Adam from IPXcore emailed me a special offer for the LowEndBox readers, especially those who love challenges. The price is cheap — $1.25/month. Here’s the direct sign up link, although the spec would fall on the “low end” range (which is what this blog was originally about, isn’t it? :)
- 96MB memory
- 2GB storage
- 30GB/month data transfer
- 1/2 vCPU core
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
Servers with Phoenix Internet with Qwest and TW Telecom network. You can also use coupon code LEBFTW to get 33% off discount on any of their regular virtual server plans. Domain registered in April 2011 with both NS running on the same IP address. They have at least Adam and Damien working there so not a one man show.
Related Posts:
Have You Checked Out Cloudvider's Lastest Offer Yet?
Shockingly Low Prices from Energized Web Hosting! (Get It? I Slay Myself, I Really Do)
How Private is Your Hosted Data, Really? Even That Encrypted Stuff...
HostSlick: Get a 4GB VPS in the Netherlands for Less than €2 a Month!
Cloudvider's New VPS Line has Launched for Black Friday! And We've Got an EXCLUSIVE Discount Code F...
Sullivan's Hosting: Cheap VPS and Dedicated Server Offers in Phoenix and Kansas City
The Founder at LowEndBox
The original owner of LowEndBox known as LowEndAdmin or LEA for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource Low End Boxes. After creating the roots of the community that we know today, LEA stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.
Latest posts by LEA (see all)
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
Tried with the same offer listed on wht and after a small test I cancelled the account. Too weak, small and so on for almost anything. Or maybe I just failed the challenge as written in the post ^^
And I also think this extremely cheap vps will attract hackers, spammers etc so the node will be hammered.
That was the case with hostrail.
“That was the case with hostrail.”
Another noob
Its comon knowledge hostrail failed because lack of funds/Bad Business setup.
Yep, thats common knowledge.
But i guess(No one can say for sure unless they were part of the staff/owner/provider) lack of funds and bad business setup wasnt all. They must have been under alot of attacks or benchmarking because they had lots of small downtimes.
But sure I do not hope this cheap offer will attract any users that will use the box for illegal activities and lead to an unstable node.
Have a nice day Daniel,
And please dont call me a noob.
..And why would a normal serious VPS provider even make such an offer ? How can they profit from such a low price?
Cheap advertising and a way of getting new customers in the company, and then send newsletters with nice upgrades later on?.. maybe
Yes, and yes, what’s the problem?
And ask how this can profit to all the providers with sub 20 usd per year plans.
96mb, 30gb and 2gb How you can abuse?
Another noob
Well it’s incredibly low spec, so you can fit a ton of VMs on one node. Think 100+. Quite easy to profit on that if IPs are cheap or they have their own block.
Bandwidth Test
CPU Test
System Information Platform: Linux x86 (32-bit) Compiler: GCC 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-33) Operating System: Linux 2.6.18-274.3.1.el5.028stab094.3 x86_64 Model: Linux PC (AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4184) Motherboard: Unknown Motherboard Processor: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4184 Processor ID: AuthenticAMD Family 16 Model 8 Stepping 1 Logical Processors: 1 Physical Processors: 1 Processor Frequency: 1.40 GHz L1 Instruction Cache: 64.0 KB L1 Data Cache: 64.0 KB L2 Cache: 512 KB L3 Cache: 5.00 MB Bus Frequency: 0.00 Hz Memory: 31.4 GB Memory Type: N/A SIMD: 1 BIOS: N/A Processor Model: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4184 Processor Cores: 1 Integer Blowfish single-threaded scalar 1999 ||||||| multi-threaded scalar 1262 ||||| Text Compress single-threaded scalar 1073 |||| multi-threaded scalar 1038 |||| Text Decompress single-threaded scalar 1064 |||| multi-threaded scalar 1092 |||| Image Compress single-threaded scalar 898 ||| multi-threaded scalar 876 ||| Image Decompress single-threaded scalar 796 ||| multi-threaded scalar 825 ||| Lua single-threaded scalar 1580 |||||| multi-threaded scalar 1550 |||||| Floating Point Mandelbrot single-threaded scalar 1030 |||| multi-threaded scalar 1017 |||| Dot Product single-threaded scalar 1543 |||||| multi-threaded scalar 1541 |||||| single-threaded vector 1355 ||||| multi-threaded vector 1551 |||||| LU Decomposition single-threaded scalar 2403 ||||||||| multi-threaded scalar 2435 ||||||||| Primality Test single-threaded scalar 1365 ||||| multi-threaded scalar 1101 |||| Sharpen Image single-threaded scalar 4706 |||||||||||||||||| multi-threaded scalar 4068 |||||||||||||||| Blur Image single-threaded scalar 4350 ||||||||||||||||| multi-threaded scalar 4113 ||||||||||||||||its worth noting they aint using solus, they are using Virtualizor
We are now using SolusVM instead of Virtualizor.
