During Black Friday 2020, Anthony Smith from Inception Hosting posted a series of offers on LowEndSpirit, ranging from KVM with NVMe to storage servers.
One Combination in particular intrigued me:
4 V CPU/ 512 MB RAM KVM for 12 Euros a year.
Considering the price range for KVM servers these days, twelve Euros for 512 MB RAM VPS seems a little expensive.But the network that this server is hosted on, and reputation of the provider, along with 4 vCPUs made it a compelling reason to try out.This is not the first time I signed up for a multi-vcore server: last year, I had GB, 4 vCPU service from Virmach. This deal from Black Friday 2019 I hardly use just because the processor was highly underpowered. The current specs seemed to present a case for themselves. Ordering the server was pretty easy- I already have an account with existing services from Inception Hosting (3 NATs and 2 storage servers). Setup was fairly quick- I received vps details within 15 minutes of making payment.
Initial Hiccups with VPS
The server did present its fair shar of woes. First of all, creating an encrypted disk resulted in a series of failures. Next, I was unable to set up a SSL certificate, no matter how hard I tried. Using Webinolymy favourite command line script, I was unsuccessful in installing SSL certificate using LetsEncrypt. Slickstack and Openlitespeed were also a no-go.
[email protected]:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 226M 0 226M 0% /dev tmpfs 49M 5.3M 43M 11% /run /dev/mapper/lonstor--vg-root 24G 2.8G 20G 13% / tmpfs 242M 0 242M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock tmpfs 242M 0 242M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/vda1 236M 86M 138M 39% /boot tmpfs 49M 0 49M 0% /run/user/1000 [email protected]:~$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 482 117 121 29 243 134 Swap: 511 317 194
Finally, I was able to get WordOps, another script based installer for LEMP, up and running. A stock wordpress site and SSL were all configured. It did take a few trial and errors. WordOps however did install a lot of graphical interfaces for monitoring and other features, which I decided to do away with.
I have retained the screenshots of those errors and will probably write about them later. Running WordPress with four vCPUs and when the content is going to get delivered from CDN, one can expect a smooth performance. My aim is to install WordPress cache, and I’m going to try out thescript posted by user Daniel15, creator of DNStools.ws. Ina post on LowEndTalk, he has talked about optimizing Nginx using this script while using WordPress cache. I will also write about the experience with installing WordPress separately- there is a whole series planned around that. You may want to read up about the first part of that series on LES Blog.
Benchmarking Results for KVM by Inception Hosting
So, with this, let’s take a look at the performance of this particular VPS. I ran the standard benchmarks with the usual suspects: YABS, nench.sh and bench.monster for speed test. The results from benchmarks are posted below. Here a few observations from the VPS: system is stable, no major surprises there. Network seems to be pretty stable. I have not seen too many spikes over the past wewk.
YABS
curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -9
I used the ‘-9’ flag to run both Geekbench 4 and 5.
