It all began back in February when DireVPS, a subsidiary of OpenITC, began offering 4GB OpenVZ VPS for $6.10 per month. At the time, many users were calling into question the authenticity of the offer. Prior to this offer the highest amount of ram on a vps we had offered was 2GB. Many of the companies providing 2GB plans eventually deadpooled.
Since that offer, we have featured a handful of other hosts selling high ram (4GB) servers. Selling this much ram at this price requires overselling – something that these hosts have never hidden. Whilst the term overselling sends a shiver down many peoples spine, it can actually be a good thing. Without overselling these plans would ultimately not be feasible. However, when overselling is not properly managed it can cause many problems.
A few months on, it is apparent that these plans are in fact not gimmicks. However the perception that these plans are still lingers. Therefore we have spent a bit of time analysing some of these plans, with the intention of showing you what’s currently available for your $7. How do these servers perform? Click ‘more’ to find out.
| AT – WaveRide 4GB ($6.5) | IT – OVerZold 5GB ($6.9) | NL – OpenVZ.io 4GB ($6.8) | UK – DireVPS 4GB ($6.1) |
 + Plusses:
– Minuses: |  + Plusses:
– Minuses: |  + Plusses:
– Minuses: |  + Plusses:
– Minuses: |
The four hosts above are the major players in the high ram VPS market. Interestingly enough, they’re all european based. Despite the cheap hardware and cheap bandwidth of America, there is only one provider offering 4GB+ VPS in America. As this provider consistently receives poor reviews, we took the executive decision not to feature them in the post until they’ve ironed out any problems that they face.
WaveRide are a subsidiary of EDIS GmbH, and began providing high ram in April 2013. According to website, they decided to launch Waveride so that they could “provide advanced linux professionals with reliable, extremely low-cost OpenVZ vps containers, on… enterprise grade hardware”. Whilst EDIS are known for their global network, these plans are currently only available in Vienna, Austria. These plans are entirely unmanaged and unsupported.
Initially when WaveRide launched, and I obtained a server, there was quite a bit of downtime due to hardware problems. In the end, WaveRide bought a brand new node online and migrated everyone across. This solved the stability issues. After that, downtime was seldom. The VPS performed well, with I/O consistently around 130MB/s and download speeds into the 30MB/s range. I never ran into any issues with bursting the CPU or eating into the ram. See their terms before buying.
OVerZold are a subsidiary of Prometeus/IperWeb, who have won our top provider polls on the last three occasions. OVerZold launched on LEB in March 2013, offering 5GB OpenVZ VPS plans in Milan, Italy. With the demand of these plans, and the lack of IPv4 available in europe, they quickly sold out. Unfortunately the 5GB plans may not return at these prices, but some 4GB plans are available on their website.
My server with OVerZold performed well when I bench marked it. I/O was on average in the 250MB/s range and download/upload speeds averaged 88MB/s. OVerZold are running on the Intel E5-2620, and like WaveRide you also have access to 6 CPU Cores. Reviews on their posts have had nothing but good things to say about them. As with WaveRide, do check their terms before buying.
OpenVZ.io are a subsidiary of Iniz, formerly StormVZ. They only began to offer large ram servers last month. Iniz are owned by Web Phase Limited, a UK private limited company. Like OVerZold and WaveRide, they too are using enterprise grade hardware. There website states that they try their best to maintain their nodes at enterprise level to ensure abusers don’t jump aboard.
When I put my 4GB OpenVZ plan through it’s paces, it performed well. With their network, I could easily get 40~MB/s in both upload and download. I/O was consistently around the 140MB/s mark. Looking at their offer thread, multiple people mention they’ve been suspended for high io/cpu/load. Just how high wasn’t clear.
DireVPS are a subsidiary of OpenITC. Whilst we have never featured them on LowEndBox, they were launched by Sean back in February on LowEndTalk. Being the first provider to offer so much resources for under $7, there was a lot of disbelief that the offer was actually real. I think the British Sarcasm, most notably in Dire, confused people. Despite offering this amount of ram, they initially didn’t sell well due to the scepticism.
When we tested DireVPS, IO was actually very good at 280MB/s+ consistently. Whilst the network was limited to 100Mbit, it performed decently (although at times did get overloaded). We were able to use pretty much all of our ram allocation for long periods without any problems.
I’m not sure I’d recommend hosting anything critical on any of these servers without thoroughly testing. Unfortunately these kind of services can attract abusers and DDoS attacks which would negatively impact anything important that you’re hosting. As I’ve mentioned in a few places, please do read the hosts terms before you sign up as it will save both you and them a headache. All of these providers have their pluses and minuses, do research more to find the provider most suitable for you.
