In the previous post, we have reviewed the performance of the smallest siblings of BuyVM’s KVM offering. Although the disk I/O is pretty good at close to 100MB/s, the fact that only 1 CPU core is available caused the benchmarks to be pretty low. So, by paying more, other than getting larger RAM, do we also get better performance? In this post, we shall take a look at the performance of a 512MB KVM VPS. General Information and Set Up Since both 128MB and 512MB VPS use the same sign up process and the SolusVM control panel is pretty much the same, I will focus our discussion here on a few differences. First difference is obviously the cost, the 521MB VPS cost 10 per month, and here is what you get for 10USD: During the sign up process, the warning message that appeared for the 128MB VPS declaring that upgrading/downgrading Read More

BuyVM is perhaps one of the most frequently featured providers here – for a good reason that they sell really great servers at really cheap price. So far, almost all 15/year providers are unable to deliver a reasonably performed VPS for a prolonged period of time, except BuyVM. As a result, almost every time BuyVM added some new stock, they are sold out in relatively short time frame. Therefore, although it has been a few months since BuyVM has announced their new KVM product lines, I did not manage to get a hold of a few KVMs until recently. This review will consists of two parts, both are dedicated to BuyVM’s KVM series, the first is the most budget 128MB KVM VPS and second part is for the mid-range 512MB KVM products. Why? Because many hosts use lower-range hardware and almost all hosts put more clients per VPS on their Read More

It has been a while since my last post about BuyVM and several things have happened since. Over all of them, the biggest change was that they are no longer with Hurricane Electric and instead moved all their servers to Coresite.com, as indicated here. How are the pony VPS doing now after months of improvements? 96MB decided to take a quick peek just before the new stock opens again in a few hours’ time. Note that this is a not a full review since many thing have not changed since my last review,  instead, I will only focus on things that are changed. OS Selections Several OS templates have been added to the BuyVM’s list of OS selections since the last time I reviewed them, most notably Debian 6, CentOS 6 and CPanel DNS-only template, which according to Francisco, would use very minimal amount of memory. Here is a list Read More

The World IPV6 day has just passed, however, for average home Internet users like me, IPV6 remains a distant dream than a reality: my ISP does not support IPV6 and some of my friends, even those with some computing background, have no idea what IPV6 is. Therefore, when FitVPS advertised their IPV6-only VPS offer, I was really curious to see how it is looks like and the 99 cents price for the first 3 months made me decided to give it a shot. Product Information and Miscellaneous Based on this post on LowEndBox.com, here is what you get for 0.99 for the first quarter and $10 thereafter. However the prices have been down to $3 per quarter afterwards: There are also free upgrades offer to LEB readers, however I was been told the ports are already on 100Mbps port, hence you can either double the hard drive space or double 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

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

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!

Just saw on the 123 Systems’ website here that they seems to have stock for the 10 USD/year VPS special again. Basically, 123Systems’ deal is one of the cheapest I have seen (even cheaper than 15USD/year BuyVM deal!) and here is what you will be getting for 10 USD: VPS – Dallas,TX – Linux-128-Yearly-Special Instant Setup! Guaranteed RAM: 128MB Burstable RAM: 128MB Disk Space: 5GB Bandwidth: 250GB/Month 1vCPU 1 IP Address SolusVM Control Panel And I think the other nice feature about them is that they offer add-ons that you only need to pay one time: 1024MB Dedicated RAM – ($65.00 USD One Time) 20 GB Disk Space – ($15.00 USD One Time) 128MB Dedicated RAM – ($5.95 USD One Time) 256MB Dedicated RAM – ($12.95 USD One Time) 512MB Dedicated RAM – ($27.95 USD One Time) I have not tried them yet and the reviews on WHT and LEB Read More