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2Host - $4.89 256MB Xen VPS

2Host Tom from 2Host emailed me their special offers on their San Jose CA Xen VPS. While the WHT users get 5% off discount, LowEndBox readers can get 10%30% off recurring! Use promo code LEB10TB and you can get a B-Class Xen VPS for $4.89/month. Order it here.

  • 256MB memory/512MB swap
  • 12GB storage
  • 10TB/month data transfer on 1Gbps port
  • Xen/SolusVM

Test IP: 184.105.195.10, which is with HE.net in San Jose. 10TB of data is nice, only if the pipe is wide enough with a fast & stable CPU. Whether you can use 10TB is one thing. I would, however, feel anxious thinking what my VPS neighbours would do to use all that data. From experience of 2Host’s servers in St. Louis and Asheville, the connectivity can be patchy sometimes. The VPS themselves are pretty stable though, as I was with 2Host for over 15 months. I did receive bad reports on their lack of support + server instability so YMMV.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

77 Comments

  1. Amyt:

    Is it HVM?

    December 26, 2010 @ 2:02 pm | Reply
  2. how about the conectivity last time i get bad speed at 2host

    December 26, 2010 @ 2:53 pm | Reply
  3. vmuser:

    stay away from 2HOST, very slow speed,

    always oversold!!

    December 26, 2010 @ 3:04 pm | Reply
    • circus:

      It’s only natural, if an offer have too much bandwidth it will attract heavy bandwidth users, in the end everyone infected.

      December 26, 2010 @ 3:10 pm | Reply
      • vmuser:

        not only this problem, there disk IO is terrible too.

        December 26, 2010 @ 4:05 pm | Reply
  4. tommy:

    let’s wait untill 2host clarification this issue :)

    December 26, 2010 @ 9:14 pm | Reply
  5. 2Host has updated the offer. Instead of 10% off, it is now 30% off, i.e. $4.89/month for the same package.

    December 27, 2010 @ 3:23 am | Reply
  6. bugs:

    stay away from 2HOST, very slow speed,

    always oversold!!

    December 27, 2010 @ 3:53 am | Reply
    • rm:

      The fact that you keep posting the exact same message under different nicknames again and again, pretty much ruines any credibility your opinion might have had, and makes you seem just a troll/spammer trying to smear a good company.

      December 27, 2010 @ 5:17 am | Reply
      • but it is true, their network is so damn slow.
        really really slow. like 50 to 200K/s max!

        see my full comment at bottom.

        December 27, 2010 @ 9:02 pm | Reply
  7. Winglet:

    How XEN can be oversold?

    December 27, 2010 @ 10:01 am | Reply
    • Why not?

      In this case, I think 1gbps is equivalent to about 320TB of traffic if it’s fully utilized, that’s about 32 VPSes on a node. And from the website they say a node is probably built with up to 16GB of RAM, and divide that with 256MB, you’d get approx. 60 VPSes.

      Now go figure if they oversell anything.

      December 27, 2010 @ 10:41 am | Reply
      • rm:

        Overselling bandwidth by 2x is actually quite good. It’s not like each and every customer will use 100% of their 10TB.
        But then again, your calculation is only partially correct: it’s not 1 Gbps per node, most likely it is 1 Gbps (outgoing link to the Internet) for ALL the nodes.

        December 27, 2010 @ 11:03 am | Reply
        • I agree about bandwidth not being a problem if it is oversold. I mean if your pipe is running at high utilization (60-80%?) you may want to upgrade to a faster connection. But if you have even 2TB bandwidth on a node, and your clients are only using 1.3TB of the 2TB… who cares if you’ve sold 10TB worth of bandwidth. As long as providers are upgrading their systems as needed and pay their bills adding bandwidth to a server is easy as pie. Honestly… if your costs are lower it just means you can pass that savings on to clients.

          December 27, 2010 @ 1:11 pm | Reply
        • I’m actually answering the question “How XEN can be oversold?”

