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Show off Your Low End Box

First of all, I am taking a short break for a week, because work has been really hectic (damn, I have a “real work” to feed my family). Meanwhile, feel free to occupy yourself here and at the new domain of my Low End Box forums — Low End Talk. It is running a current version of bbPress and is hosted on the same QuickWeb VPS as this blog. Feel free to continue the discussion there :)

And here is a question that I am thinking of throwing here for a while. I have been collecting and tracking hosting companies that provide “cheap roots” below a price point. We are getting providers from all over the place — some good, some bad. Some are still going, some have raised price, and some have since fallen into the dead pool. So next time when I have a small project that requires a new low end box — which provider from the ever growing list should I choose?

Here is an idea. Maybe we should have a list of “projects” — web sites, online stores, blogs, whatever that are actually hosted on low end providers, what their statistics is (amount of traffic, how busy the sites are, so no just-another-personal blog should apply), who they are currently hosting with and how long have they been with this low end provider. This is your show off time — tell us how 1337 you are with your memory optimization skillz, and stories on how your cheap VPS coped with being dugg/slashdotted.

I am making a start.

  • LowEndBox.com — hosted on QuickWeb.co.nz‘s 80MB Xen VPS in Softlayer/Dallas since a month ago (it’s a courtesy testing VPS so free for me, thanks to Joe @ QuickWeb)
  • 27k visitors/month and 92k page views/month according to Google Analytics
  • Only use ~1GB of disk space & 20GB/month of data.

Never been dugg/slashdotted although I dare to try that :)

Now, your turn, and I am heading back to work.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

58 Comments

  1. Paulmankipu:

    no back were never involved in this blog.

    July 23, 2010 @ 8:45 am | Reply
  2. Hello, this is a great idea.

    Looking forward for those results.

    Cheers

    July 23, 2010 @ 12:15 pm | Reply
  3. Yeah, having just purchased my first low end vps, I’m keen to see what kind of real world results we can get out of them! Anyone have any stats?

    July 23, 2010 @ 2:07 pm | Reply
  4. Because still no show off after such a long time, i will post my *low* traffic blog here :D
    http://www.seputarvps.info ( A blog about VPS, indonesian), en.seputarvps.info (incomplete english translation), murah.seputarvps.info ( cheap vps in indonesia & overseas, not uptodate).

    • These are my new wordpress blogs, the domain registered 1 month and a week ago, hosted in one VPS
    • For first month, it use $3/mo 64MB Xen HVM VPS from onexenvps.com. This is special plan after have some emails with them.
    • A week ago it move to $1.62 64MB OpenVz VPS from pingvps.com. This is their cheapest customizable package.
    • Just about 150 hits/day according to wordpress stats plugin.
    • Use 915MB data , don’t know about the bandwidth usage.

    Obviously never been slashdotted :)
    Will move one (maybe all )of the blogs to some 64MB Xen PV VPS.
    Sorry if my low traffic blogs disappointed you :)

    July 23, 2010 @ 3:31 pm | Reply
  5. IWTFI:

    150 hits / day?
    i’m jealous. i get less :(

    July 23, 2010 @ 3:39 pm | Reply
  6. earl:

    @bekanosky

    150 hits/day for a month old domain is not bad..

    July 23, 2010 @ 3:46 pm | Reply
  7. Note: 150 is total of 3 blogs :).
    But, i’m still happy in writing that blog. As C/system programmer, wordpress & PHP is like a magic for me

    July 23, 2010 @ 3:58 pm | Reply
  8. Using $4.33/mo 128MB XEN VPS from QuickWeb.co.nz

    Downloading and processing about half a million deleted-domain-name records per day and storing them in mysql 5.1 database. Using PHP5-CGI with Lighttpd. Just a personal, unimportant experiment that im doing for myself.

    July 23, 2010 @ 5:20 pm | Reply
  9. Nico:

    Off:
    I need something like 32M/64M, 3G space, 50G transfer, I will prepay USD12 anually. Someone?

