William from RapidXen has updated me with their exclusive offer to the LowEndBox users. You can either use promo code 27EZXQ420 for 50% off first month, or promo code YXQ187NH3 for 20% off recurring discount. Same as their previous offer but coupon code changed for tracking purposes. That brings down the price to $5.99/month for the following Xen VPS:
- 128MB memory/256MB swap
- 5GB storage
- 2Mbps unmetered bandwidth at 95 percentile
- Xen/Custom panel
RapidXen has been around since early 2008 and they have a good team down there. You can choose either Los Angeles or Chicago.
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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
> 2Mbps unmetered bandwidth at 95 percentile
Ah, I remember once considering RapidXen, and being put off by this scheme of pricing, among other things.
(Other things being their European plans in “beta” and more expensive + lower spec than the US).
Anyway, IMO this “percentile” thing is difficult to understand and calculate in advance, and just feels like a shady mouse trap practice to land you right into an additional bandwidth charge in case your site gets posted to Slashdot or the like.
I very much prefer the usual and honest “XX GB per month”, or plain “X Mbps” with no strings attached.
@rm i was lookig at this too, didn’t understand the
>># 2Mbps unmetered bandwidth at 95 percentile
Can anyone explain it?
If im not wrong its you get 2Mbps (eq ~200kb/s) * 3600(sec to hour) *24 (hour) *3x (30-31) days a month /1024 (to mb) /1024 (to gb) eq 510 gb per month.
The key here is that its normaly a 2mbit line but you can burst it (as you can do with ram on open vz)?
Or is this completly wrong ?
@c/rm: What 95% means is that you can fully burst the line 5% of the time, i.e. you will be able to use up to 100Mbps for 36 hours (split however your VPS uses it throughout a 30-day term). That’s about 1.5 TB if you completely saturate the line for 36 hours straight. It’s *a lot* more resilient to short bursts of extremely high traffic such as that Slashdotting will bring. If you read their website, it’s enforced by throttling – e.g. if you exceed 36 hours of >2Mbps usage, your port will be restricted to 2Mbps for the rest of the term and you *won’t* be charged for overages.
@InsDel
thanks that explains alot
So many poor offers lately, the ram is ok for a xen virt, but what’s up with 5gb space and some futuristic bw measurement lol? I’d understand 5GB on an SSD, but on a SADA drive it is such a humiliation -.-.
@InsDel
their “95th%tile unmetered usage (What is this)” link at http://www.rapidxen.net/plans says:
> the samples are sorted from highest to lowest, and the top 5% (which equal to approximately 36 hours of a 30-day billing cycle) of data is thrown away. The next highest measurement becomes the ‘billable utilization’ for the month.
> For example, if a website is Slashdotted for an entire weekend (48 hours) then billing would be based on a higher rate just because of that single weekend.
So it does sound like you have no control over how much you will have to pay for bandwidth with this scheme.
Based on their plan page it looks like they automatically shape you down to fit your 95th percentile profile (+QoS) if you start to average over 2.
@Tom: You call this a “poor offer”, but the modest (i.e. not-so-prone-to-abuse) resources combined with, if I’m reading their website correctly, storage on a separate SAN system probably makes this one of the higher-performing offers for people who value high-speed disk i/o, the usual bottleneck of VPSes. If true, that also probably explains the relatively modest amount of disk space – SAN == $$$.
This would, among other things, make a great IRC server… something explicitly allowed on their website.
Is the coupon only for monthly payments or also for yearly?
And is it only for the lowest spec VPS or also for the others?
@Tom: how many of those LEB offers include ipv6 addresses? They offer a full /64 with it. If you search on LEB you’ll see that you’ll won’t get thay many (BuyVM/BurstNet/LightWave/Neutrino (who never was able to deliver their offer)/HitMe.pl (who was basicly a scam))
I still have not tried a VPS on SAN. I am a bit wary by the latency of SAN.
