LowEndBox and LowEndTalk are full of providers from all over the world; there’s a provider out there for just about everyone.
Hosting providers, like shoes, are not one size fits all.
Thus, a need for different hosts in different countries — for various reasons — latency, politics, and beyond.
One of the countries that contains a particularly large amount of providers on LEB/LET is Romania.
Romanian providers are known around here for providing very cheap deals, mostly just because they can afford to based on their location.
But, they’ve also received a bit of a mixed reception. For good reason.
The community is still a bit jaded by another huge Romanian provider @cociu or HostSolutions closing shop abruptly and leaving his clients who paid for years out on the hook, with no service to show for it.
That event led to two new Romanian faces showing up:
- Calin from iHostArt.com
- Florian from Hazi.ro
Both of which, by the way, operate their own Romanian data centers.
(Yes, they’re just built differently in Romania.)
Ever since they’ve shown up they’ve both slowly continued to grow, becoming somewhat more mature of operations.
That being said in terms of iHostArt.com specifically, a few months back I messaged Calin recommending focusing on storage servers, seeing there was a clear missing space in the gap of Cociu.
Then lo and behold, I received a picture of a stack of hard drives in my Discord messages from Calin:
In return, that led to me exchanging a couple of questions with Calin…
Calin’s Pivot & His Plans for the Future of iHostArt.com
SirFoxy: “Is iHostArt.com just you right now?”
Calin: “Yes, one person no other employees. One person, 2k+ customers 😄 fun fact, my city has approximately 8k people living in it.”
SirFoxy: “Where is that at?”
Calin: “Orastie City, Romania where our data center is at.”
SirFoxy: “Do you keep up with Cociu? That’s where he was from too, no?”
Calin: “No, he’s from Oradea. It’s the same region, but another city. Oradea is a very big city, 300k people are living over there.”
A. it’s me B. it’s cociu — 300 Kilometers distance, a very large distance.
SirFoxy: “Do you still plan on self-hosting or are you interested in moving to a data center? I thought I saw you mention you were interested in colocation.”
Calin: “I want to build 5 PB of storage, after I finish building and I make back some of my investment, I plan to start looking at colocation. The hassle of keeping servers in your own DC is way too much.”
SirFoxy: “For sure, gotcha.”
Calin: “I’m very happy because LEB/LET and other forums have helped me grow from a simple game hosting project with wooden racks to what it is now. I plan in the next 3-4 months to make a video about the story of iHostArt, because a lot has happened since we opened, and we have more good things coming soon 😄. I am very appreciative of LEB/LET and the community.”
SirFoxy: “For sure, keep it up man, happy for your success. I’d like to get an offer from you for LEB, but before that, I have two more final questions for you: what have you been up to specifically lately, and what are your plans for iHostArt.com?”
Calin: “We have recently started investing in new hardware to improve services, and in the last 3 months we have built 1.2 PB of raw data. We hope that in the next 12-16 months we will build a total of 5 PB of date, and we hope that in the next year, we will put these servers to colocation in a Tier 1/2 data center that relies as much as we do on privacy and follows our same principals like ignoring DMCA.”
There you have it!
What Does iHostArt.com’s ‘DMCA Ignored’ Romanian Data Center Look Like?
Your Romanian storage VPS would end up being on one of these servers:
Wait, my bad, wrong post. Moving on…
You can see a YouTube short of them powered on here.
The node specifications are as follows:
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon e5-2630 v4
RAM: 128 GB DDr4 ECC
28x 14 TB Raid6
1x 960 GB SSD Enterprise for boot
2.5 Gbps port speed
Now for the offers…
Romanian Storage VPS Starting at $42 for 4TB Semi-Annually
VPS 1
- 4 TB HDD RAID 6 (20 GB SSD for boot/operating system)
- 25 MB/s I/O
- 4.3k IOPs
- 1 dedicated CPU
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- VNC access
- 100 Mbit unlimited dedicated port speed
- Port 25 is blocked permanently
- 1 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
- Full KVM virtualization
- Full root access
- Multiple 32/64 bit OS
- Located in Romania
- Allowed: Seedboxes, Plex, torrents, adult content
- Delivery within 10 days after the order
- $42.00 USD / 6 months
VPS 2
- 7 TB HDD RAID 6 (20 GB SSD for boot/operating system)
- 30 MB/s I/O
- 5.7k IOPs
- 2 dedicated CPU
- 1 dedicated IPv4
- VNC access
- 100 Mbit unlimited dedicated port speed
- Port 25 is blocked permanently
- 1 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
- Full KVM virtualization
- Full root access
- Multiple 32/64 bit OS
- Located in Romania
- Allowed: Seedboxes, Plex, torrents, adult content
- Delivery within 10 days after the order
- $30.00 USD / 3 months
For more high-storage servers, check here.
You can also check out the LowEndTalk offer thread here.
SirFoxy, That Sounds Great and All, but I’m a Benchmark Fiend…
No problem, friend. The first step is recognizing your problem.
That being said, I’m willing to feed your addiction:
This benchmark was done on a production server with “57 other servers” (Calin was specific about the 57 server part) for the VPS 1 plan, which does have limited disk speeds as shown above.
Is iHostArt.com the Right Storage VPS Provider for You?
iHostArt’s storage is great for things like backup, plex, seedboxes, and so on.
Calin definitely does care about his clients and wants to continue growing iHostArt.com the right way, but you should basically be looking at these storage VPSs as currently in the beta testing stage.
This is still a very new project, and full data loss is entirely possible.
Don’t me wrong either, for a lot of people these storage servers will get the job done, but just keep the above in mind while you’re using them.
These are a great value, and I think it’s worth rolling the dice on. Up to you to make that decision, though.
P.S. If you’re curious about where the featured image comes from…
It’s from Calin’s spectacular LET thread titled: “iHostART.Com – Make a meme with our company! Funny, Bad, Sadly, Any! And win 5.69 euros” — all credit goes to @hostaris for their wonderful work of art.
Related Posts:
- Path.net Seeks Discord Subpoena for Ex-Employee and Competitor’s Data - December 12, 2023
- Interviewing Christopher Cantwell - December 6, 2023
- Uptime Kuma: Your New Favorite Self-Hosted Uptime Monitoring Tool - December 1, 2023
It’s good to see all the spectrum of hosts. I have a soft spot for the little guy working hard to provide a service for others. Not personally interested in this host for the non-DCMA reasons, but just a reliable fast, and inexpensive place to do lots of… well whatever I want.
I have an order in the queue and will review once I get delivery and do some using/tests.
I am Hosting with this “company” and its still a mess!
My 1 TB VPS is since 2 Months Down, no Comments on my tickets.
Now All my VPS was moved to a new node, all DATA lost.
No Comments on Tickets, again.
Hello @Garlik it’s possible give us more details and possible please leave the ticket ID?We recently migrated VPS NAT and old black friday offers to new hardware (from ddr3 to DDr4) and notified customers by email with a new VPS (the old one remaining active for the next 2 weeks) for the client to migrate their data It is impossible to lose your data because the old VPS node is still active today
Regards,
Calin
This is ridiculous.
You will do a 2 Months Node Movement without notifing costumer and now i am waiting still 3 Weeks for DATA MIGRATion, nothing happend until today…
I am a new customer, and a fan so far for sure. Just got my storage VPS up and am getting it set up the way I want (Arch). So when I have it all up and tuned I will do a more technical review. But Calin seems like a class act if you don’t mind being a little off the beaten path, so to speak ;)