    July 23, 2010 @ 7:25 pm | Reply
  10. I currently run a free image hosting site off a small VPS. http://www.freeimagehostingon.us
    Current Stats.
    Avg Hits a Day. 400,000
    Avg Bandwidth Usage a Day. 30GB’s
    Most popular day in July, Yesterday 2.3 Million Hits, 260GB’s traffic. Memory usage spiked at 140MB’s
    Avg Traffic 10Mbit Peak 45Mbit
    VPS Specs:
    CentOS 5
    LXAdmin
    Lighttpd
    256MB RAM
    VPS Provider: Ruby Ring Technologies

    July 23, 2010 @ 8:55 pm | Reply
  11. Subscribing to this topic :)

    July 23, 2010 @ 11:03 pm | Reply
  12. Almost all images (ca. 1GB) on my blog (www.slugsite.com) are served from static.slugsite.com, a 64MB (128MB burst) OpenVZ machine from a long, long-expired $6/mo promo from hostingincanada.com. It normally handles around 40,000 requests and moves 4-5GB per month, in a memory footprint of around 35MB. It’s survived a full slashdotting (3.5Mbps) without breaking a sweat, as well as several other sustained megabit-plus spikes in traffic. (Yay, four 1.6GHz Xeon CPU slices.)

    All sorts of other files on the same site are served from downloads.slugsite.com, a 128MB (256MB burst) VPS from VPS4Less. It’s the 7Euro/mo plan, from a discount promo from several years ago for 5 Euro/month. It sees about 7,500 requests per month, moving a total of about 8-12GB/mo, from a memory footprint of around 20MB. It regularly maxes out its unmetered 4Mbit connection.

    July 24, 2010 @ 4:44 am | Reply
  13. Heh guys. I can see that some are going against the “rule” here. You are supposed to be showing off your “low end” boxes, and those costs above $7/month does not count (well, the definition here anyway).

    July 24, 2010 @ 12:40 pm | Reply
  14. A fake open relay (like a /dev/null for spam), (was) hosted in vpslink, rented with the “EXCLUSIVE – 66% Off First 3 Months from VPSLink” coupon code in http://www.lowendbox.com. US$7.95 for 3 months.

    VPS spec: link-1. 64MB memory, 2.5GB disk space, 100GB monthly data. Xen-based.

    It collected more than 5 million spam messages for the 3 months I rented it. The 64MB memory didn’t present any problem, as I could swap to disk if necessary.

    July 25, 2010 @ 5:39 am | Reply
  15. If I posted my VPS info here, it would be the worst break of rule. So not stating the specifications;), I get about 120-150 uv for a day. Bad for a high end box. No? But some of my clients get more hits than me! :) lol

    July 25, 2010 @ 12:28 pm | Reply
  16. Vasya Pupkin:

    I am running MX, DNS, and TeamSpeak server on my 128MB/5GB (upgraded to 256MB/10GB) Xen VPS from 2HOST. Every day my mail.log size grows up to 25MB. Server is running for a month already and since I got it, there were a lot of problems. There was a long standing issue with packet loss spikes, which hopefully was fixed, though support never said what they did to fix the issue; two big outages, when server was not reachable for more than a hour, and several less significant issues. When there are no problems, it works good. So, I wouldn’t recommend anyone getting a VPS from 2HOST if you want a stable server.

    July 26, 2010 @ 7:45 am | Reply
  17. I have a box with 2Host too, 512MB XEN VPS on their so-called DELL servers (actually running Quad-core Optron processors which are like almost 1.5 yrs old). Had lots of issues in the start, network issue, downtimes, poor/late support replies. Can’t move to a stable XEON. No refund issued

    Anyway, Im Running SVN repos around 1GB in size, daily commits of about 25MB from different developers, a backup server that collects all backups from different VPS machines (via wget) and then upload them to my dedicated box in Canada via rsync.

    Cost: $7
    Will NOT recommend 2Host to anyone looking for a VPS.

    July 26, 2010 @ 7:55 am | Reply
  18. @LEA please remove advertisements from this thread please

    July 26, 2010 @ 7:56 am | Reply
  19. please remove advertisements from this thread please

    Yes Sir!

    Off-topics are gone now. Some I can’t really tell whether they are advertisements

    @Anthony — well I guess yours is an ad, as you are running both the free image hosting AND Ruby Ring Tech?

    July 26, 2010 @ 8:31 am | Reply
  20. Hey LEA,

    Does 1GB RAM count as lowend? :)

    Francisco

    July 26, 2010 @ 9:59 am | Reply
  21. @Francisco Dias
    If it’s under 7$/month, I guess “yes!”.

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:19 am | Reply
  22. @Anthony
    You get about 40k hits a day? But Alexa says your traffic rank is 2,156,056
    That is weird! I have more traffic rank than you for my website even it’s not 40k hits a day.