          In regards to the bandwidth, it’s just an example. It may not be an issue if the provider actively monitors the network performance, however in my opinion this type of marketing strategy tends to attract a bunch of abusive users.

          December 27, 2010 @ 1:39 pm | Reply
        • Especially torrenters!!! Watch out for them!

          December 27, 2010 @ 2:38 pm | Reply
  8. best advice: dont botter using those guys, their network is so damn slow, and the tech guys there have no clue at all.

    I was customer there for a 4 months on a 2GB xen vps.
    The network speed became around 50-200K/s for a month. no fixes and the tech support would not understand it. I complained many times and even would let them ssh as root and even show them how slow it was.

    it was too complicated for their little mini brains to know that 100K/s upload is slow.

    also, not to mention that many times during the day, the network was almost unreachable, getting pings of 3000 ms to 6000 ms.

    avoid them at all times.

    I really hate them so much that I can waste time commenting on any html page matching /2host/

    December 27, 2010 @ 9:00 pm | Reply
    • Speed test file here: http://184.105.195.10/100mb.test

      Got 120ishK/sec for first 11megs. Didn’t want to wait around for 13 minutes so I didn’t finish it.

      December 28, 2010 @ 12:06 am | Reply
      • John:

        Got 330 KB/s in average from Hong Kong.

        December 28, 2010 @ 3:57 am | Reply
      • I can get up to 10MB/sec from either Fremont or Dallas. Above 830KB/sec from UK though.

        December 28, 2010 @ 4:30 am | Reply
      • Should have said mine was from Germany. I can check from the US later today if anyone wants. Wireless network I;m currently on doesn’t allow ssh connections.

        December 28, 2010 @ 1:05 pm | Reply
      • bob:

        1.48 mb/s from my 100mbit vps at wholesaleinternet: single homed HE in Kansas City.

        December 30, 2010 @ 4:16 am | Reply
      • US based server got me 11.1 megs as an average.

        December 30, 2010 @ 1:17 pm | Reply
        • fred:

          When I first signed up with them, their net was quite fast and had very good IO. after a month or so is declined so bad that it was unusable for a low traffic site. 100K hits per day only.

          the worse of all, I had a 6 GB mysql database, I could NOT get that database out of that server into a working server fast.
          since it was so slow to transfer the database to another server, took almost 1 day long, I had to sacrifice 1 day worth of data and logs.

          That is the main reason I am so pissed off with them.

          January 1, 2011 @ 8:25 pm | Reply
        • @fred:

          a low traffic site… 100K hits per day only… 6 GB mysql database

          You might have been asking too much for $5/month (if you were indeed their low end plans before) :)

          January 1, 2011 @ 11:05 pm | Reply
          • fred:

            for a site with 100K hits a days I chose the 1.5GB XEN, it was $30 I think.

            January 3, 2011 @ 2:55 am | Reply
  9. elber galarga:

    They are full of rapidleechs, like burst.net

    these users make resource abuse.

    and harm to other users.

    December 27, 2010 @ 10:49 pm | Reply
  10. Haven’t dealt with this company but from reading the WHT thread, looks like they also have an issue with replying to tickets.

    December 28, 2010 @ 12:04 am | Reply
  11. kd:

    Well,

    the package/price is quite interesting so I decided to give it a try…

    Here’s another testfile for you to try on : http://184.105.195.36/100mb.bin

    December 28, 2010 @ 3:40 am | Reply
    • rm:
      # wget -O /dev/null http://184.105.195.36/100mb.bin
      --2010-12-28 09:59:20--  http://184.105.195.36/100mb.bin
      Connecting to 184.105.195.36:80... connected.
      HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
      Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
      Saving to: `/dev/null'
      
      100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 34.0M/s   in 2.9s    
      
      2010-12-28 09:59:23 (34.0 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
      

      from BuyVM :)

      December 28, 2010 @ 5:04 am | Reply
  12. John:

    I have been with 2host for 12 months now. Their network is slow from time to time, no doubt about that. We have experienced 3-4 total losses of connectivity lasting for several hours and if I remember properly even days. My node is pretty stable though, the only thing that annoys me is their laziness to update node kernels to the most current version.

