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

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

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

BuyVM pretty much the most contentious brand in the low end VPS industry, primarily due to its ability to offer one of the cheapest low end box in the industry, the famous 15 USD per year plan. The post on LowEndBox has generated more than 300 comments, perhaps more than any other posts that have ever generated, and according to this post, they basically need to answer the doubts about their profitability almost every week. Basically, for 15 USD per year, here is what you will be getting: All of their VPS offered are co-located in the data centre of Hurricane Electric in Fremont, CA. Domain name was registered barely last year and the registrant is based in Victoria, BC, Canada: and name servers seem to have different IP blocks, which is, as usual, a good thing: The interesting part is that their company website seems to be using their Read More