James from QualityServers has emailed me an updated low end OpenVZ VPS plan with yearly payment for the LowEndBox readers. £15/Year (~USD$24.32) using this sign up link.
- 128MB memory/128MB VSwap
- 10GB storage on RAID50
- 200GB/month data transfer on 1Gbps
- 1x IPv4 + 8x IPv6
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
Only 100 of them in stock. VAT included in the price. Payment available in either PayPal, credit card or bank transfer. They own their own servers + IP range, and their servers are co-located with BurstNET in UK (test IPv4: 217.114.63.178, IPv6: 2a02:21a8:2:3b::e76a:c130). QualityServers has pretty good reviews here from previous posts. Formally known as QuickVPS, they have been around since late 2009.
For those who are looking for more memory, disk space and data transfer, QualityServers’ The Eliminator™ plan might also interest you. As discussed in LowEndTalk, it comes with 600MB memory, 600MB VSwap, 40GB storage and 1TB/month data transfer for £4/month.
UPDATE: James is doing a special a LowEndTalk — use coupon code LET23082011 to get this offer at £12/Year!!!
Related Posts:
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
Would love this if it wasn’t openvz :(
It is OpenVZ but thats because we’ve just put a new monster of a VPS node online for OVZ and need to fill it. This is based on VSWAP and is not heavily oversold :)
OpenVZ 6 no longer has user_beancounters for memory management, and just has a much simpler (much better) VSwap system.
If anyone is interested in a review on their Eliminator plan, here is a review I did some time ago about it:
http://www.96mb.com/96mb-low-end-vps-review-part-x-qualityservers/
Interesting to see they have a OVZ plan catering to the budget-conscious group now, is it still managed?
No don’t think so. If you click through you’ll see the dropdown box right at the bottom says “Unmanaged (Forum Support Only)”.
I would love to see how VSwap based OpenVZ goes against UBC based OpenVZ in terms of memory management.
@LEA: What are the differences between the 2? How can you tell which one is using which? Thanks for being my teacher for the one millionth time :)
vswap based openvz does not limit ram use based on allocation, instead it’s limited based on the real usage.
So finally they got it right? The allocation accounting is disgusting and troublesome.
Yes.
For fun, I put a 16mb OVZ VM (16mb vswap, 2.6.32 kernel) on my test node running nginx, PHP and MySQL: http://vps-110.claw.d3vm.net/status.php
@dmmcintyre3
Excellent!!! That’s the ultimate LEB. :)
I think my question is, for memory pages that have been marked for vswap — they might not really be swapped out on the physical server, but accessing it would be penalized and artificially slowed down (using CPU limit if I understand the source correctly).
Definitely better and easier to understand than the old UBC model.
It is definitely a much better system.
@ dmmcintyre3
how do you configure MySQL so that it could fit in there?
1380kb RSS does seem pretty tight for MySQL. When your process’ pages got swapped to vswap, are they removed from the RSS count?
Wow, 16MB of memory? That is barely enough for the OS to run! How did you even manage to installed MySQL on it let alone running it?
@96MB
cool thing about OpenVZ (and VServer) is that the running OS does not count toward your memory allowance, only the memory used by apps you launched yourself (and the ‘init’ process) counts.
The above result would be impossible, period, to obtain on 16MB Xen or KVM. Most likely those would not even boot.
@rm
if so then I have to think twice before buy 128KVM :-/
@rm: Oh, right, my fuzzy brain…OVZ is no more than installing a few programs running on a PC under your name, but nonetheless I got to say that is a really optimized VPS!
As far as MySQL using so little ram, there has not even been 1 connection attempt to it, so the RAM use better be very low.
MySQL config: http://vps-110.claw.d3vm.net/my.cnf
Yes, only your processes (init, ssh, etc) count in OpenVZ’s memory limits, but the node is only using 40mb RAM (excluding disk cache)
Did I just say PC? I should shut myself up and get some sleep now I guess…
Hello,
I can not found TOS/AUP for VPS.
http://www.qualityservers.co.uk/web-hosting-terms/ is for web hosting only.
