Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting
blog.maclawran.ca
blog.maclawran.ca
Using the advice of this site I signed up for an empire hosting account.
Selected the server and options I wanted, submitted my billing information and got four emails welcoming me and informing me that my account had been created.
Logged into the back end to be informed that my ip address had been baned and I could not access the system.
Contacted support via the live support widget and was informed that to be able to access my system I would have to disconnect from the proxy I was using and use the ip address my ISP provided.
The proxy I was connected through is a linode server that I run and manage, the proxy connection was an SSH Dynamic proxy because I was sitting in a coffee shop.
When I am using public wifi I secure my connection over SSH and route all my browser data through that secure link.
Because I control both ends of the link (my laptop and the 'proxy') I trust that connection more then I do the owners of a wifi hotspot.
I was informed that I would be unable to use the empire hosting account I created unless I direct connected.
Canceled order.
I will stick with Linode, which has NEVER given me a single issue and whos service seems better.
edited to add With them being nice enough to send me back my password in clear text I am glad I used the ssh proxy.
The Parallels Virtuozzo / OpenVZ container-based approach to virtualization is just so infinitely more efficient than hypervisor-based virtualization. It's really, really staggering. We use it where I work for internal virtualization and have done tests with thousands of containers on a box that could hold at most 20-30 KVM-based hypervisor instances.
If you look into the deep tech details, it becomes immediately obvious why this is the case. It's too bad this isn't in the mainline Linux kernel. There is an effort called LXC, but it is behind OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, especially in the security department.
The only disadvantage is that you can't run your own kernel, but for 99.9% of Linux applications this does not matter. You can do quite a bit inside a container: OpenVPN, IPSec, Fuse, IPTables, bridging, etc.
For personal hosting, I've had very good luck with this one: http://alienvps.com/
I have their "abduction" plan -- a very very cheap one not advertised on the homepage. It's very small, but I've managed to cram a stripped-down MySQL and Lighttpd LAMP stack in there for my personal sites. You can't beat the price, and so far I've had no downtime or issues.
This is also the reason why performance is usually beyond terrible. Most of the cheap VPS hosts are extremely overprovisioned and not very well maintained. There may be the odd gem (I haven't tried alien), but $130 buys you a rackspace VM for a year nowadays, so I don't see the point of even bothering anymore.
You don't have to oversell like that. It doesn't change the fundamental, unavoidable fact that containers are a far more efficient way to virtualize than hypervisors for fundamental architectural reasons. An OpenVZ-based hoster that didn't oversell ridiculously would be cheaper and faster than a hypervisor-based host.
With a hypervisor you are running an entire kernel within a simulated machine within another kernel. That will never be more efficient.
> Linode http://linode.com - expensive, no IPV6, really fast network @ 11.9 Mbps
Actually Linode have IPv6 support in 5 of their 6 locations :-)
It could run that network test he mentions in the article, and hdparm, something to check CPU load, gather info on the CPUs and memory and whether it was using Xen or OpenVZ or whatever, maybe try a few benchmarks.
>>>
Thank you for signing up with us. Your new account has been setup and you can now login to our client area using the details below.
Email Address: my.mail@address
Password: YepYouGuessWhatWasRightHereInCleartext
To login, visit http://secure.empire-hosting.net
<<<
Ah well.. Let's look at the other recommendations of that list, I guess.
But I even think this practice is useless. They just sent my password in cleartext. It sits now in my inbox and I have to delete it or I store my unprotected password. And - for what exactly? Does that serve any purpose? I just entered it a second ago.
So I question the usefulness of that approach and consider this very first contact unprofessional. YMMV and all.
1: Just tried the 'Forgot my password' dance and it they don't retrieve it at least: Received mail with link to site which sends a mail with auto-generated password to log in. A bit weird, but well..
And as you point out with the "forgotten password dance", access to your email account gives an attacker access to your hosting account anyway (although not stealthily).
