If you have been following this blog since its birth, you probably notice that I have recently slowed down a little from the original pace I was targeting (one review per week, which sort of give me the balance of maintaining the interest without devote too much time that would jeopardize my other priorities), as a result, I literally have a mini-queue of VPS that is lining up for me to write reviews on. Inception Hosting is an interesting company, registered in UK but their servers servers in Netherlands – The low land and the land of freedom that is famous for many of the off-shore hosts, who are “not reputable and have poor infrastructure” according to this WHT post. Could Inception Hosting be an exception or just like their names have suggested, they would just be a dream mixed with reality? Price and Set Up Inception Hosting has a 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

The idea of "Cloud" hosting has always fascinated me. Everyone seems to talk about it at all times but yet I am not sure how many people (me included) knows too much beyond "putting up a bunch of super-powerful computers together and make them look like one". Therefore, when I was offered an opportunity to test out the cloud VPS offer from Gandi.Net, I jumped on the wagon almost instantly. Price Price for Gandi’s cloud VPS is not exactly low-end, considering the cheapest you can get is 12 Euro per month, which is about 18USD, for a 256MB, 5Mbps share: The key advantage here is rather the dedicated CPU core, which is different from most of the budget providers that only offer “fair share CPU usage”. If they truly don’t oversell, that means you will at most have 15 neighbours on a 16-core server, which, compare to some hosts that 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

It was not exactly my plan to get another VPS, after having 6 VPS and 3 of them are practically sitting idle. However, when I saw this test offer from TelVPS, my finger start to get itchy again. After all, for 3 cents (for 24 hours), you can’t really lose too much. Basically, this is what you get for 24 hours for 3 cents (yes, you read it right, USD 0.03): Server is located with ServerCentral (they have a link to the information sheet on the DC here) in Chicago. Setup and Control Panel The set up was instant, I got my payment received email the same time as I got my VPS login! Although it is no longer rare these days, it is always something great. Control Panel is the standard SolusVM panel with all the standard functionality: What is really great is that they have a myriad selection Read More

It was almost ironical that less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post (which, now, no longer exists for reasons that I will explain below) celebrating 30-days of uptime with 96MB.com (or the 96MB RAM VPS box it is sitting on), 96MB.com received such a huge visiting volume that the box could no longer hold it through and surrendered with a DB Connection Error screen. Out of panic, I tried to reboot the box, the shutdown was fine, however after I tried to boot it up again, here is the error message that I have got: Filesystem unmounted: sudo /bin/umount /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS config file written: /home/xen/vps2433.vm/vps2433.vm.cfg Filesystem Created: sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_vmswap Filesystem labelled: sudo /sbin/e2label /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg domU_disk_root Filesystem mounted: sudo /bin/mount /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS hostname file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname Files chowned: sudo /bin/chown root:root /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_* File moved: sudo /bin/mv /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt/etc/hostname VPS hosts file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hosts Files chowned: sudo Read More

By the time you are reading this, the tiny VPS box that 96MB.com is sitting on has been online for 30 days! Thanks Sean and XenVZ for providing such a extremely inexpensive but yet stable box! For more reviews about this box, which has only 96MB of RAM but runs the entire 96MB.com, feel free to read my review. Happy 30-Day Anniversary, 96MB.com! Here is the current uptime at the time this post is written: uptime 12:04:33 up 30 days, 9:23, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.18, 0.12

OK, now you have done a great assessment, you know how much you are willing to pay approximately and the level of service you are going to get, and perhaps, you’ve even gone a step further from my previous post to start looking for a VPS provider and is somewhat shocked by the myriad number of choices that you have. The question then becomes, naturally, how do I find the few ones that you know you can trust with your precious websites/programs? Step 1: Reading reviews Few people actually bother to sit down and read reviews from the Internet these days, partially because if you search in Google by typing in “VPS Reviews”, there are perhaps millions of links shows up. On the other hand, most of the them are perhaps nothing more than meta tags embedded in the web pages, hoping to attract more traffic, and the remaining ones, Read More

To everyone who is waiting to get a cheap but powerful BuyVM VPS, please get your calendar marked! According to this announcement, they will be adding stock again on Monday April 18th at 12:00pm GMT-7, if you have any trouble translating this to your local time, here is a website that may help. BuyVM is perhaps one of the most famous players in the low end VPS industry, and their 15 USD/year plan, which I have just finished an review on 96MB.com, is perhaps one of the most popular among the low-end VPS users. In fact, it is so popular that there is actually a website dedicated for their stock and last time they added stock, all 15USD/year plan are gone in 30 minutes! So don’t wait, set up your alarm clock and grab one before it runs out!