Quickweb is one of the oldest VPS providers in the budget VPS industry and the original sponsor of LowEndBox.com, they have also been reviewed on 96MB before and I am still using one of my Quickweb VPS to test their network connection on the West Coast today. However, they rarely give big recurring discounts so when I saw this news on Twitter, I thought it would be important to share with the 96MB readers. Promo code is: XMAS2012 for a 50% recurring discount on the following supaVZ plans: At the time of writing, for VZ1, there is stock everywhere except Florida location (UPDATE: Stock has been added for Florida location as per this twit), which means there is also stock in Los Angeles! It is available for any payment period including monthly payments: Indeed they are a bit more expensive than other providers in the LEB market, but this is Read More

For the low end VPS regulars, Quickweb is definitely one of the big names out there. It has, at least in the past, done some really impressive work and sold really stable VPS, and more importantly, perhaps the most central website in this low end VPS community, LowEndBox.com, is hosted with them. Personally, my first VPS was purchased from them and the VPS I have paid the most is a Supa VZ1 at their London, UK location. However, the recent posting about them did come with some negative feedbacks, and a long time LEB veteran, drmike, does not seems to be too happy with their VPS offerings as per this comment here,which was posted on the Christmas day. So what is going on with Quickweb recently? I decided to sign up for a VPS and take a look myself. Basic Information and Set Up Again, as per this post on Read More

Joe from FST Servers left a comment on one of my previous reviews stating that they would like me to write a review about them. I have never heard about this company before – no reviews, no history, but the fact that they are using Citrix XenServer is something that makes them a really worthy one to be reviewed for. General Information and Prices There is really limited information I can find about FST Servers, through the domain checks, their domain is registered to Brendan Fusco in Chicago Illinois and it seems to be where their servers are based as well according to this post on LowEndBox.com. As per this post on Webhostingtalk, they have decent processing power on the hardware nodes, as well as completely dedicated resources with nothing “burstable”. Prices offered are definitely in the low end of the budget spectrum, especially for XenServer platform, with the lowest Read More

Quite frankly speaking, F9 Servers is another not-so-cheap VPS service provider that should probably be excluded from the “low end” VPS list, however they are one of the very few Canadian providers in Ontario province and the company itself is located in the same city that I spent my university life at! Therefore, when they offered a free trial server on WebHostingTalk, I could not resist but to sign up for one quickly. Price and Sign Up The lowest configuration for a VPS in F9 Servers looks something like this: and here is the corresponding price: For that price, you can get a similar specification for the whole year in Montreal Canada, so I really do not see how much advantage they would have price-wise. However they claim to have pretty solid servers and very few VPS per node, which could potentially meet the clientele who needs high-end VPS. One Read More

By the time you have read the first three parts of Finding The Right Low-End VPS series at here, here and here, and if you have not get bored yet, you should have a pretty good idea to have a few service providers to pick from. The last, and perhaps one of, if not the most important step, is to verify those providers by digging through some of the publicly available data sources, that they are indeed what they claim to be. In this section, I will use QuickWeb as an example for illustration purposes, since they are one of my favourite providers! The first piece of information that is widely available is the domain registration. Google for "domain whois" information and you will find a myriad number of websites offering such information.  I personally do not have a preference which website is better, but some websites do cache those Read More

Personally, I am not exactly a fan of KVM and has never had one before. After all, what is the great part of KVM when both OpenVZ (which is cheap) and Xen (which is sort of dedicated) are already in place? However, this post on LowEndBox.com has made me curious about taking a look at the KVM boxes, and since the opportunity has presented itself (who does not like free stuff?), I decided to give it a try. Basically you get the following specifications: The prices are not exactly cheap, since 1 GBP = 1.6USD approximately, so even prepay a year means you will have to pay 160USD, which is more expensive than any of the VPS that I have ever had!   Provision It could be due to the fact that they were still in Beta stage when I tested it out, however the provision was completely manual and Read More

The first review is obviously on my XenVZ/OpenITC box, which is the very box that 96MB.com is sitting on. The original offer is no longer available, however as per the offer page on LowEndBox.com, here are the specification of this most low-end VPS that I have: Obviously Xen is what I chose as this is really what I see makes the offer attractive. Also, it was not mentioned that it also comes with 2GB of off-site backup with 2GB monthly transfer. Set up is almost instant, order paid via Paypal on 9:07PM, VPS provisioned on 9:38PM. The control panel is highly customized, and here is how it looks like: Some of the really nice features about this custom panels are: 1. Allow custom kernel through PyGrub, some users have reported here that they actually managed to get a few MB of RAM after making use of the custom kernels, however Read More

I just did a head count on my VPS today and here are what are available in my inventory at the time of writing: 1. 1 x XenVZ/OpenITC (Got it from this offer, no longer available) 2. 2 x BuyVM (The famous 15USD per year offer, normally out of stock, and there is actually a website dedicated to check if they are in stock or not here) 3. 1 x Quickweb Supa VZ1 (Description here) 4. 1 x Nix Communications (Got it from this offer, seems sold out at one point and more stock was added later on but it seems it is out of stock again) 5. 1 x IPAP.Co (Got it from this offer,  it is still being set up at the time writing, and reviews won’t be available until it is fully set up). In the next few weeks, I will be writing reviews for each and Read More