It has a section for VPS.
with debian 6.0 32bit swap is missing (vz2uk:1118):
free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 128 45 82 0 0 16 -/+ buffers/cache: 29 98 Swap: 0 0 0additionally after changing the theme on the forum, I’m getting
HTTP Error 500, please fix
Hi,
Please see our forum or updates. I’ve reset your theme.
Thanks. Works now.
That’s funny, just two days ago Quality Servers told me to be wary of SimplexWeb’s £20/year offer after I cancelled my VPS with them to move to SimplexWebs. And here they are now with an offer that’s 25% cheaper.
I can’t remember what I said exactly but it would have been something along the lines of: at that price they will make a very small margin, and there will not be a lot left for staff etc. This remains true for us as it is with them: we are making up for a small margin with volume and are offering no support whatsoever on this plan.
Thank you for clarifying James, however it was Lucie that responded to my cancellation. ;)
Bought a £15 one.
Seems really nippy at the moment!
Excellent news :)
If this is anything like as good as the two larger VMs I have with these guys, I’d recommend it. Support is always suprisingly fast, and they seem to know what they’re on about. UK-based support too! :)
Used to be on their Eliminator plan.
The node I was on crashed and everything on my VPS was lost, so then I was promised a free month but never received one. Couldn’t be bothered with it and cancelled.
I was also on this node when it crashed and encountered severe data loss. In QualityServers’ defense I did receive my free month and everything was set up for me as soon as they had the new node up.
I’ve been with them for a few months. on their eliminator plan thing.
Honestly I’ve had no problems
Every email is answered quickly, and their clued up with all my issues i raised.
I wont be changing.
This does exactly what i need, even if i’m not using 5% of what I’ve been allocated.
Top service, Top support.
Thanks
Just fired one of these up, not had a proper play yet but here are some quick tests:
What is RAID 50?
2 RAID 5’s in a RAID 0 :)
Francisco
Multiple RAID5’s in RAID0, or do you get RAID500 with 3 :)
RAID500 would be multiple RAID50s in RAID0.
Ok, so what’s going on with memory usage? Is it me not being able to read/add up or do i need to open a ticket? This is Debian 6 32bit after running lowendscript ‘system’ part only to clean up, then a fresh reboot.
root@****:~# ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.5 2028 680 ? Ss 16:29 0:00 init [2] root 307 0.0 0.5 1948 688 ? S 16:29 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslogd root 339 0.0 0.5 2288 760 ? Ss 16:29 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron root 354 0.0 0.6 2392 900 ? Ss 16:29 0:00 /usr/sbin/xinetd -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid -stayalive -inetd_ root 361 0.2 0.8 2400 1124 ? Ss 16:34 0:00 dropbear -i root 362 0.0 1.2 2960 1616 pts/0 Ss 16:34 0:00 -bash root 369 0.0 0.6 2348 904 pts/0 R+ 16:35 0:00 ps aux root@*****:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 131072 32032 99040 0 0 6592 -/+ buffers/cache: 25440 105632 Swap: 0 0 0The listed processes aint using the same amount of memory as ‘free’ is reporting.
Even though nothing is going on on the server, memory used has increased from 29 to 33 meg since reboot a few minutes ago if that is significant.
‘cached’?
I’d just bought one before James announced the reduction to £12/year! I’m not arguing over £3 a year though ;)
Impressed with the performance, definitely recommended.
jtodd, fix this damn tun/tap issue finally. I feel embarassed… as I recommended your service to someone and now this person need to open ticket and struggle two days to get tun/tap back… after every… EVERY… node reboot…
It’s not first time and as it seems it will happen everytime when node will be rebooted. 2 days to get something that simple as tun/tap re-enabled after every reboot is simply too much! Once… ok, but again and again… come on guy…
Hi,
Please see https://www.qualityservers.co.uk/cp/kayako/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/8/24082011-kernel-bug-on-vz2uk about the issues surrounding the reboots, and note that the tun issue should now be fixed so that it loads properly on boot.