The LEB admin is correct in that this plan was developed in the spirit of this site. We like to think of it as a trial offer: like our service? We hope so. We also hope that you purchase one of the more “premium” plans. But we’re fine if you’d rather not. I can say that we’re generating a profit from this offer. It’s not a massive profit that will bring us riches overnight (obviously), but it’s paying for the cost of what the plan offer, and contributing a little to our advancement.
We’re here to stay. We aren’t really offering anything new to the VPS-buying world, but we like to think that we’re doing it better. Have an issue? Submit a support ticket. If it’s during the day, MST time zone (-7 UTC), you should get a response in less than 15 minutes. If it’s night time, you should get a response in less than two hours (we’re trying to improve this one). Have an issue that needs voice communications? Call us, our number is on the site. You’ll get one of us on the phone.
We aren’t trying to project an image of being a massive, face-less corporation, located in who-knows-where. We’re still starting out on this, but like I said, we’re here to stay. Yes, I know this is a phrase oft-repeated by upstarts on LEB, so i’m not sure how to allay fears otherwise. We own all of our own hardware (not leased!), and none of it was cheap, as it was bought with the mindset of “what would work best for this application?” or “can this hardware handle what we want to do with it?” instead of “hey, what have you got that’s cheapest?” Yes, our website is a little rough-looking, yet, we’ve been concentrating our efforts more on fine-tuning how things are running, and offering support, instead of polishing a shiny website.
Well, this post has turned out to be quite a bit longer than I expected it to be. If any of you have any further questions, you can feel to email me at my name @ipxcore.com
Also thanks to LEB admin for pointing this out:
both NS running on the same IP address.
I’ve been working on splitting this into two geographically different locations, and this reminded me to check to see if it’s changed yet or what. (it hasn’t!) Thanks!
Just pay for DNSmadeEasy or something. It’s only a few bucks.
We’ve been looking at something like that, actually. Thanks for the tip!
When we submitted this offer to LEB, the monthly transfer was offered at 20gb per month. However, it looks like it was copied as 30gb per month.
No problem! Instead of alienating our new clients by informing them that we’re reducing the transfer they think they purchased, and also for potential clients as a display of our dedication to high customer satisfaction, we’re upping our offering to match what’s printed on LEB. All current clients have been upgraded to 30gb, and new clients will receive 30gb.
Yes sorry that was a finger slip, after reading Adam’s email again.
Maybe I should do that more often to other providers. Adding a zero somewhere for example :)
That’ll be fine, as long as it’s not on the price you’re adding more numbers on.
Like 300GB Space, or 3000GB Bandwidth sounds like a good finger slip now and then.
This is becoming annoying.
$1.25, seriously, what, the ****???
Right.
1) You will not break even FACT
2) To do it by putting at least 50 on a node, would seriously cause problems.
After being in the industry a good 5 years, I see offer after offer like this, and they all fail.
I do not care what you say, trial or not, going in as cheap as this is ludicrous and silly.
People like buyvm can do it a little bit more costly, and they own most of their stuff like myself.
I think you should SERIOUSLY look at this properly, no matter what, $2.99-$5 per month, fine, but comon $1?
After a fee you will get what? 90 cents per server?
Sheesh! Staff, servers, licenses, tax.
Next one for the dead pool.
Go back to business class, learn a thing or too, then sort yourself out.
Anyone can rape me here, I do not care, this is beyond stupid, seen it all before and so has everyone else.
Otherwise, good luck.
What a pro commentary
Indeed the hope is for the clients to take the jump to the next plan — 128MB/192MB memory, 10GB storage and 200GB/month data for $4.63 (from their previous offer). I guess we’ve been living under the influence of Groupon, where business often take a loss to earn customers.
However like many business having tried Groupon deals, loss-making customers might never turn profitable.
Totally off topic but every time I see Groupon, it always remind me of this link (Groupon demand almost finishes cupcake-maker).
