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VPS Compare – compare worldwide VPS servers

vpscomp.com

106 pointsrockair85 comments

This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:

In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.

I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.

Then a lightbulb went on ...

A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004, I sold the company.

We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually caught on.

JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...

The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".

Fascinating story. What's the best way to contact you in private (email)?

John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com

Are you the inventor of all virtualization we know today or VPS only?

Virtualization is much older than that - it was invented in the late 1960s, I believe at IBM.

Seems like IBM was innovative back then. What happened?

Bureaucracy.

No, no. In fact, I wouldn't say that I invented anything at all. It was just the combination of off the shelf items (FreeBSD, jail, colocated servers, various management programs we wrote) that was unique at the time.

In 2001 a colo'd server could be very, very expensive. I think our starting price for a "server instance" was $65/mo and people were ecstatic about that.

I signed up in late 2001 iirc, one of those few rare moments when you see a new technology and you know nothing will be the same ever again.

Thanks for being our customer. It was a fun time.

I believe it was independent reinvention, because the paper by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson regarding FreeBSD Jails, which was presented at a conference in 2000, says

"The jail facility has already seen widespread deployment in particular as a vehicle for delivering "virtual private server" services."

http://www.sane.nl/events/sane2000/papers/kamp.pdf

I'm not sure who that would have been. The crowds I ran with (Defcon, Blackhat, Hope) and the crowds I advertised with (k5, Slashdot) had never seen a "VPS" service before, and at no point in 2001 did we have any competition.

As I said, we struggled to even name it, settling on calling it a "server instance", and only later did we see others referring to them as "virtual private servers".

I will say that as I did my (lame, cursory) market analysis in sept/oct 2001, I did see some bizarro product from Verio where (IIRC) they were renting out slices of Sun e10ks that they had. It was exorbitantly expensive and I don't even remember if you got a proper root login ... but other than that, there was nothing.

We started bytemark.co.uk around the same time, with the same lightbulb, using User-Mode Linux which was way slower :) We're still selling virtual machines (using KVM), and dedicated servers at bigv.io which I submitted to the site, and have our own data centre in York. It's still a great business to be in.

In February of 2002 I decided we should have a linux offering, and I hacked away at UML almost non-stop for about two weeks ... but it really didn't go anywhere for me.

So later in 2002 ... perhaps August ... we licensed Virtuozzo and used that. It was ext2 only at that point and man did that cause a lot of pain ...

Needs an option for less than 1TB of bandwidth. Some of us just want to crunch data and have no need for such large bandwidth. You even have an option for 1GB disk, so what about adding an option for 100GB bandwidth?

As another commenter has said, cores mean nothing unless they're dedicated to my VM. There needs to be a better metric, but unfortunately it's very difficult to "benchmark" a VPS objectively. Any ideas?

Is that 600GB of HDD or 600GB of SSD, or 600GB of SSD-cached HDD? Those are all very different things, and the little icon to the left of the capacity is neither noticeable nor searchable.

Big countries like Canada and the United States need to be broken down into 3-4 regions for latency-sensitive customers.

Users should be able to choose the currency. Right now you're second-guessing the currency based on my location/Accept-Language/whatever and it doesn't seem to be changeable.

Having a column for the virtualization platform might be useful for some people. Is it OpenVZ, KVM, Xen-PV or Xen-HVM?

If anyone is looking for cheaper offerings, there's http://lowendstock.com/

If anyone is looking for unusual locations, there's https://www.exoticvps.com/

The filter by single country is not particularly useful. I'd like to search by all countries (or checkbox some of them) instead of having to perform N searches to find who's the best provider.

If you really want this site to have useful rankings for anyone aside from those looking to pay the bare minimum, consider gathering some additional information:

a) Uptime statistics

b) Customer-Support ratings

c) Technical ratings (user assessment of various tools provided by the VPS, ease of migration, etc.)

This.

Small VPS are dime a dozen on Lowendbox.com. You can grab them for $1 and below.

They tend to be unstable, slow as molasses, poorly supported, and the hosters sometimes just disappear overnight (often to relaunch under a new name a few months later...).