Sat Dec 19 13:50:16 GMT 2020
Basic System Information:
———————————
Processor : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz
CPU cores : 4 @ 2399.996 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 482.7 MiB
Swap : 512.0 MiB
Disk : 24.0 GiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 2.10 MB/s (525) | 29.32 MB/s (458)
Write | 2.12 MB/s (530) | 29.69 MB/s (464)
Total | 4.22 MB/s (1.0k) | 59.02 MB/s (922)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 56.64 MB/s (110) | 67.84 MB/s (66)
Write | 59.74 MB/s (116) | 72.36 MB/s (70)
Total | 116.38 MB/s (226) | 140.21 MB/s (136)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed
| | |
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 794 Mbits/sec | 896 Mbits/sec
Online.net | Paris, FR (10G) | 639 Mbits/sec | 486 Mbits/sec
WorldStream | The Netherlands (10G) | 672 Mbits/sec | 512 Mbits/sec
Biznet | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G) | 695 Mbits/sec | 38.0 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 698 Mbits/sec | 127 Mbits/sec
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 732 Mbits/sec | 200 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 785 Mbits/sec | 73.8 Mbits/sec
Iveloz Telecom | Sao Paulo, BR (2G) | 698 Mbits/sec | 123 Mbits/sec
Geekbench releases can only be downloaded over IPv4. FTP the Geekbench files and run manually.bench.monster
curl -LsO bench.monster/speedtest.sh; bash speedtest.sh -asia
—————————————————————————
Region: Asia https://bench.monster v.1.5.5 2020-12-10 Usage : curl -LsO bench.monster/speedtest.sh; bash speedtest.sh -Asia
Virt/Kernel : Dedicated / 4.19.0-13-amd64
CPU Model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz
CPU Cores : 4 @ 2399.996 MHz x86_64 16384 KB Cache
CPU Flags : AES-NI Enabled & VM-x/AMD-V Disabled
Load Average : 0.13, 0.03, 0.01
Total Space : 24G (2.9G ~13% used)
Total RAM : 482 MB (128 MB + 181 MB Buff in use)
Total SWAP : 511 MB (338 MB in use)
Uptime : 8 days 20:4
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASN & ISP : AS62240, Inception Hosting
Organization : Inception Hosting Limited
Location : Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, United Kingdom / GB
Region : England
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Performing Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark test. Please wait...
curl: no URL specified!
## Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark:
Single Core : (POOR)
Multi Core :
## IO Test
CPU Speed:
bzip2 : 87.3 MB/s
sha256 : 140 MB/s
md5sum : 405 MB/s
RAM Speed:
Avg. write : 1623.8 MB/s
Avg. read : 3037.9 MB/s
Disk Speed:
1st run : 305 MB/s
2nd run : 358 MB/s
3rd run : 295 MB/s
-----------------------
Average : 319.3 MB/s
## Asia Speedtest.net
Location Upload Download Ping
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearby 550.96 Mbit/s 456.20 Mbit/s 9.864 ms
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
India, New Delhi (GIGATEL) 113.05 Mbit/s 106.26 Mbit/s 144.768 ms
India, Mumbai (SevenStar) 128.24 Mbit/s 89.40 Mbit/s 120.816 ms
India, Bengaluru (I-ON) 72.01 Mbit/s 35.63 Mbit/s 155.789 ms
Sri Lanka, Colombo (Telecom PLC) 27.75 Mbit/s 54.83 Mbit/s 238.535 msnench.sh
I added this test afterwards, this is an add-on, and was not scheduled to be a part of the review. Below are the results from the test
-------------------------------------------------
nench.sh v2019.07.20 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
benchmark timestamp: 2020-12-19 22:34:38 UTC
-------------------------------------------------
Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz
CPU cores: 4
Frequency: 2399.996 MHz
RAM: 482Mi
bash: line 156: swapon: command not found
Swap: -
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-13-amd64 x86_64
Disks:
vda 25G HDD
CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
3.875 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
6.374 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
1.914 seconds
ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 88.2 us / 356.1 us / 427.3 ms / 5.43 ms
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 4.40 k requests in 5.00 s, 1.07 GiB, 879 iops, 219.9 MiB/s
dd: sequential write speed
1st run: 190.73 MiB/s
2nd run: 213.62 MiB/s
3rd run: 304.22 MiB/s
average: 236.19 MiB/s
IPv4 speedtests
your IPv4: 185.121.24.xxxx
Cachefly CDN: 96.25 MiB/s
Leaseweb (NL): 22.82 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 3.96 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 15.76 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 5.38 MiB/s
No IPv6 connectivity detectedYou can find the command and the details from here.
Wrapping up
Let us talk briefly about the overall experience. Inception Hosting does not usually allow upgrades or stacking of special offers. Thus, you are limited with what you buy. So make your buying decision wisely. Let me also state that two days after purchaseing this VPS plan, there was a new offer with SSD Cache, and that plan was two euros cheaper. I am pretty happy with this system, and do not see a need to reach out to the provider for an upgrade or changing the plan. This VPS is on an annual plan. I may decide not to renew it and get a different one next year. But that is a remote possibility today. The server, after all, is fully equipped for what it does.
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.