I honestly hope that it really does because as I said, it’s a bit embarassing for me to recommend someones service and then this don’t work as it should. Thank you.
I’ve just set one up but cannot find any mention of the IPv6 addresses. Any ideas?
Please contact us
Via a ticket or email?
Ticket.. always ticket :) Request few IPv6 addresses and they will give them without any complication. Addresses should appear also in your solusvm consolde (IP section).
I signed up for their 12 GBP plan but the reliability is terrible. Even after resolving the kernel bug on vm2uk, my machine comes on and off every couple of hours.
I think that’s a slight exaggeration. Don’t you?
Ok, so I ordered this package, but until today the VPS has more downtime than uptime. SolusVM is not usable because it is disabled due to a bugfix that lasts now for 6 days! (sic!) So at the moment I can’t even use my VPS consistently because it will be autom. shut-down or when I shut it down it will be rebooted. Very embarassing. In the end this VPs is currently not usable for production purposes, just for playing with it a few minutes a day. As if I couldn’t do that locally on my linux.
Tom/DOOD, the kernel problem is still ongoing on vz2uk according to the post on the portal, James thought he had it nailed, but something else has cropped up. You can always submit a ticket to be transferred to another node. I’m now on vz3uk and its been fine so far. Its a shame they have had these recent problems as I’ve found the service I’ve had from them very good in the past.
The transfer to that node you are referring to includes reduced services concerning system-allocations. (Lower CPU-spped, lower I/O). If it would imply also a reduce of monthly costs, fine. But it does not. So why should I get less for what I ordered when the provider simply can not fulfill its duty he agreed upon?
I think it’s worth mentioning a few points here:
– You paid £1/month, and on top of that are entitled to compensation under our SLA, taking the price down even further,
– For your £1/month you should not have any high expectations of performance. Most of our customers pay in the region of £20/month+ for their service,
– If you read the news feed on our website you will see that we are doing all that is reasonably possible to fix this problem, and are keeping you updated,
– We are even letting you transfer over to over nodes and packages, which was not the intention of this offer.
– We have hired someone to compile a custom kernel implementing the bugs founds the latest OpenVZ CentOS 6 kernel’s fixes today.
All in all I think we’re doing the best any provider would do in these circumstances.
So how come that my VPS is on and off on a regular base? You do tranfers to different nodes, if the customer requests. Wouldn’t the contract oblige you to do that automatically, to serve the customer what he has ordered? You can do that without any change of IP with OpenVZ. Why has the customer to take action to get its VPS to work when you could simply transfer the VPS to a working node and tell the customers that everything stays the same except that they are on a different node. At the moment its tough luck for the customer. Of course for you too, because I don’t think you raise kernel-panics with purpose. But in the end you could just move customers to another system automatically so that they can work with their VPS, you don’t have you struggle with tickets and you can then silently check what’s wrong with the kernel.
So how come that my VPS is on and off on a regular base?
>> Because there’s a kernel bug we’re still working on a fix for
See below for your other comments.
I/O seems faster if you compare my original tests above which were on vz2uk and this:
Im pretty sure that what you ordered is a specific amount of RAM, storage and transfer, nothing to do with CPU speed or I/O is mentioned on any of the low end deals. You could just have easily been provisioned on vz3uk in the first place.
The last fix I implemented involved disabling OpenVZ’s CFQ IO accounting, which essentially raises the IO for low end boxes. This is something we *may* have to restore to protect the interests of our higher paying customers. I’ll try not to though ;)
You are right, I take that back with the CPU-speed and IO. I mentioned it, because it was raised by the prvider in the support-form. But I would appreciate that the VPSes would be moved automatically without customer-intervention. OpenVZ is perfect for silent moves without any IP-change. This would enable the customer to use the VPS and the provider to silently elaborate on the problem.