They are almost never worth the hassle since DigitalOcean will sell you a proper VM for $5.

So if you want to compare them, you need more creative metrics. A simple "does this company exist for over a year?"-column would already weed out many of the worst ones.

d) Billing (do the account department bill you the correct amount at the right time).

e) benchmarks

I would add the option to have sub-1GB RAM VPS's. Lots of them still are offered in the 512 MB range. Include the option to filter by number of IPv6 addresses offered. Also, add a filter for virtualization technology and if they use SolusVM or a custom control panel. Otherwise very cool and useful!

This is cool, thanks and good work. I'd love to see filterable OS support, multiple IPs, locations... :)

There's also ServerBear.com which is a bit more detailed than this.

public IPv6/IPv4/both...

That's a great app. Some ideas:

  - I'm currently in Laos, but I think/operate in USD/€, not in LAK. Please give me the chance to decide which currency I want to see.
  - 1 GB as the lowest memory threshold leaves out plenty of good deals.
  - Sometimes we need a bunch of machines for a short period of time. Can I pay per minute? Hour? Day?
  - Which payment methods do they accept?
  - Maybe, if possible, the ability to see for how long they've been around. Cheap hosters tend to disappear often.
  - Maybe, if possible, uptime stats.

Edit: typos

To add to your list: Virtualization type

Nice! There's a few things I would like to see and be able to filter by which I can't currently though:

Minimum activity billing period: minute / 15 minutes / 30 minutes / hour / day, etc.

Provisioning through API: yes / no

Number of geographic locations available (this gets tricky, depending on how you treat country. Is it locations within the selected country, or total locations?)

Not being able to scale memory down to less than 1 GB keeps a lot of good offers out.

Also, missing Atlantic.net (at least in Canada).

I use serverbear.com for comparisons

Will bookmark this one though.

+1 for serverbear

In addition to basic info, it includes things like virtualization type and even a bunch of benchmarks, all usable as filters or sort criteria. TBH some of the variation in the benchmark numbers makes me wonder about their methodology, but it's still a very useful site.

missing vultr - https://www.vultr.com/

Click "Add Provider" and paste the URL?

If you care about quality of a company and not just the raw specs, you might find http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare useful. It uses people's twitter comments to determine which hosting companies people have favorable opinions of. (Disclaimer: I created it)

Where's the "can pay anonymously in bitcoin" option? I thought that was a thing these days. ;)

vultr.com accepts bitcoin.

Anyone mad enough to sell VPSes to anonymous customers must love cleaning up after spammers.

it's really not an issue if you block outbound smtp

i did this and would remove the block if someone asked

nobody asked

Honest question: is there legitimate demand for this for legitimate reasons?

I was big into Bitcoin about four years ago and work for an ISP nowadays. We provide services as well and I've considered mail/web hosting/VPS/dedicated offerings (on a small scale) with Bitcoin as a payment option but I don't want to end up attracting the "wrong type" of people.

I realize that there are people who simply want to be anonymous and I'm totally fine with that (I do run Tor relays, for example) but my fear is that the majority of customers this would attract would be those that are "up to no good".

Thinking out loud, perhaps a mail hosting service payable with Bitcoin would be a good way to test the waters -- that is, we could take care of domain registration, DNS configuration/hosting, etc. and allow access over Tor for those looking for "anonymous e-mail" (although I'd be implementing pretty low limits on volume, at least initially).

Define "legitimate reasons". One reason someone might be interested is that my billing information would not be available in case of a compromise of the billing system (which happens). Also, nobody can social engineer information out of a hosting company that the hosting company doesn't have. There are plenty of people who are totally legit that have "unpopular" opinions or are worried about crazed trolls.

Do you do anything to stop people from signing up with Visa gift cards under a fake name?

I honestly think you probably wouldn't have too many problems if you didn't target the low end of the market, made it clear that you won't put up with abuse, and maybe required a deposit to get service that'd be returned after X months or forfeited for abusive behavior.

> Define "legitimate reasons".

For the most part, pretty much anything that isn't against a standard terms of service.

> There are plenty of people who are totally legit that have "unpopular" opinions or are worried about crazed trolls.