Hehe we all see the similarity here. Should have run LowEndBox like a Groupon site. Group-buy VPS at 50%-75% off?! Moreover, we either bring lots of customers to the providers to make them rich, or totally screw them :P
I would like to mention that the TinyVPS is a special and will only be available through the end of December. If you go to our site you will notice that this VPS is not available on any of the ordering pages, it is only available through the link.
Will be available for new orders, right? Or you will force to change plan after december?
There will be no change to existing plans, they will remain in effect. No forced change.
@Paul (twin?)
You’d even wonder more how TinyVz of Ramhost breaks even then, since they add more space and bandwidth for their offer, which mind you is available again. I think they restocked recently. I might be wrong.
No complaints here. Instant setup, easy payment through Google Checkout.
They allow secure proxies. I was able to get Squid installed and running in less than two minutes on Ubuntu using a config I had from another VPS. Base VPS config + Squid uses ~35mb RAM and almost no CPU, so it’s a perfect setup for a personal proxy (Pandora, Turntable.fm, etc, outside the US). I’m guessing that watching a lot of ESPN3 or other video streaming would knock up against the 30gb data transfer limit pretty quick.
Here’s a 100mb test I ran:
What about TUN/TAP? What about PPTP? If that’s possible this would be a perfect VPN for my needs.
TUN/TAP is available upon request, please submit a support ticket and we’ll enable it. We really haven’t had much request for PPTP. Or ipsec for that matter. If you’re willing to work with us in hammering out the bugs on it, we can set you up.
How can 2GB HDD do? Proxy?
2GB HDD can do a lot. Proxy, IRC, VPN, even *shock* host websites. Yes, multiple!
It could even be used for storing backups. This is LEB you’re on, right?
In addition, we’re mostly using stock OpenVZ templates, which come with things that no one needs, like xinetd, and you can do other things like swap syslog for syslog-ng, or sshd for dropbear, which will free up more resources.
I just bought one for testing…
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.78636 s, 158 MB/s
wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2011-12-01 21:23:06-- http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'
100%[============================================================================================>] 104,857,600 3.17M/s in 32s
2011-12-01 21:23:38 (3.15 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]
Bought one last night. Was up and running in minutes, all looking good. Their online chat was responsive and a ticket I submitted was dealt with quickly and helpfully. Very happy, as it’s costing 0.83 UK pounds a month!
If anyone is on the fence about trying our service, now is the time to do so, as we’re getting rather close to running out of available IP addresses and we’re having a hell of a time getting more. Such is the life of post-IPv4-depletion I guess.
What about IPv6?
Unfortunately, we are not set up for IPv6 yet. It’s in the works!
…and we’re out. You can still order a VPS to reserve your place, but it’s looking like it’ll be business-hours on Monday before we get any more IPs from our data center. We’ll be moving invoice dates ahead so that the ‘start’ date matches when the VPS is Internet-accessible instead of when it was ordered.
Does allow pron?
Yes, there is a section in our AUP/TOS regarding it. In addition, if you expect your site to be popular, I recommend purchasing a more powerful plan, too. Also, please read my statement above about currently being out of IPv4 addresses for a few days.
would you be able to run and iso image of trixbox ~300mb if I upload do do you have any images already?
In OpenVZ you can’t boot isos. Instead you have templates.
I’m getting 80ms to cross to US, then another 60 to get to London. Add the 10ms it takes to send that to my ISP, and the 20ms for my ADSL, and the latency is very acceptable.
I’m certainly going to try testing out an asterisk installation, using the Arch template.
out of stock
We are currently out of stock on this item so orders for it have been suspended until more stock is available.
Yes, we anticipate being back in stock either today or tomorrow. Thanks for your interest!
We’ve received more IP addresses, and we’re ready to accept more orders now! Fire away!
thanks , Damian @ ipxcore ,just got 1 vps , nice ping from asia 173ms and speed is ok. Download speed is not good not bad, medium :)
Would this be sufficiently powerful to use it as a remote log server? I’d be running either rsyslog or syslog-ng, probably over SSH or stunnel, and accepting logs from 2-3 webservers under light load (no more than a thousand visitors per day per site). I expect that the Apache/MySQL logs would be the bulk of traffic, but there’d also be some other random stuff like failed SSH attempts and so on.
I found mine is perfectly sufficient for IRC. I’ve tweaked my VPS to use a little ram as possible and with a fairly busy IRC server it’s been very good.