Anyway. 95 percentile — I thought many transit actually bill this way. At least quite a while ago and it is definitely not some kind of “futuristic” way of bandwidth measurement.
There’s SAN and SAN. If you do it right then you’re really unlikely to do it within a $5.95/month cost.
SAN is a word that seems to get loosely applied to remote storage eg Linux box with a few disks running iSCSI over gigabit ethernet. I think VPS.NET use a true SAN backend on their platform.
@LEB Admin — I’m a fan of your some gr8 article about server setup. Is that possible for you to write something about “How to setup VPN with a XEN VPS”
@Omio: http://www.google.com/search?q=How+to+setup+VPN+with+a+XEN+VPS&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Ihave had one of there VPS’s for a while and i have found it verry responsive even when it in swap fairly badly (i have it overlaoded running my email server wqith antispam/virus checking)
if you would like Ican run some tests on it and give you the results for performance.
@phillip – Care to run a disk IO check? I’d be keen to see how the SAN performs.
Just run:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k; sync
And report the output.
> Just run:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k; sync
A better way would be:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
Also, if the VPS is slow, writing 1 GB (which is what the command does) could take a really long time, so I’d try with a smaller amount first, e.g. count=2k. BTW don’t forget to delete the file called “test” afterwards. :)
Both of those commands should give virtually identical results. Note that I’m not doing conv=sync it uses the unix sync command to write the buffers. If the VPS is so slow that writing 1GB takes a ‘really long time’, then I’d definately be looking at finding an alternate VPS provider.
A single disk SATA drive will give about 50-60MB/s, so even at this speed, it should only take 20 seconds!
[code]philderneast@Quickweb:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k; sync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 27.3876 s, 39.2 MB/s
philderbeast@RapidXen:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k; sync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 39.68 s, 27.1 MB/s[/code]
there is a comparison of my 2 VPS’s hosts and user names have been changed for obvious reasons.
i remember seeing LEA using another command to show how long this took doing what but i cant seem to find it now. as i think the fact that i’m fairly badly in swap *may* be affecting this.
> it uses the unix sync command to write the buffers.
And that’s the problem with your variant, in it the “sync” is unaccounted for in the timing/speed that dd writes, as it happens only after dd is finished, and the benchmark is skewed towards faster than it really takes. So it is better to use “conv=” syncs, because they are done *by dd* and the time spent doing them is counted towards the total time that dd prints.
RapidXen guys know what they are doing
Xen hosts have very recent kernels (2.6.32/2.6.35), which is pretty rare.
Also, you get full /64 IPv6 allocation with IPv6 rDNS delegated on request.
@Anonymous guy talking about SAN vs SAN or whatever: I assure you, we have a properly engineered SAN backend with full enterprise analytics and other capabilities. We also do not use iSCSI at all. We did, however, engineer it ourselves based on industry-standard protocols and highend supermicro/brocade gear because traditional SAN providers did not fit our needs exactly.
The main issue with custom SANs are the lack of engineering expertise and the lack of a capable I/O flow analysis platform. We have both of these things, which allow us to deal with I/O flow problems as they arise (such as, e.g. when a VPS goes totally crazy and starts making hundreds of thousands of I/O requests to a swapfile they created on the filesystem).
Companies like Hostway and organisations like NASA and MIT have worked with the same vendor we worked with to bring the necessary third-party engineering expertise to do the initial SAN build out in late 2008.
Get one with them yesterday, beside invoice, nothing hear from them, I tried to contact them with email, still no reply
@dingzhi If you pay with Google Checkout it can take longer to process than Paypal due to the way Google Checkout holds funds. If you have questions, open a support ticket or join the irc channel. http://rapidxen.net/chat-live
[root@vps ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k; sync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.38623 seconds, 775 MB/s
Please read the article I just wrote about the proper use of ‘dd’ for benchmarking: http://romanrm.ru/en/dd-benchmark
Thanks for your article man!