Benchmarking Virmach VPS, New Jersey, USA: Black Friday 2020

Introduction:
I was not planning to get any new services from Virmach after discontinuing the two KVM servers from Black Friday 2019. I even resisted form purchasing one of the many awesome deals for Black Friday 2020 offers. I followed both the trackers : virmach.fat32.top and virmach.app, as well as the Virmach deal discussion on LowEndTalk.

Virmach Black Friday Deals 2020

This year’s Black Friday deals by Virmach started as a dud. There were multiple issues accessing the Virmach site, WHCMS errors, and also hiccups for the sale to start. But once it did, Boy! Was it a blast. Below is a screenshot from the amazing tracker created by user Fat32 from LowEndSpirit, as well as a sample offer from Virmach.app.

I finally gave in when the below offer came up :

1 GB RAM, 1 vCore VPU, 20 GB SSD Drive in New Jersey for US $ 7 per year. Below you can find the results of benchmarks: YABS and bench.monster (for speedtest)

Results from YABS

 OS           : **Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS (64 Bit)**
 Virt/Kernel  : KVM / 4.4.0-109-generic
 CPU Model    : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 v2 @ 2.50GHz
 CPU Cores    : 1 @ 2499.998 MHz x86_64 4096 KB Cache
 CPU Flags    : AES-NI Enabled & VM-x/AMD-V Disabled
 Load Average : 0.24, 0.20, 0.10
 Total Space  : 20G (2.0G ~11% used)
 Total RAM    : 992 MB (41 MB + 750 MB Buff in use)
 Total SWAP   : 255 MB (1 MB in use)
 Uptime       : 0 days 0:15
----------------------------------------------------------------
 ASN & ISP    : AS36352, ColoCrossing
 Organization : Virtual Machine Solutions LLC
 Location     : Township of Piscataway, United States / US
 Region       : New Jersey
----------------------------------------------------------------

Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark

  Single Core : 1570  (POOR)
   Multi Core : 1526

 ## IO Test

 CPU Speed:
    bzip2     :  45.4 MB/s
   sha256     :  99.1 MB/s
   md5sum     : 283 MB/s

 RAM Speed:
   Avg. write : 1672.5 MB/s
   Avg. read  : 3242.7 MB/s

 Disk Speed:
   1st run    : 382 MB/s
   2nd run    : 390 MB/s
   3rd run    : 403 MB/s
   -----------------------
   Average    : 391.7 MB/s

India Speedtest.net

 Location                        Upload           Download         Ping   
----------------------------------------------------------------
 Nearby                          110.04 Mbit/s    69.13 Mbit/s    * 78.804 ms
----------------------------------------------------------------
 India, New Delhi (GIGATEL)      18.46 Mbit/s     39.42 Mbit/s    254.560 ms
 India, New Delhi (Weebo)        18.42 Mbit/s     21.22 Mbit/s    261.388 ms
 India, Mumbai (SevenStar)       51.29 Mbit/s     32.57 Mbit/s    193.660 ms
 India, Mumbai (OneBroadband)    23.81 Mbit/s     37.45 Mbit/s    280.136 ms
 India, Mumbai (SevenStar)       31.93 Mbit/s     42.59 Mbit/s    241.391 ms
 India, Bengaluru (I-ON)         13.99 Mbit/s     11.31 Mbit/s    235.585 ms
 India, Bengaluru (Activline)    6.28 Mbit/s      13.27 Mbit/s    214.899 ms
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Finished in : 8 min 51 sec
 Timestamp   : 2020-12-21 14:17:18 GMT
 Saved in    : /root/speedtest.log

 Share results:
 - 
 - https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15950599
 - https://clbin.com/KWCrL

YABS or Yet Another Benchmarking Script

 Mon Dec 21 14:20:52 GMT 2020

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 v2 @ 2.50GHz
CPU cores  : 1 @ 2499.998 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 992.3 MiB
Swap       : 256.0 MiB
Disk       : 19.4 GiB

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 38.31 MB/s    (9.5k) | 609.98 MB/s   (9.5k)
Write      | 38.38 MB/s    (9.5k) | 613.19 MB/s   (9.5k)
Total      | 76.69 MB/s   (19.1k) | 1.22 GB/s    (19.1k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 926.89 MB/s   (1.8k) | 964.62 MB/s    (942)
Write      | 976.14 MB/s   (1.9k) | 1.02 GB/s     (1.0k)
Total      | 1.90 GB/s     (3.7k) | 1.99 GB/s     (1.9k)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed     |
                |                           |                 |                
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 748 Mbits/sec   | 302 Mbits/sec  |
Online.net      | Paris, FR (10G)           | 832 Mbits/sec   | 279 Mbits/sec  |
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 746 Mbits/sec   | 768 Mbits/sec  |

Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value                         
                |                               
Single Core     | 321                           
Multi Core      | 331                           
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5452944 

Summing it all up

I have run the benchmarks on this Black Friday 2020 KVM offer from Virmach on Ubuntu 18.04. When I put this to production, my plan is to use alpine linux, with Caddy server. Or I might use it for image optimization using jpegoptim. More on that in a separate post.

This review is a part of the Black Friday 2020 vps offers. You can find similar posts from Index page where my other reviews are catalogued.