    [root@xxx ~]#uptime
     23:07:45 up 147 days,  1:02,  1 user,  load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
    

    Disk I/O

    [root@xxx ~]#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, 4.90099 seconds, 219 MB/s
    
    December 28, 2010 @ 4:15 am | Reply
  13. Rous:

    I had one of their VPSs for about 6 months and have to echo what everyone else has said with regards to the complaints. They were very quick with the setup, but after that everything went downhill; this is what I experienced:

    – very spotty bandwidth measured by latency and raw upload/download speed
    – disk I/O declined from the time I was installed
    – a number of outages which they never warned about in advance for various reasons – faulty hardware, provider issues, kernel upgrades etc.
    – absolute lack of communication from support. expect your ticket to go unanswered for many days. for whatever reason support picks up a little bit on the weekend. when they do get around to answering you it is obvious they never read the ticket anyway.

    In short, there is a reason they are offering 30% off, so take this into account before you waste any time with this provider. I would never go back or recommend them to anyone regardless of price.

    December 28, 2010 @ 7:10 pm | Reply
    • rm:

      Hey, I was with you until the last paragraph – don’t knock offering XX% off, especially offering it to get posted to LEB, or simply around new year holidays. There is a LOT of reasons to do XX% off, and ‘bad’ reasons you think of are in strict minority.

      December 28, 2010 @ 7:26 pm | Reply
    • You need to consider too, as with any host you will see a bell curve of sorts in stability from the first opening of a VPS node, when a deal is offered, and the calm after the storm. A GOOD deal will bring in a LOT of new orders. So the VPS node has all this extra work load from people’s VPS being provisioned, initial setups, OS updates, etc… this will hit network and disk IO for everyone. Once the deal is gone and everyone’s VPS has been setup… you will become more stable.

      December 28, 2010 @ 8:27 pm | Reply
      • …And after they boot the scripters and others screwing around on the box. :)

        December 28, 2010 @ 10:30 pm | Reply
        • Yeah… of course this is assuming that they watch for abusers and do boot them :)

          December 29, 2010 @ 6:40 am | Reply
    • Rous:

      My post was simply meant to warn people on what to expect from this host, take it or leave it. I have been working in the provider industry for nearly 15 yrs and have had accounts at many of the providers that post deals on LEB and WHT, but my experience with 2host was much worse compared to others. It all depends on what your application is for this VPS, but for me having a ticket go unanswered for a week isn’t worth the time it takes to set up a new instance.

      December 29, 2010 @ 3:31 pm | Reply
  14. Might want to check out http://www.chicagovps.net, I’ve been using them for a few months now and have been real happy. No downtime and fast connectivity always thanks to the super high end datacenter they use. Good luck with whoever you use though.

    December 29, 2010 @ 3:08 am | Reply
    • Hey Mike, it appears that your “High End Server” site is hosted on a low end box, i.e. ChicagoVPS :)

      December 29, 2010 @ 3:11 am | Reply
      • Ali:

        From his blog on “High End Server” :

        A friend of mine, who has been in the technology field for many years, started a VPS/Dedicated Server provider a couple months ago. It is appropriately named “ChicagoVPS.net” – as you can probably guess they do their hosting out of Chicago Illinois.

        December 29, 2010 @ 4:10 am | Reply
      • bob:

        I have a 512mb ChicagoVPS package. Right after I ordered they gave me a bad IP address. It routed to Texas instead of Chicago. After a couple hours of assuring them I wasn’t an idiot and that there was a problem even though they could ping it, they finally got around to fixing it. They typed the wrong subnet into WHM. Half a day was lost.