IPXcore are pretty epic, and at $1.25 I’d say its really worth a bet, based on what you’ve described it should be fine.
Thanks! Any suggestions for which template would be the easiest to minimize RAM usage? I’m comfortable with most of the distros on the list, but don’t know enough to pick the most economical…
I *did* use Arch on mine, but I had issues with that, so I went for debian instead.
I pretty much removed all but the core, and replaced things like openssh with dropbear, bash with dash. I also disabled every component I wouldn’t be needing, since there’s no point hogging ram for no reason.
Here’s what mine is doing, with a total of just 15meg of ram used:
$ ps aux ; free
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.7 8360 784 ? Ss Dec10 0:01 init [2]
root 1311 0.0 0.7 43228 736 ? S Dec10 0:00 supervising syslog-ng
root 1312 0.0 3.3 50396 3300 ? Ss Dec10 0:02 /usr/sbin/syslog-ng -p /var/run/syslog-ng.pid
root 1335 0.0 0.8 20908 856 ? Ss Dec10 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
root 1338 0.0 0.5 10468 532 ? Ss Dec10 0:01 /usr/sbin/dropbear […]
user 1372 0.0 8.3 346836 8240 ? Ss Dec10 0:03 […]inspircd –config=[…]/conf/inspircd.conf
root 20419 0.0 1.2 23088 1192 ? Rs 17:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/dropbear […]
user 20420 0.0 0.6 3956 612 ttyp0 Rs 17:36 0:00 -dash
user 20427 0.0 1.0 14816 1016 ttyp0 R+ 17:36 0:00 ps aux
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 98304 15568 82736 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 15568 82736
Swap: 0 0 0
Indeed, the Arch template has some weird issues with it.
After Arch, the next leanest template would definitely be the 32-bit Debian template, as Jamie mentioned. There’s not much point to 64-bit templates on any of the VPS packages that we have, but people ask for them, so we offer them. I digress…
Another way to keep your VPS lean: thoroughly consider if you really need sendmail and xinetd. If you log into your VPS regularly, and don’t have sendmail installed, any mail messages that get generated for root will be waiting for you. And since sshd/dropbear aren’t spawned from xinetd, there’s really no point to running xinetd.
I bought 2 of these servers to use as leafs on my IRC network, and they work fine, but only issues I have with you guys is that after buying, I got 4 emails related to a server being created:
http://secret.ws/m5uw8p.jpg
Didn’t really bother me, but it did confuse me for a little because I didn’t know what was what, and I thought I just got myself a bunch of free servers.
That was my fault I didn’t allow the server enough time to setup your operating system when I approved your order. Free VPSs would be nice ;) sorry about the confusion.
Haha, it’s fine, I just tried each one until I found 2 working ones, I was going to create a ticket and say but I guess it was noticed when some went down.
Sort of my fault too for ordering both of them within 2 minutes of eachother (or so.)
Running an IRC node on it, it works beautifully, had to remove (and kill) apache2 and sendmail, as those were included in the “base” image for some reason
Leaves you about 50MB of 96MB to play with, plenty for a few little bits and pieces
I bet you could get more free ram. What IRCd are you using?
I’m using inspircd on my VPS, and I’ve got a good 82Meg free. And that’s with me logged in- logged out there’s no need for dash and stuff to be running so there’s less ram used.
I’m using Unreal IRCd and Anope for services
It’s using the Ubuntu 10.10 x86 image which is (admittedly) rather bloated. I uninstalled and purged all the crap I mentioned that came with it, after rebooting it sits (with the IRCD running) at a comfortable 20MB of RAM used :D
That’s more like it! :D
[root@hydra ~]# cat a.out
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 1500.108 MHz
Total amount of ram : 96 MB
Total amount of swap : 0 MB
System uptime : 9:27,
Download speed from CacheFly: 2.84MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Atlanta GA: 662KB/s
Download speed from Linode, Dallas, TX: 1.31MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 330KB/s
Download speed from Linode, London, UK: 286KB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 277KB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 183KB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 1.08MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 1.92MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 520KB/s
I/O speed : 45.2 MB/s
Now if only I could run Gentoo :p
vps was setup instantly after payment (support is amazing btw) and this is what i’ve gotten it down to after tweaking:
http://i.imgur.com/ZVSkn.png
that’s a debian install using 2mb of ram (init and sshd only) very impressed so far well worth the $1.25!!