HI,
Actually the vast majority of our customers are very patient and happy to wait, and actually their patient will be rewarded as VZ2UK is an absolute beast of a VPS node, which means that everyone’s performance is much better.
If you want to be moved it’s just a ticket away.
Ticket intervention always sounds to me like its eating the time that could be used better for solving problems. Well, in the end I’ll wait. I think this discussion lowered my heat ;-)
Ticket intervention always sounds to me like its eating the time that could be used better for solving problems.
>> Good point :)
Well, in the end I’ll wait. I think this discussion lowered my heat
>> Glad to hear it. I’d like to mention that it’s our intention to be the leading LEB provider for the UK, so we’re really pulling out all of the stops to offer you guys the same service that we offer our higher paying customers, just for smaller servers.
Nice to hear. I had some grumbling with previous LEB-providers. As a kid of the Commonwealth I hoped that services provided here are still on a better quality than in the colonies (US, Canada). So I lean back and wait :-)
The amount of downtime since i’ve moved my VPS to qualityservers has been nothing short of a disaster. The VPS has suffered from constant reboots, downtime that can sometimes be 4-5 hours at a time and in the last 2 weeks I don’t think it has been up more than 12-16 hours max.
The IO performance of the node also seems slowish compared to a bunch of other LEB advertisers i’ve used, with the dd command showing an average of 20MB/sec, lower than any VPS i’ve had with virpus/burst/curve/thrust. Although I fully understand that it not the perfect test of IO, the results of the test always seem to be indicative of the kind of IO performance i will get.
I simply cannot recommend this “company” in its current state after signing up and spending hours configuring my VPS, only to see the efforts completely wasted.
I expected more from qualityservers. Eliminator £4/month plan specifications seems great on paper but performance is very poor. Regular downtimes on daily bases. I think that I will cancel this one and stick with few others UK LEB providers which are better example of quality and stability.
@Labtecy and @Heinz:
The amount of downtime since i’ve moved my VPS to qualityservers has been nothing short of a disaster. The VPS has suffered from constant reboots
>> Have you been keeping up with our news feed with regard to the now resolved kernel bug? (https://www.qualityservers.co.uk/cp/kayako/index.php?/News/NewsItem/View/8/24082011-kernel-bug-on-vz2uk) Did you ask to be moved to another node? Can I have your ticket ID requesting a credit under our SLA?
downtime that can sometimes be 4-5 hours at a time and in the last 2 weeks I don’t think it has been up more than 12-16 hours max.
>> That is a gross exaggeration. The VPS node generally suffered from about 5 minutes’ downtime each time, with the VPSs booting up within a further 10-15 minutes.
The IO performance of the node also seems slowish compared to a bunch of other LEB advertisers i’ve used, with the dd command
>> The IO is actually extremely good on this node, despite that test showing a low result. You can find more here: http://www.qualityservers.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic/88-vps-io-throughput-low/
I simply cannot recommend this “company” in its current state after signing up and spending hours configuring my VPS, only to see the efforts completely wasted.
>> Just to clarify and reiterate, the problem is now fixed and you could have requested a quick and easy transfer to another node.
Eliminator £4/month plan specifications seems great on paper but performance is very poor
>> Which performance are you referring to exactly, and how much do you expect of a £4/month managed plan in the UK, including VAT? Please take the price point into consideration here.
Regular downtimes on daily bases.
>> See above regarding the kernel bug
I think that I will cancel this one
>> Feel free to cancel (we are actually running out of space for new orders…), or alternatively, claim under our SLA and try us out for another month for free to see what we’re like when we’re not plagued by known kernel issues.
> For your £1/month you should not have any high expectations of performance
> how much do you expect of a £4/month managed plan in the UK, including VAT? Please take the price point into consideration here.
When people around here say “this VPS is slow” they compare it not to their $60 dedicated server, but to a low-end VPS from some other provider they previously had or still have — and often at the very similar or exactly the same price points. So it is not a good strategy to use the price as an excuse and answer to all performance complaints.