        So far the machine and connectivity is good besides ~20 minutes of my server becoming unreachable through UDP (I haven’t setup monitoring software so there might have been other downtimes). DD speed is around 50 mb/s, and they are packing E5405’s, but they restricted every plan to 1 core.

        December 29, 2010 @ 7:35 am | Reply
        • @Bob,

          We are sorry that we did indeed give you a wrong IP that routed to Texas. What I will do for you is set your billing period back 2 days so you get some extra time. Mistakes do happen, but I am glad to hear everything has been ok so far.

          Thanks,

          Chris

          December 29, 2010 @ 6:57 pm | Reply
  15. Hehe yeah my production stuff is hosted on dedicated servers because the database transaction rate/volume requires that. If I could, I’d host everything on low end boxes though (imagine the savings). @LowEndAdmin: I love your site by the way, bravo on carving out a really neat niche.

    December 29, 2010 @ 5:42 am | Reply
  16. Peter Hope-Tindall:

    My new vps seems dead this evening. (Host machine too – can’t even handshake with serial console ssh logon).

    :-(

    PHT

    December 30, 2010 @ 6:32 am | Reply
  17. faizal ramadhan:

    im cannot access in my xen

    December 30, 2010 @ 9:50 am | Reply
  18. promo code can used on 512MB/1GB SWAP plan?

    December 30, 2010 @ 2:22 pm | Reply
  19. It is about that san jose is fastest to China main land…
    I’m interested on it…

    December 30, 2010 @ 2:23 pm | Reply
  20. Peter Hope-Tindall:

    I signed up end of December.

    rdns **STILL** not working after 6 days. Needed to open a ticket to make a change to allow control panel to set rdns – fair enough – changed in control panel – but it hasn’t actually worked.

    Looks like this one won’t be a keeper.

    January 4, 2011 @ 3:48 pm | Reply
  21. Peter Hope-Tindall:

    Is anyone here getting tickets answered by 2host?

    Interestingly – I signed up for 3 different vpses at the same time (to evaluate).

    hostrail
    2host
    and
    clubuptime

    clubuptime has given the best service and good pricing
    hostrail (which had a crazy deal ($1.05/month)) is running OK – good speed, good uptime, good support
    2host is performing badly – pauses every 4 or 5 seconds at the commend line as if the CPU is too busy. Plus awful support.

    PHT

    January 5, 2011 @ 3:53 am | Reply
  22. Peter Hope-Tindall:

    FYI – finally responded to ticket today. Looks like they fixed rdns problem.

    But – the poor vps performance and support disappearing for a couple of days has left a bad taste. Let’s hope things improve as the month goes on.

    PHT

    January 6, 2011 @ 2:40 am | Reply
    • Matt:

      Lucky you. :) I have submitted several tickets and I’ve been waiting over a week now for something as simple as rDNS. Since it’s a mailserver it’s been practically useless.

      Setting rDNS in SolusVM doesn’t seem to work, either. I had the same request on Quickweb a couple of month ago and Roel had it set up for me in five minutes.

      January 6, 2011 @ 8:52 pm | Reply
      • Peter Hope-Tindall:

        I opened a couple of tickets – which were ignored.

        Then opened a legal ticket giving them 24 hours to provide a status on the issue.

        Failing that I wanted the account closed and would do a PAYPAL chargeback.

        I get that the level of support can be less for a cheaper server. But I expect at least a 48 response on something like this that is preventing email from getting out.

        I have to say – this is the worst performing of all 4 VPS I have at the moment.

        (VPSLink, Clubuptime, hostrail and 2host).

        when I’m ssh’ing in – the network is choppy – sometimes have to wait for 2-3 seconds for keystrokes to catch-up in vi.

        PHT

        January 6, 2011 @ 11:54 pm | Reply
  23. Peter Hope-Tindall:

    Cancelled!!!!

    Recommend you stay away from this one.

    January 20, 2011 @ 4:49 am | Reply
  24. dgv:

    Is this dead?