- How To Create a DNS Server On Ubuntu 18.04 - July 10, 2019
- How To Create a DNS Server On Debian Stretch - June 27, 2019
- How To Install and Use A Plex Media Server On Raspbian Stretch - June 17, 2019
i love prometeus, very very stable !
Somehow LetBox is left behind. 5GB RAM for $7. Sold out, though.
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/letbox-7-5120mb-206-months-2048mb-openvz-vps-in-dallas-texas/
Maybe OverZold is gonna reopen their promotion after seeing this post? :D
Ya, i see that too :(, We will have new stock as soon as possible, Now We working with some Additional free services.
Prometeus is the best! I love them! + I love EDIS, but EDIS in other services much expencive.
I have the Prometeus OverZold 5GB since the offer until now, and will continue to keep it :)
Thanks to Uncle Salvatore and M for their great works
Interesting article Liam.
I was a little sceptical about these sorts of offers when they came out and got in to some heated debates about the the whole overselling of ram to this degree however it seems to have worked out well so credit where it is due to the hosts.
Now that a script is floating about to consistently use/reserve your unused Ram on OpenVZ to make sure you really are getting what you pay for I expect some issues for the Ram racers if it becomes a popular practice, it will probably never cause any issues I guess.
As a host I liked how completely honest and up front direvps was about everything but I can understand why it would be off putting to end users, they really are not doing anything different to the other 3, they are just being ultra transparent.
Great article, would be nice to see a similar one done on KVM and on Xen.
>Great article, would be nice to see a similar one done on KVM and on Xen.
Will do. Also with ‘ultra’ lowend vps 32 and 64mb. The big one was first purely because of what I was currently renting.
Would definitely be nice to see both sides of the spectrum.
Anthony perhaps considered it to be unreasonable to mention this by himself, so I’ll do it for him :)
AnthonySmith’s Inception Hosting currently runs a 2GB Xen offer in the US, which as far as I know currently is the only offer of such high RAM Xen still within the LEB price range.
Some of us become disillusioned with OpenVZ and decide to refrain from ever ordering OVZ-based VPSes in the future, so a cheap Xen option with a lot of RAM is certainly very nice to have.
+1 for 2GB Xen!
It comes with 6 CPU cores, too! I think it’s pretty rare to find LEB with more than 4 CPU cores.
Thanks rm I did not want to be crass :) I actually really do like the article and will be watching this ram race closely.
Points of interest are that 3 of the 4 mentioned have actually names the service either around poor quality or around the idea of overselling with the exception of Iniz, all of them have considerably lower unix bench scores than even a 256mb xen package I was doing 2+ years ago on i7 950’s
These servers have their place though, I have had my mind changed on the validity of them, most of them have at least made some effort even if not directly to point out that they are knowingly overselling by a massive amount, I would personally (as a consumer) rather see it done like this than just to claim it is not over sold while raid 0’ing a couple of SSD’s to keep up with the swapping and pretend your offering a premium service.
I/O and CPU performance are important metrics to consider, yes.
However, I would probably be less reluctant to run things on a “big amount of fixed RAM but severely oversold” host, rather than “reasonable amount of RAM with about the same ‘vSwap'”… because the former won’t randomly kill processes before reaching the hard limit, but the latter definitely will.
We mention these are heavily oversold and we will *try* maintain the node to a healthy standard.
(Footer)
http://openvz.io
What is the detail of the offer?
Search LET for “Inception Hosting”.
big big big.I like this information.
Well, at least these plans don’t attempt to offer the ridiculously useless OpenVZ “vSwap”/bursting RAM allocations. Anything that suddenly makes memory allocations fail when the amount of free RAM appears to be plentiful — triggering oom_killer — is utter nonsense at best, and a huge danger to running systems at worst.
(Which is why I have generally opted only for KVM or Xen plans; there, I can actually manage overcommit through an explicit small chunk of swap, if absolutely necessary.)
I’ve read that WaveRide isn’t good for Hosting Minecraft servers, because they use slower i5 Cores. Which is probably the best to host this?
Most use E5 (not i5) to cater for the large amount of memory. In most cases it’s more I’m running a game server… I need more CPU than it being an actual problem.
E3 would be faster per core, but is limited to physically 32GB of RAM so might be more of a problem in these huge RAM situations.
That means I shouldn’t use this providers for gameservers? Especially not for minecraft servers?
It depends if your game heavily uses CPU. Some don’t actually. Sometimes it’s more unoptimized instances more than anything.
Waveride (EDIS) uses most recent E5 CPUs in its nodes.
>> model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 0 @ 2.30GHz
>> number of cores : 24
Cheers,
Gerhard
Great for those who need high RAM. I tried to use Overzold with minecraft and then keep my map and anything that needed IO in a ramdisk, but then the bottleneck was CPU. My VPS I use for websites is Iniz and it’s awesome but they are strict on your CPU usage and ban Minecraft.