I agree and understand. Those folks aren't who I'm worried about.

My biggest concern is the "abusive" folks, to be honest. Abuse of any type wouldn't be tolerated at all but I am all for freedom of {expression,speech,...} and wouldn't care what the service was being used for as long as it was legal.

Requiring a deposit isn't something I had thought of before but that might very well be a good "deterrent".

I think the standard thing is to charge more if the customer pays via Bitcoin, and to expect payment in 3/6/12 month lumps rather than a month at a time.

This could help to deal with increased customer service costs (abuse handling), and to price spammers out of the market.

Yeah, that sounds reasonable too.

There are already mail providers that take bitcoin, but I don't know of any that will manage your domain for you. (E.g. mailbox.org takes bitcoin or envelopes with cash in them, but you have to configure your domain DNS yourself.)

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pay with BTC. I love how friction-less and easy it is, especially if you get partially paid in BTC as well for your services. I love https://bithost.io and I guess you could ask Scott if he had any problems so far.

He gives you a limit of 2 instances (droplets) on signup. You can then open a ticket and explain what you intend to do and he gives you the desired number of servers. I give him access to the apps I'm working on to remove any doubt and be transparent.

I always think that malicious people find entirely different ways to get what they want without even thinking of payment. Hacking a box for example.

Thank you :)

Some (definitely not first-world) countries have pretty large taxes to foreign purchases. We've > 35% in Argentina. BTC skips that (though BTCs have been getting harder to come by here).

I'm sure it's not the only place.

Also, people without a credit card.

Be careful X core means nothing reliable, for 99.9% of VPS providers, they are not dedicated nor rated and could be divisible by up to 2000 guests (particularly with OpenVZ provider), at least on Rackspace, AWS, Azure the CPU performance is generally within a specific range (variability due to minor hardware config differences, and noisy neighbours, but appropriately restrained). In addition 99.5% of these providers don't have the sufficient knowledge to run a VPS operation, they purchase a few dedicated servers and copy of SolusVM and WHMCS and hope and pray for the best.

99.9% of VPS providers 2000 guests 99.5% of these providers

Where are these figures coming from?

I work for an ISP and can put as many machines in our datacenters as I want (within reason, of course) so I only have a few (small) VPSes nowadays. When I used to have a bunch of them, however, I quickly learned to avoid anything OpenVZ-based like the plague.

This is anecdotal, of course, but OpenVZ "feels" very much inferior and the providers running OpenVZ (more often than not) very much seemed like fly-by-night operations simply trying to squeeze as many VMs as possible onto a physical host without any regard to performance.

I've had the same experience. Xen and KVM seem to be best for predictable performance.

Shouldn't AWS still count as a VPS? A reserved micro instance is cheaper than most any of these options and serves the same purpose.

Not with the bandwidth requirement it isn't.

How so? The definition of VPS[0] doesn't include a bandwidth part, and to be fair, Amazon has a free tier as well (albeit small).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server

I was responding to your "same price" point. If you include the bandwidth they're asking for then EC2 rises in cost sharply.

PS - Huge fan of yours by the way. You should do another AMA on /r/SysAdmin.

Ah, that makes sense and is fair.

> Huge fan of yours by the way. You should do another AMA on /r/SysAdmin.

Heh, thanks. I appreciate that! Maybe soon I will do an AMA.

Same for GCE, for that matter. These should appear on the lists.

Is there a way to change display currency?

Very useful.

Try cross-posting on a thread on lowendbox.com.

Also webhostingtalk.com

In fact, if OP could scrape the VPS deals forum from there, that would be super cool ( do something that doesn't scale. ;) )

I can't imagine not using Linode as my default option.

They are without doubt my favourite IT company, in 7 years with between 3-4 and a lot more instances I've had to talk to them exactly 3 times (once for a query, once to ask for a bandwidth cap change and once related to billing).

They set the standard for me at this point.

But independently from your selected location linode is routing through the US. That's a bummer for way too many possible customers with sensitive data.

OVH classic 1 has 10GB hdd not 25GB. Would be nice to be able to see the virtualization method in the table (vmware/openvz etc).