    March 10, 2011 @ 5:12 pm | Reply
    • Vasya Pupkin:

      I thought so yesterday, but my VPS got back online after few hours. And it wasn’t even rebooted. Now it’s down again. Looks like someone is DDoSing them.

      March 11, 2011 @ 1:34 pm | Reply
      • You would think people like that would spend their time doing more worse while pursuits.

        Like self mutilation.

        March 11, 2011 @ 10:39 pm | Reply
  25. Chester:

    I purchased the 512MB/1GB SWAP plan from 2host on 03/22/11. Everything worked great for the first two weeks. With the exception of slow ssh and solusvm being down for 3 days. Then I noticed webmin was telling me I only had 64mb swap available instead of 1GB like I had previously. I submitted a ticket and this is the response I got.

    Mon 04/04/11 12:07 AM
    Hello,

    For your own safety and benefits, we no longer offer large swap space with our services due to abuse and security reasons.

    If you run out of memory, I would recommend upgrading. Using swap is not a replacement for ram.

    Let me know if you need anything else.

    Best regards,

    John Danielsen

    They were offering it when I sent payment on 03/22/11. Could someone explain how less swap would benefit me and be safer?

    April 5, 2011 @ 12:42 pm | Reply
    • Sweet:

      I got the same message as some others:
      —————————–
      Hello,

      For your own safety and benefits, we no longer offer large swap space with our services due to abuse and security reasons.

      If you run out of memory, I would recommend upgrading. Using swap is not a replacement for ram.

      Let me know if you need anything else.
      —————————–

      I mentioned that my logging only ever showed about 8MB of swap used, and 40MB+ free RAM, to which they said my disk I/O was high.
      —————————————–
      Your I/O was very high and therefore suspended.

      We will not restores service unless you upgrade and monitor your service to see if your I/O usage will remain acceptable.
      —————————————–
      I offered to turn swap off and to upgrade an additional 128MB of RAM, and asked if they saw the IO as constant (MySQL) or in regular spikes (backups).

      After a few hours with no response, I tried to log in to to get a reply on the ticket and learned that my account had been cancelled for no reason.

      SO. They were great up until they stopped caring about people with cheap plans. Wouldn’t recommend.

      April 28, 2011 @ 12:33 am | Reply
  26. I’ve used 2HOST for a year, but I have a low traffic site. So I only occasionally noticed the slowdown in response times.

    Then, on 03Apr — exactly 2 weeks ago — we received an email telling us to back up our stuff, their Asheville, NC site was being moved to San Jose, and we were required to backup and move our own stuff.

    Not only that, we were required to notify them in order to get our details for our new server.

    WTF? Less than a months notice, no help moving things or even getting new IP addresses?

    So, anyway, we back up our stuff and send them the email asking for our new server details.

    Two days later, nothing.

    Massive f**king FAIL, this is something complete amateur n00bs would do. Now I really wonder what the true story is behind the move.

    “Dear valued customer” my a**, you can call me “Unhappy Former Customer”.

    April 18, 2011 @ 1:33 am | Reply
    • P.S. BTW, we were getting less than 100Kbs during our backup to another server on a fat pipe. Took forever, nearly 12 hours.

      April 18, 2011 @ 1:36 am | Reply
    • P.P.S. 17Apr, today, is supposed to be the final day for their Asheville “datacenter”.

      April 18, 2011 @ 1:40 am | Reply
      • Yes, Ashville, NC does have a datacenter. A couple of them I believe. Both government and public/private as well. :)

        April 27, 2011 @ 3:34 pm | Reply
  27. ramo:

    I have been using them for over a year. About 2 weeks ago (after the forced move, see bitmonki above) the vps was suspended. Raised a ticket, commented on the ticket about 3 or 4 times, and I haven’t gotten a response. Two weeks, 4 comments on a ticket and no response. Forget them, the absolute lack of service is unacceptable.

    April 27, 2011 @ 2:24 pm | Reply
    • Matt:

      I have always had a pretty good luck/experience with 2host, the network can be pretty splotchy at times but it usually comes back up. Sales tickets are fast, but I haven’t really needed anything else.

