put in a review request or if I happened to be in need of a VPS myself. However, in some occasion, the review request comes from customers who are either happy with the service and would like more people to know about the provider they are using, or they feel Read More

As many have said recently, my pace in writing VPS reviews are getting slower and slower. Believe it or not, I am actually just getting as frustrated with my own progress as well as I have received quite a few email politely reminding me their review requests have not been completed for months. NECS is one such example, Ramon from NECS has sent me a review request since June 7, and another reminder last month about it. I have finally got around to them and let’s take a look at their services. Basic Information and Set Up I have decided to take advantage of their offer on WHT and unfortunately their lowest plan (Basic) was sold out, so I had to sign up for the Starter 1 Plan, which offers the following amount of resources for 5 GBP (equivalent to slightly above 8 USD at the time of writing) per Read More

My recent VPS reviews have been focused on mostly the VPS that are located in North America and despite all the similarities between the VPS services provided in Europe and Americas, the specifications provided, at the same price level, could varies quite a bit simply due to the cheaper bandwidth cost and the existence of some really low-cost DCs such as OVH and Hetzner. As such, I will start a review today on FileMedia, which is a German-based VPS provider offering KVM VPS. Basic Information and Set Up I noticed FileMedia when they have made a post on LowEndTalk to provide a free test VPS for three months for a review. As per the the advertisement, here is server that is on the offer: Although I have been in Germany a few times as a tourist, I have to confess that I knew next to nothing about the language, however, Read More

As 96MB.com grows everyday, so is the number of requests for a review of the services, and as the pile grows up, there is often one or two that tend to slide through the crack. YourDomainGoesHere (YDGH) is one of them, I have ordered and being paying for their services for more than half a year and each and every time I paid my invoice, I kept telling myself I will need to get this review done next week, and…the cycle just repeated. So finally, I have decided to write about them and take a look at how their services are performing. (On a side note, I do pay for every VPS that I have written on this blog, except the ones that I labeled clearly as part of the promotions/beta testing, I will normally ask for a refund for the VPS that I paid purely for review purposes – Read More