It would be also nice to be able to show all products from a region, e.g. western Europe, northern Europe and so on (I don't care if it's in FR,DE or NL)

Seems to be missing all of the Digital Ocean UK prices. Also would like to see what OS flavours are offered, what networking options (private net, IPv6 range, IPv4 costs etc), hide plans that use non-SSD, which providers offer 2FA logins, backup costs.

nice site! It'd be cool to see a filter for virtualisation type as well.

maybe not terribly useful, but I wasn't able to open the site at first. http://api.vpscomp.com:3000/geo/checkme was 500'ing with something like 'undefined cca3'? I disconnected my VPN and it worked. Reconnected and it still worked, so I lost the exact error (oops). defaulting to USD when the country can't be detected (or the native currency for the VPS) would be nice.

Surprised that intovps.com is not on the list. One of the earliest VPS providers, and still one of the least expensive. 2TB traffic, 30GB HDD, 1GB RAM, $10/mo.

Same price as DigitalOcean, are they SSDs?

I just looked them up [1] and they don't mention ssds, however they appear to give four cores by default, which may be more important for some workloads.

[1] http://www.intovps.com/plans.html

Problem: Can't choose currency. Why? I'm in Antigua and all pricing is rendered in XCD, but I'm a USD user.

Question for everybody: why would you choose a VPS over a "cloud" server (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCE)? Why vice versa?

Price for me. For less money, I get CPU, Disk and Network. On AWS, I can pay about the same price for the CPU part, but I still have to pay EBS and network traffic.

Short answer: VPS are (usually) cheaper, and you have total control.

Longer answer: There are basically two approaches to scaling software: Either you build/simulate better computers (vertical scaling), or you deploy more of them (horizontal scaling).

Dedicated hardware lets you build or simulate having a better computer (e.g. FPGAs, or using a network driver that is ideal for your traffic patterns, or a heavily tuned JVM). On the other hand, the cloud lets you quickly add (or remove) computers in response to service demand.

VPSs just split the difference (though they are usually closer to the vertical side of the equation).

Hello,

I've used every cloud/vps provider and I'll try to give you a short list (Linode, Aws, Azure, DO, StormonDemand, Newservers, GCE, Rackspace, Vultr, Atlantic, Terramark vCloud Express, CloudSigma, Bluebox, Bluelock, GoGrid, Phoenixnap, Tata) as well as many cloud SaaS services (DME, Rage4, EasyDNS, Boundary, NewRelic, Dyn, Akamai, Cloudflare, Incapsula, Pingdom, Pagerduty, etc.)

Why do I chose a provider like DO over AWS? Cost and simplicity. With AWS who knows what you will get billed for? However, when you combine services you can get a much better value proposition. DO is cheaper, as stable and you get better performance than AWS, combine that with a good dns provider (DME, Rage4) and a content delivery network (Fastly, MaxCDN) you have a much better/cheaper solution.

When you have a smaller scale, a VPS is usually cheaper than cloud with known billing.

I want vagrant-"provider". I use digital ocean, because there is vagrant-digitalocean gem.

Seems to miss quite many providers, such as (most importantly) hetzner online.

Add flag for Tor friendly :)

Is there a similar thing for dedicated hosting providers?

you might want to add vultr btw. i know they seem to have a bad rep as a clone of DO, but i was really happy with their performance.

Add filter for ALL countries

Also for continents. E.g. I'm interested in a server in Europe, don't care if it's in France, Germany, Netherlands, or wherever.

Thanks for your comment, i plan to add this feature.

No vultr, huh. :/

This doesn't give any idea about the quality of any of these hosts. Many of these are already well known so it's not much help.

ovh classic 1

1gb, 10tb, 25gb....what the hell? this is like way better than digitalocean and I thought DO was the cheapest.

It's OpenVZ, not full virtualization. That means you have no control over the kernel (e.g. can' t upgrade it, can't fully reboot), and it's said - but I can't vouch for it - that it's more susceptible to "bad neighbors".

They have full virtualization (the VPS Cloud plans), but it's much more expensive.

Here's a thread on Lowendtalk about VPS Classic plans: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/37835/ovh-classic-1-vps...

word...it was too good to be true.

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