      With the way a lot of companies run their ticketing system the more you reply to the ticket before getting an answer the further down in the stack it will go. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened here. :/

      April 27, 2011 @ 4:21 pm | Reply
      • ramo:

        That doesn’t make any sense. More comments, less likely to do anything about the ticket?

        Anyway, they finally responded after I mentioned they were forcing me to go somewhere else.

        April 27, 2011 @ 10:58 pm | Reply
  28. Mykeul:

    Hello,

    The support does NOT answer for 1 month now, I think it is nearly dead.
    The VPS seems more and more slow too (IO & bandwidth).

    Mykeul

    April 28, 2011 @ 8:41 am | Reply
  29. I can also comment on the forced move here – but in a pretty positive note. I sent in a ticket, about a half day later got new server details, configured it to my liking, and no other problems.

    Actually, I even went as far as to test running transmission on it for a few (legal) torrents. Downloaded a couple ISO’s in minutes.

    April 30, 2011 @ 1:22 am | Reply
    • John:

      Chuck, the migration was quite smooth but there is a huge problem with reverse DNS. Several customers including me are on 178.18.18 subnet which has been blacklisted in Blackhole21 spam database. To remove it we need to have a valid reverse DNS. However, this functionality in the 2host Solus panel is not configured properly (or they do not have access to the datacentre ARPA?). Our tickets asking to fix this important issue have been left unanswered for a week now. If the problem is not resolved in a reasonable time, I believe we have the legal right to terminate the service and ask for a refund no matter what their ToS say as the conditions on 2host side have changed. I have extended my VPS for another year in Feb 2011 having 280 days of uptime and functional reverse DNS.

      April 30, 2011 @ 3:38 am | Reply
      • Odd – I never used my VPS for mail, so I never had this issue. I only use it watching Hulu from home in Canada. Good luck though – I can see how much of a pain that would be.

        April 30, 2011 @ 3:40 am | Reply
        • John:

          We do not use it for mail. Having IP blacklisted may affect your VPS in many ways.

          April 30, 2011 @ 3:55 am | Reply
  30. User:

    Support disappears for a week. No email contact. No live chat. No support terminal. No support ticketing.

    I was left in the dark when I needed help the most!

    May 10, 2011 @ 9:23 pm | Reply
    • User:

      also… their previous Ashenville datacenter have several downtimes which I happen to catch during a client meeting. Who knows how may other times it actually was offline. Their migration to San Jose was ok. Speeds better now. But I have officially ended our relationship, because they must have really poor management and cannot provide the level of support I require – along with their lack of minimal support (1 week down time) without prior notifications.

      May 10, 2011 @ 9:28 pm | Reply
  31. tom:

    2host sucks. It offers you good specs for cheap prices, but its network based in Ashenville is the slowest I ever used.

    Stay away.

    June 2, 2011 @ 2:02 am | Reply
  32. Donsaeed:

    Hello
    I want to install pptpd and xen vps have this error :
    Iptables v1.3.5: can’t initialize iptables table `filter’: iptables who? (do you need to insmod?)
    Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.
    Please check ,
    Support say bullshit.it say :
    Here are instructions on how to change install APF Firewall for your VPS:
    Install APF Firewall

    July 16, 2011 @ 9:07 pm | Reply
  33. One VPS offline at Node xen42

    hello, I found my vps offline. but can not to boot it.
    please help me . thank you.

    folwin.com (178.18.18.203)
    Status Offline Hostname folwin.com
    IP Address 178.18.18.203 Operating System CentOS 5.6 64Bit Xen
    IPv4 Address 1 IPv6 Address 0
    Node xen42 Bandwidth 9.77 TB
    Disk Space 20 GB Memory 256 MB
    Virtualization Type
    (Xen PV)
    Swap 64 MB

    October 1, 2011 @ 3:00 pm | Reply

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