So it is summer again and for me, summer is usually a time I spend on catching up with a few things that I have been thinking of doing but have unfortunately no time to do yet. And as it turns out, the top issue on my to-do list for 96MB.com, based on the number of requests that I get (other than the requests to review VPS products and services) is to have a forum. Obviously there is the Big Brother (WebhostingTalk) in the realm of hosting-related forums, and then there is LowEndTalk, which I have personally benefited more than a dozen times from it and 96MB.com is never meant nor will ever be a competitor to any of them. So, here are some questions that I would like to throw to the readers of 96MB: 1. What is the direction do you think the forum should go in order 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

Knownhost is probably one of the most well-known brand in the VPS community for their managed VPS services. The services that they have provided is really second to none and have received quite a few positive feedbacks on WebhostingTalk. The only problem? They are too expensive to the budget VPS community. In fact, even with the heavy discount that they have posted here, even their cheapest VPS plan is way beyond the acceptable range of the budget VPS, which is typically set to below 7USD per month. Therefore, when Knownhost opened up their budget hosting division, RocketVPS, and offered a really sweet deal on WebhostingTalk, which even brought down their most basic VPS to within the budget VPS limit, I immediately took the dive and signed up for one of those boxes (Fortunate enough for me, I was able to be one of the first 50 lucky customers to get Read More

Anthony emailed me a long time ago before InceptionHosting even started to offer hosting in the continental US for a review on their Phoenix node, however I was too busy with all other stuff in life (if you have noticed recently, my posting rate on 96MB is decreasing drastically) until Anthony basically gave up waiting for me on that review (sorry Anthony!) and asked me to review the new node he set up in Netherlands. Unfortunately, although I have done the data collection work like months ago, I did not get a chance to write this review until now. Therefore, without further delay, let’s take a look at how the new service is doing. Note that this won’t be a full review since Inception Hosting has been featured quite a few times on 96MB (more specifically here and here) and therefore I will only focus on the recent changes as Read More

Among all of the VPS providers that I have reviewed so far, besides a few that I was curious about myself, others were either requested by the providers themselves or someone who is interested in purchasing their services. However, VPS6.Net stood out as the only one which there were requests from both sides: Jeremy from VPS6.Net has asked me to write a review about them a few months back and one of their potential customers has asked me to review their services as well. What is the magic power behind VPS6.Net that made them so attractive? I was curious about this and when I saw they actually offer free trial on their OpenVZ service, I took up the opportunity and signed up for a box. Basic Information and Set Up As mentioned above, the trial VPS offered by VPS6 comes with 128MB of RAM, 10GB of bandwidth, 2 CPU cores Read More

UPDATE: Amanah has ceased to offer their free VPS services.   Amanah has just sent me an email informing me that they are now offering a small VPS out of their Toronto location. It comes with the following specifications: 1GB of hard drive space 128MB of RAM 100GB bandwidth at 100Mbps OpenVZ Yes, I know the hard drive space is a little small, but I believe they are the only provider in Canada who is offering free VPS! So definitely sign up quickly before all the stock are gone. Their plan, as far as I know, is to offer the free VPS on a permanent basis and you will not be charged for the service at all. Here is the sign up link and nope, it is not an affiliate link and I am not taking any profit for this. By the way, set up is not instant as they Read More

I have to say that that although there are many providers which claimed to provide VPS with only 96MB of RAM, rarely any of them actually do provide a VPS for which 96MB is all you have as memory resources. Most of the OpenVZ providers actually provide at least another 96MB of burstable RAM, which means you are essentially running on a VPS with 192MB of RAM (although you can not do that all the time), which is really what all is needed to run an LNMP stack, plus many other basic functionalities. For Xen HVM providers, you even have the ability to add your own swap space, making the swap space to be as large as you like. That is why when IPXCore start to offer a true 96MB VPS (i.e. all you have is 96MB of memory and no burstable/swap RAM), it immediately turns out to be something 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

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

As I am pondering slowly over the long-overdue list of review request, VPSDeploy seems to be the next one on the list. Their VPS offerings got me really excited as it was one of the very few low end VPS that is actually offered on SSD! We are know the advantages of SSD: fast disk I/O, however, the current cost of SSD is a lot higher than the standard HDD and therefore kept the low cost VPS providers away from offering it. In fact, there is only one other VPS provider that I have reviewed so far that offered this service. So how is this particular offering from VPS Deploy performs. Basic Information and Set Up As per this post on LowEndBox, here is what you get for 4.99USD:   Although LEA has supplied a discount code for 50% off the first month payment, I did not actually get to Read More