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

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

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

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