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

It has been a while since the last time I have signed up for a VPS, after all, the last time I did a count, I have already had 7 VPS under my name. Other than the VPS hosting this blog, and another one hosting another few low-traffic blog that I have, the rest are pretty much idle all the time. However, when IonVM offered a free 48-hour trial VPS, I figured it won’t cause me too much harm to sign up for another one, so I decided to give it a shot. Set Up and General Information Entering the signing up page in their WHMCS system using HTTPS, there was not too much information revealed about the trial VPS, however, it is interesting to note that the sign up page allow you to activate TUN/TAP devices during sign up, which is rare, if not the first one (BuyVM has Read More

It is always interesting to see a company selling VPS services half-way across the globe, which is exactly what QualityServers did. Through their Eliminator plan, which was advertised on WHT, they have promised to have a “one-size fits all” plan. Is it really good as it has advertised? I decided to try it out myself just to see. Plans and Set Up As per their advertisement on WHT, here is the specification of the box: As per this post on LowEndBox.com, their US servers are based in Tempa, Florida with Hivelocity DC. UK is also available for the same price for those who prefer a European location. 6USD for a 600MB OpenVZ box is not exactly cheap for an unmanaged service, however for a “fully managed” service, it definitely sounds like a good deal, add 1 more pound per month and you get a Xen box, which definitely is a 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

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 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