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

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

When I have completed my previous review for VMPort and asked for a refund for my payment last September, Ashley issued the refund quickly to me with one condition– I will come back and review their service in few months. I did get my refund but many reviews after, I still have not got back to VMPort. During this period, Ashley has started another line of business, KVMPort (although KVMPort.com is down for me as well as for isitup), offering services using KVM virtualization. During this period, Ashley has emailed me and contacted me via Twitter trying to get a review. After repeated apologies, I have finally got around to sign up with them and write a review for their KVM service. And here is what I have seen from isitup at the moment: Basic Information and Set Up As usual, the package I am reviewing is the lowest KVM Read More

As I was going back in time and reading about all the past 42 reviews I have done with the VPS providers and enjoy the fruit of my work, I can not stop wondering what happened to the providers of some of the oldest reviews. Obviously some of them are already closed (for example, IPAP.co and eNetSouth), however some of the others have thrived with the great VPS that they have provided. Today, we are going to take a look at XenVZ again, which is the VPS provider that I have wrote the first review and is what 96MB.com was originally sitting on. It has been a year since I have last reviewed them (and a year since 96MB.com was conceived!), how have they been doing? Basic Information and Set Up As per their advertisement on Webhostingtalk, here is what you get: Although once you click on the order link, Read More

It is again another lazy weekend, I know I know, I am back to school now, and with work piling up (never thought a graduate degree would be more demanding than a undergraduate one!), I really should study day and night and should spend more time in the library. However, for anyone who have been working for a few years, you know how difficult it is to give up a lazy weekend and do something you really want to do (in my case, writing on 96MB.com!). Therefore, when I was contacted by a member of LowEndTalk asking me to do a review on one of the QualityServers VPS that he bought recently, I used that as an excuse (don’t like to borrow things from others for long!) and decided to put in another review for the week. Disclosure: The member on LET has offered me a logo design for 96MB.com Read More

Brightbox has definitely won the title of the longest free beta service providers on my list. Although it is common to see providers offering a month or two worth of beta services, having one that offered beta services for more than 6 months is something unheard of. Quite frankly speaking, I have completely forgot about the cloud VPS with them until I have received an email informing me that they will discontinue the beta services soon and put things in production mode to make some cash. How is their services? Let’s take a look. Basic information and Set Up I have to admit that I have never heard of Brightbox before I signed up for the beta program, and their price structure has really made me wondering if I have encountered the most expensive VPS providers. Although the specifications seems by no means beyond “low end”, the price structure is 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

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

Let me begin by saying this: the most important part of finding the “right” or the “best” low-end VPS for you, actually start from nowhere else but YOU! What? Me? Why me? Two reasons: 1. The reason why you are buying a low-end VPS is because you do not want to pay, for whatever reason, 100 dollars a month to set up your website, and 2. What you pay is going to be a very strong clue of what you will be getting. I used to dream of having a super-powerful server sitting somewhere that I can do some real rocket-science type of computing with it. Unfortunately, the reality is, as a decent working person with no wealthy family background and no oil reserve in my backyard, what is left in my pocket after paying all the necessities every month, is minimal. And that is why, most of you, are 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