Bret from UrgentVPS has emailed me almost a month ago (yes, I know I have been really lagging behind on the requests, but it is getting more and more difficult to sit down and spend time to write reviews these days) to request a review on their OnApp cloud VPS lines that they have pushed out to the public recently. The idea of cloud VPS using OnApp is great, but traditionally it has been mostly restricted to the wealthier clientele with deep pockets, so let’s see how it is. General Information and Set Up May be a little off the topic, but the first thing that jumps into my eyes when going to the home page of UrgentVPS is their chat with us windows, which is rather unique: Although not publicly advertised on their website, UrgentVPS actually has a low end VPS special, and here is what you get for Read More

Recently, one of my earlier reviews for Inception Hosting was featured on LowEndBox.com, although I was excited and honoured that 96MB.com could receive such great recognition from one of the leading websites in the low end VPS community, it also get me curious about Inception Hosting. It has been more than two months since I last (and first) reviewed their VPS services and Anthony and Inception Hosting seems to have done pretty well recently, so how are they doing right now? Let’s take a look. General Information and Set Up To make it comparable to my previous review, I signed up once again on their VPS Lite package, which, for 8.99 Euros per month, would give you the following specifications: Although with current discount code that Anthony have made available here, you are looking at about 4.50 Euro (about 6.50USD) per month. It is good to know that their Client Read More

Secure Dragon has always offered me some pleasant surprises, and although barely two weeks ago I have reviewed their ultra-low-end 96MB OpenVZ product line, I have received an email that they are offering a Xen ultra-low-end product as well. For 16 USD/year, which is barely 2 USD more than their OpenVZ equivalent offered by Secure Dragon, I decide to give it a shot to see. Basic Information and Set Up As per Secure Dragon’s website, here is the detailed on their new 96MB Xen PV VPS: Note that the swap space offered in this case is pretty big compare to the dedicated memory, which might be helpful if you need to use more than what you are assigned to once a while. However, do note that although in OpenVZ, burstable memory is actually still RAM, in Xen, the swap space is actually hard drive space, therefore it is extremely slow 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

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

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

I just did a head count on my VPS today and here are what are available in my inventory at the time of writing: 1. 1 x XenVZ/OpenITC (Got it from this offer, no longer available) 2. 2 x BuyVM (The famous 15USD per year offer, normally out of stock, and there is actually a website dedicated to check if they are in stock or not here) 3. 1 x Quickweb Supa VZ1 (Description here) 4. 1 x Nix Communications (Got it from this offer, seems sold out at one point and more stock was added later on but it seems it is out of stock again) 5. 1 x IPAP.Co (Got it from this offer,  it is still being set up at the time writing, and reviews won’t be available until it is fully set up). In the next few weeks, I will be writing reviews for each and Read More

So, here comes the first post that I have made on this blog, which is running on a Xen VPS with 96MB of RAM. The first question is why did I do it? Inspired by LowEndBox.com, put it simply. I have purchased no less than 5 VPSes from various promotions from this popular site before I noticed that it is literally a one-man blog running on 80MB of RAM! As per here, the website receives about 45k of pageviews daily. (Edit: LowEndAdmin has kindly pointed out to me that as per here, pageview for LEB is about 250K per month, less than 10k per day, thanks LEA!) Therefore, as curious man as I have always been, I decide to try it myself and when I saw this offer listed on the LEB website, I decide to give it a try. Quite frankly speaking, the process of running a web server Read More