Oh and I want to note Iniz performance is awesome, here is my serverbear: http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2013/01/03/diCafLNYmvKiGuRj
I have just their 2 GB package though
– WaveRide is listed here (instead of Edis)
– OVerZold is listed here (instead of Iperweb)
– DireVPS is listed here (instead of OpenITC)
Come to think of it, shouldn’t OpenVZ.io being the brand listed here, instead of Iniz?
Maybe Liam will fix it :)
Yes they separated the two. OpenVZ.io is netherlands only, Iniz has american locations. All these “big guns” seem to be offshore.
It should! Did PM Liam over at LET yesterday night about this
Tired of long articles. :)
TL;DR:
Read the article :-D
I wrote a review for DireVPS here:
http://www.96mb.com/96mb-low-end-vps-community-member-review-part-3-direvps-4gb-ram-openvz/
thanks, was looking for that; joke or no joke sean @Dire started a new trend, only problem was people did not take him seriously at first, let’s hope they do now
it is a nice product
INIZ (OpenVZ.IO) Review: http://vpsboard.com/topic/888-iniz-1-month-5-days-oh-god/#entry13904
Pure quality.. I may grab a SSD-Cached aswell :)
Prometeus OverZold brand is better than most other OVZ providers.
DireVPS was ok, but didn’t wanna enable some ipt-modules that are commonly enabled on OVZ nodes. If it weren’t for that, I’d most definately be an OVZ customer of them still.
Not tried Edis’ version, but I’m very happy with my .at kvm.
While prometeus and OpenITC make a joke (and money i hope) of this, others mentioned here don’t, which says a lot imo.
Having deployed ovz myself, I can only conclude that I will be dropping all except a very few.
At the crazy low prices offered it would be ridiculous to expect to run a business on one of these slices.
I jumped on one 4gram offer recently, just to see. Nice to have that much RAM but it of little use if there are no cpu cycles left. But it is still useful – as a testing environment for my scripts and for storage. Can’t really complain at the price – you get what you pay for.
But I must +1 the recommendations for Inception Hosting. EU plans may seem a tad pricier than others, but it’s realistic (yet still inexpensive). The 5 VPS I rent from them them have performed flawlessly for the last 7 months. The Inception 215Mb VPS easily outperforms the bargain 4gb slice.
As I’m growing a business I’d feel fully confident to go for a dedicated server from Inception. Anthony seems a no-bullshit guy and I like that.
I’m going to put this out in the open again, you missed Letbox.
And I’m kind of disappointed with the ratings relating to DireVPS. They’re not that bad, just because they don’t often openly mention they have the backing of some popular IT company.
@Jimmy
> I’m going to put this out in the open again, you missed Letbox.
Did you read the whole thing?
> Despite the cheap hardware and cheap bandwidth of America, there is only one provider offering 4GB+ VPS in America. As this provider consistently receives poor reviews, we took the executive decision not to feature them in the post until they’ve ironed out any problems that they face.
Did it not occur to you that this part is exactly about Letbox?
I’ll just take it as to I’m a idiot sometimes.
@rm If you have no Knowledge about our status let me keep on update.
1: The network issue we have has been fixed in just few days and we have no control in this delay when it become handle by network support. As far as i know network issues need tests to figure out where is problem exactly.
2: We have 2 bad review but it not our fault and we will do our best and learn from our past to avoid any issue in future. The client never read our terms of use and what we do allow.
They are both abuse at our node and we proof with screenshots. If someone have any issue with letbox i will be happy explain with proof of screenshots.@Liam will write review about us soon.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
And i’d thanks @Liam for give me opportunity.
I have a 6GB VPS wit INIZ and the performance is very good :)
It should be even better now :)
We now use 10 drive array in RAID10 and new Dual E5-2650 (8 core) CPUs!
Performance on the Openvz.io nodes is definitely even better after yesterday’s move to Amsterdam :)
— /tmp (simfs /vz/private/xxxx) ioping statistics —
10 requests completed in 9001.4 ms, 13908 iops, 54.3 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/0.1/0.1/0.0 ms
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, 1.5136 s, 709 MB/s
How can VAT be a minus, they’re a law abiding company, so they pay VAT… surely that should be removed as in the EU VAT is a legality…
Just to make it sure, we do offer OVerZold to existing customers in good standing, it is just stock is too low to be offered to everyone and we also limit abuse.
It would be nice to see this updated with new offers!
None of them provide DDoS protection service?
Would not recommend, Prometeus.net / IperWeb.com / OverZold.com
Closed my account and would not even allow me
to BackUp my account after more than 2-Years of
paying them with punctuality on time ever time !
When I mention that I would post to LowEndBox.com
about it is when they terminated my account from suspended
to terminated, very NAZI-Like / GOD-Like attitude, STAY AWAY !