This was the very first contact. Sending me passwords (same for 'temporary ones' after a reset. I consider that a cumbersome process whereas I consider the initial mail just plain "wrong") delivers more than just the text over this channel.
I read between the lines "Here's your password again from 2 minutes ago. File it away" which again is nothing I consider a good idea. The impression is that they write the digital form of a post-it note of the password for my monitor.
Is it a big issue in itself? Nope, probably not. But it certainly ruined the first impression for me and I'll walk away now. I shared that part because others might (or might not) agree and to potentially save like-minded people a registration.
Password-reset emails are also easy for an attacker to generate, and no harder for them to intercept than the welcome email.
And yes, password-reset emails may also be a concern (not as severe, though, if reset emails are single-use and have short TTL).
Most of the VPS providers that I've seen are US based, which means 150ms+ pings, which isn't great for SSH.
Brightbox.com also do good options for UK based VMs
Given the "I'm gonna break something" feeling I get when using the Xen console on prgmr coupled with my desire to kill and rebuild VMs regularly I'll probably just stick with Rackspace in the future.
They are also providing hosting services to LEB (http://www.lowendbox.com)
They've lost my data twice in a 2 year period, but for 4.95 a month I was kind of expecting it. But now they moved my VPS to another node and all should be fine. Which brings us to customer support: it is absolutely great and they respont to tickets very quickly.
So: use for non-critical stuff, backup, and be happy.
The price was right at the time, and they have a few basic cloud-style features (so not just a barebones VPS provider.)
Now about the server connection:
http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test - 104,857,600 16.6M/s in 6.5s - Earlier got around 20M/s
ftp://ftp.nfsi.pt/pub/speedtest/100mb.bin - 104,857,600 694K/s in 2m 17s - Note that this is a portuguese server and the only one I know of a file with 100mb
These are downstream into the VPS, outside I can't test properly, because I don't have a good connection for that.
About the server setup etc, being a Gentoo user, decided to install it (I previously checked if it was possible), they provide a recovery image that you can use to boot, and did the installation from there, no problems so far.
Their web interface is pretty simple and easy to use, no regrets so far but I still have 30days ahead.
They experienced a break-in a few months back. Communication to customers was clear, timely and reassuring. (All companies experience problems at some point, it's how they react to those problems that is important. Hetzner's response was very good).
Some small amount of their site/documentation is in German. That's not a big deal (google translate or whatever) and generally it is only the more obscure corners.
Disk size might be limiting on the cheaper offerings (20GB / 7.90 EUR).
I have not experienced the "heavy firewalling" mentioned elsewhere in this thread but I haven't tried putting any serious traffic through it.
Overall very positive.
Recently we leased a Kimsufi/OVH dedicated box with ProxMox installed. Similar price (without setup fee) and it's been running without an hiccup. Had to make a phone call to support about a billing issue (my mistake) and it was immediately resolved.
From my experience, it doesn't get much better quality/price wise than these two, in Europe.
My cousin has been using them for approx. 5 years and he's also very happy with them. He's also had them do a non-standard custom setup for a client before and that seems to have went well and painlessly.
I signed up when the 512mb instance was only $4/mo, but it seems they've upped it to $8/mo now. Anyway I haven't experienced any significant downtime or bad performance, but then I'm not doing anything important on it. I also have no clue about their customer service level since I've never used it.
The Dutch company Versio (domains, shared hosting, dedicated, vps, colocation) hosts VPSes from as little as €5,-/month. You need to pay in 3 month terms, though. I don't really mean to adverstise, but why did this page make it to the HN homepage?
I have been using them for hosting small Django sites and running SVM classification without any issues. It's cheap if you want to have a VPS to play around with different OS-es (you can reinstall a new OS via the control panel).
No Chunkhost. I signed up for the beta and now pay for a Xen machine with 512 MB of RAM for only 14 dollars.