If you’re still on the fence about trying our service, please let it be known that this price is going up for NEW customers on January 1st. Accounts in good standing on January 1st will be locked in at this price until they cancel.
@Damian
Just out of interest, what’s IPXcore’s viewpoint on SOPA?
We don’t support it.
After saving every kopeck, then every pfennig, that they could for 15 years, my family moved to the USA in 1993, for the freedoms. We’re committed (as much as we can be, we don’t have unlimited resources like the government) to keeping it that way.
why is it so slow suddenly, even your site gives timeout sometimes.
The site loads fine ¬_¬
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/zu9psv9rx/www.ipxcore.com
If you’re finding things to be slow, please raise a support ticket. If you’re not able to get to our website for some reason, please email us at email @ ipxcore.com.
Regardless, all of us have plenty of bells and whistles and alarms and such to let us know when things aren’t working right. You can be assured that, yes, we know things are broken, yes, we are shamed that things aren’t working, and yes, one of us (usually me) is working on both an immediate countermeasure and a long-term solution.
Also, just for the fun :D
OMG!
Cool! Depending on which node you’re on, it may improve soon, since we’ve got some larger cache modules on the way.
VPS down, admin tools down, ipxcore website down. Not so great.
yea, everything is down…
Adam’s on the way to the datacenter to see why. We’re missing one node, but unfortunately, it’s the node that the website runs on.
In other news, we’re buying more hardware today. We plan to move the entire ipxcore.com site to different hardware, and have it served from multiple points, so that when we have issues, we can at least send out an announcement.
And now we’re bearing all the scars
and all my traceroutes showing stars.
The packets would travel faster in cars
the day the routers died.
Kernel panic. Node is coming back up now. We’ve got screenshots so we can analyze what caused it.
We recorded 67 minutes of downtime on this node due to this; this is unacceptable. We’re all going to get together later today to discuss what we can do to mitigate such a wide gap in service.
You could possibly invest in a ip kvm ? (/sarcasm)
Yes, that’s on the list of things-to-buy.
@Damian
a watchdog timer.
To be honest, I hadn’t looked into that, as I was under the information that the openvz kernels were compiled with the config setting that automatically reboots them after a specific number of seconds after a kernel panic has occurred. Turns out in my research just now, it has to be enabled in /etc/sysctl.conf.
So this is, as usual, my bad. Learning something new every day.
Everything down at the moment… also last 2 weeks there have been a lot of downtime/timeouts.
I know that for 1$ I can’t ask for much but this seems overselling.
Is their website down at the moment? Or is it just me?
Having problem with network, or they just gone?
There was a VPS user performing an outbound DoS attack. We have identified and terminated the user.
We’re having a lot of issues with script kiddies running DOS attacks from our $1.25 containers.
Hey,
Wanted to buy one with LEBFTW promo but no stock? :( I read such a positive review on 96mb.
We’re planning another promo around April 1st. Stay tuned!
Promo is up and running!
You’re a day late ;) I’ll go order one now.
We have changed all of our VPS packages & pricing. The TinyVPS now costs $1.71 (w/o promo) and comes with 128MB RAM, 160MB Burstable, 5GB Disk, and 50GB Bandwidth. We have moved all our servers to a new datacenter too with faster connection!
@Adam
…but, the new datacenter’s ToS say no IRC.
My heart sank at that email you guys sent out- my 96mb VPS was my favourite, and very well specced for running an IRCd. I could have kept the server, I guess, but it wasn’t much use to me as it was dedicated for IRC.
Also, do your provider do IPv6 yet?
If you ever change providers again, and you go with someone who don’t mind IRC as long as you’re playing nice, I’m very much up for coming back. Out of all the server providers I’ve used, you have always provided a fab service.
I need to check this more frequently :)
Our provider blocks port 6667. If whatever you’re doing with IRC can run on a different port, then by all means go ahead; we’re fine with it.
We’re working with them to get IPv6.
Sorry to have to challenge this, but the exact content of the email went:
“The reason for discontinuing IRC is that our new datacenter location does not allow IRC on its networks. We have requested and discussed with them that we would be allowed to continue offering IRC access,however, our request has been denied and IRC will remain restricted.”
Nowhere in the email I was sent by Adam did it say about providers blocking ports. Ouch. If I knew this, I would have just made my net SSL-only, and been a couple of pounds better off.
Can you confirm now that IRC is definitely allowed but just port 6667 blocked?