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Comment by kenkam | Hacker News Reader

Looking at their VPS offerings, their 512MB package with 2 TB traffic costs 6.49 euros (~8.4 dollars) per month. Linode's 512MB offering is at 19.99 dollars. The only upside I can see so far with Linode is you get 20 GB of storage instead of 5 GB with Edis. So what's the catch? Can anyone who is using Edis VPS or otherwise share their experience with us?

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Edis is not what I will call "professional". I got a UK VPS and was given an IP config such that the default gateway is outside of the subnet, with no explanation given.

After some rather heated exchange with William from Edis, where he:

- gave no explanation

- yelled at me in CAP and bold

- showed a lack of understanding of the slash notation (e.g. 192.168.1.100/24)

I went around Edis and poked the data center, and the matter was mystically resolved shortly after.

Besides, I also experienced an unscheduled and unannounced downtime once in my short time with them. These things only happen with low end VPS providers, and of course AWS EC2.

Not sure but Linode is fairly expensive compared to other VPS providers. That said, I have just rented a Linode VPS ($20/month) and am very happy with it. The interface for managing it is great and there are tonnes of great features. My old £5 per month VPS was good too but you do get what you pay for (unless you're using AWS).

I've had a Linode since about '06, and I've been very happy with them.

~$ uptime 23:47:12 up 750 days

No kernel updates?

Nice uptime :-D Couldn't possibly get that with my cheap VPS. Would go down every 60-80 days.

I'm running a €2/month KVM VPS in UK with them, had to commit to a minimum of 1 year. The box has rebooted twice in the five months I've had it, whether due to OOM (only 128M RAM) or Edis, I don't know. No other hiccups.

Otherwise, I got all that was promised, 1 IPv4, IPv6 /112, it seems to be a 2533MHz 5066 bogomips amd64 thingy, but no idea how many others are sharing. I'm running Debian on it, basically just providing OpenVPN for my computers/devices.

Their management UI is quite barren and happily mixes German and English, so I'm not quite sure of all its features...

If your budget allows 7.9 euros, http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq7 is probably a nigh bit more reliable (according to a colleague, who has exactly that).

I also had a Linode's 512M, comparing the two Linode wins on reliability and management features. But at 14 GBP (what, ~22 dollars?) you can get a dedicated server from http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/

Interesting... do you have any experience with Kimsufi?

I've had one of the cheapest Kemsirve's (Kimsufi spanish brand) for a few months. The only issues with them is the lack of CPU, only two cores and not really powerful, and the not-redundant SATA drive.

But if all you need is a ton of bandwidth and space (1tb!), it's a nice deal. They have great connectivity (located in France), and only went down for one evening (when all of OVH network went down simultaneously worldwide).

For more power and CPU usage, you're better off with an VPS. They usually also have RAID underlying drives so at least you have some more warranties against data loss.

Linode is Xen virtual machines and Edis is OpenVZ based containers.

What does that mean in reality?

xen: you can install any kernel openvz: only the host kernel gets shared amoung guests and less isolation. also in the past there was no swap support, seems to work now.

host level (para)virtualization vs. os level virtualization. The latter allows significantly increased density while the former enjoys much better isolation, customization and usually* more reliable resource reservations.

In practice this mean that Linode offers 512MB RES/RSS memory (+swap) and Edis offers 512MB VIRT memory.

VIRT memory limiting is very a serious issue for some software. For example, apache may use 10x VIRT memory because it is threads-based (most linux'es reserve about 6-10M VIRT memory for the stack of each thread). VIRT memory is usually considered "free to allocate" and software (JVM, soft that uses mmap and so on) is written with this assumption. But this is not the case with OpenVZ VPS servers. Just run "top" to get an idea about VIRT and RSS memory usage of common programs.

It is exciting how this issue is not well-known. I even think that 91.318% of "apache is memory hungry" things (they are still partially true, but..) came from OpenVZ VPS benchmarks.

So in my opinion 20$ 512MB XEN is way better than 10$ 512MB OpenVZ because 512MB XEN is very different from 512MB OpenVZ.

P.S. my knowledge of OpenVZ may be outdated because I moved from OpenVZ VPS servers a couple of years ago.

> P.S. my knowledge of OpenVZ may be outdated because I moved from OpenVZ VPS servers a couple of years ago.

This is still true for OpenVZ. You can't really run JVM or SBCL on OpenVZ VPSes for that reason.

For me, OpenVZ lacks most of the advanced networking features, e.g. GRE tunneling.

Edis also does KVM.

Edis is offering KVM and Linux-VServer (different from OpenVZ), see https://www.edis.at/en/server/linux-vserver/ Cool thing about their Linux-VServer: access to 16/24 CPU cores even on the cheapest VPS plans... Downside: no command-line-based firewall config, it is done using the web interface (quite annoying): http://www.edis.at/en/server/overview/info/

...just noticed a nice surprise in the EDIS VPS management console: "Due to high demand the firewall is now managed by the tool 'vrs_iptables' directly on the VPS." -- So no more clicking around in the web interface to manage the firewall, sweet!

I imagine they have a higher density of virtual machines per host meaning that you're competing / sharing physical resources with many more people.

I'm a very satisfied edis customer. I used one of their dedicated servers for years and recently switched to the KVM Premium. I'm very happy with the performance and their support is excellent. The only downside, as mentioned above, is the limited space.

I have been using edis for different perks (just vps, though) in different locations and they have always worked extremely well for me. No complaints whatsoever.

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