Offtopic, the new gravatar generic pics are… ugly (space invaders? LOL)
Performance is pretty hit or miss, here’s my box. Web is ok, but disk is basically unusable:
As explained in your ticket, the reason the performance is hit and miss at the moment is we’re migrating a lot of VPSs over from older hardware to newer hardware, which puts a strain on the nodes.
Hi,
Just my five cents, I’m an ex-customer of QualityServers and this is my story:
1. After several disk failures on the host node, I lost all my data and recovery of the VPS took several days. For that I got one month compensation (according to my plan) and I received invoice meanwhile.
2. Then two months later my account was TERMINATED by mistake, because of an invoice overdue (I already got one month compensation, what overdue?). I lost my data again.
3. Anyway, I decided to stay with them and this time I went for three month period for which I received another threes months as a compensation of account termination. I had to re-install all the stuff and recover my data. My root DNS servers are refreshing one per day, which additionally caused bad feeling as I got new IP address for the new VPS.
4. Then a kernel bug hit the node and my VPS had a random uptime between few hours and one day. This continued for week or more. Meanwhile my account was again suspended because of the same issue – I got an invoice sent, but I already got three months compensation.
5. Few days later when everything calm down my VPS was very lagged and had a HUGE load average. It seemed that the node has suffering CPU and/or I/O starvation.
6. Without any notice/email/warning my VPS was TERMINATED. According to James, my VPS was causing the huge I/O and or CPU. I didn’t get a chance to look if this is really true. I didn’t get a chance to at least backup my data. I lost my data for third time. Still, I didn’t received plausible explanation for his decision.
My VPS had 512MB RAM running nginx, php-fpm and mysql. I’m running a small blog and I really DON’T know how this could cause a huge CPU or I/O starvation. Anyway, I’m with Bhost now and so far I had 10 days uptime (WOW) and my CPU (according to SAR) has usage less than 1%.
Regards,
Sve
Hi
I know you’ve had an awful experience with us but I would just like to say that it’s down to a lot of bad luck and is not a typical experience with us. Glad you’re happy at your new host.
Intersting Information on WHT
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1086043
Just part of the company?
Yes, *part* of the company *may* be sold. We are a small company with our fingers in a lot of pies and want to simplify things a bit. I can’t go into any more details than that I’m afraid.
Hopefully just the shared hosting side of things. I’m happy with the management and staff they have right now, things are working well. I’d hate to see things go downhill under new management…
I think they sold their monthly customers since jtodd was saying on LET that they’re only accepting yearly contracts now.
Francisco
I’m both. :)
That’s why so many fire sales latey with discount after discount? :) I was wondering before if you are about to sell business and that’s why you’re filling customer database that quickly :)
(I noticed weeks ago that you’re selling old company name/domain at WHT)
No it has absolutely nothing to do with that. Every so often we deploy a bunch of new equipment and need to fill it from empty which is where the sales come in.
There’s these too…
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1083949
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1078835
Looks like they don’t want to do cheap VPSes any more, and are pushing their cloud services.
I wouldn’t put them in the dead pool; is there a “doesn’t-want-to-do-low-end-boxes-anymore” pool? ;-)
Here’s an excerpt from a recent email sent to Quality Servers customers:
Finally, just to let you know, I can confirm that our company will be moving into cloud hosting services and will commence trading as UK Cloud, and moving away from traditional VPS hosting. I want to confirm that existing customers are not affected by this change of direction (existing nodes will stay online) however we in the future we will be inviting and recommending that those with an existing VPS hosting important data to transfer over to a cloud VPS. The cloud VPS will likely be slightly more expensive that the current arrangement, however increased performance and stability will be key features. After this is complete, we will attempt to sell off all remaining space on our nodes and decommission unused (ideally the older) nodes before discontinuing the sale of new traditional VPSs.
If you are interested in the new cloud VPSs, some preliminary information is available about it here. Feel free to provide any feedback on the new (unfinished) website and let us know about any errors.