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:24 am | Reply
  23. KLIKLI:

    @Francisco & eSupun

    Criteria of low-end VPS are listed here:
    REF: http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki/listing-criteria

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:34 am | Reply
  24. Alexa will only count visitors who are using the Alexa tool bar if I’m not mistaken.

    July 26, 2010 @ 1:41 pm | Reply
  25. @LEO, Yes and No, maybe a small shameless plug but a truth in what you asked us to post about. Please if need to remove the company reference do so, don’t need/want to break any rules.

    @eSupun, not 40k about 250k http://freeimagehostingon.us/stats remember image hosts get very different types of traffic, we don’t get many people coming to our site, but linking to files inside the site.

    July 26, 2010 @ 2:11 pm | Reply
  26. Actually it’s a laptop (the screen is dead and removed, keyboard too) Celeron 366MHz, 64MB of RAM and a 6,4GB hard drive. The laptop don’t have any ethernet port so I put a 100Mbps (more really like 25Mbps due to processor) card in pcmcia slot.

    Big advantage is that the battery, though it’s old, is still functioning and give ~30 minutes of autonomy in case of power outage.

    I use this box for monitoring servers and doing SSH-tunnels. Works great and low power consumption.

    July 26, 2010 @ 2:44 pm | Reply
  27. C:

    So my first shell i got 34 hits today. not mutch but i haven’t moved my primary sites yet.
    its the low end xen package at webangel that i got from LEB.

    The second one is the rackvm posted a few days ago, after i posted the 100mb.test file in one comment i’ve gotten alot of hits for that file (and also my webroot), alot of jp/ch sites posted it as a test ip
    root@shell2:~# grep “100mb.test” /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log | grep “26/Jul/2010” | wc -l
    49

    Still no projects on them =)

    So what am im doing on my shells ? well im going to make a bigger Nagios distributed cluster.
    Im currently got about 3 servers for my workplace, and im going to add personal nodes to them to cover more contrys.

    July 26, 2010 @ 6:23 pm | Reply
  28. I’m paying $3.99 for a new blog I’ve recently started off. Around 100 hits a day. Running Lighttpd, MySQL and PHP-5 using 50MB RAM. VPS has 256MB RAM/384 Burstable – 10Mbps unmeterdd bandwidth burstable to 100Mbps with Spacerich Networks.

    Jack.

    July 26, 2010 @ 8:48 pm | Reply
  29. IWTFI:

    @Jack your site/ip?

    July 26, 2010 @ 8:53 pm | Reply
  30. July 26, 2010 @ 10:26 pm | Reply
  31. IWTFI:

    and where you got your vps?

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:38 pm | Reply
  32. SpaceRich Network (http://www.spacerich.com)

    How come you ask?

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:38 pm | Reply
  33. IWTFI:

    i was just wondering where’s your blog hosted.
    thanks for your replays though.

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:47 pm | Reply
  34. No problem!

    Do you have any sites yourself?

    Jack.

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:48 pm | Reply
  35. IWTFI:

    not a public one :(

    pff must start a blog.!!

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:50 pm | Reply
  36. I would gladly follow your posts!

    Jack xD

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:51 pm | Reply
  37. IWTFI:

    :D btw you are missing the mcrypt for pma. you can install it with “apt-get install php5-mycrypt” or install phpmyadmin with “apt-get install phpmyadmin”. then you can see it if you type “http://yoursite-or-serverip/phpmyadmin”.

    July 26, 2010 @ 10:53 pm | Reply
  38. Thanks – But it told me that the package isn’t found.

    Jack xD

    July 26, 2010 @ 11:06 pm | Reply
  39. IWTFI:

    woops it’s “apt-get install php5-mcrypt”.
    but better install phpmyadmin

    July 26, 2010 @ 11:07 pm | Reply
  40. Thanks – That worked.

    Jack.

    July 26, 2010 @ 11:08 pm | Reply
  41. earl:

    Would be interesting to know if anyone is making money on their lowendbox.. well at least enough to pay for the VPS?

    July 27, 2010 @ 7:13 am | Reply
  42. @earl
    I have made money from my lowendbox. Not that already mentioned, but from 128MB Xen-PV VPS from chhost that cost me $3.7/mo from their custom plan.
    It is C++ application that can’t be mentioned here.
    Still small amount of money from 2 customers, hoping get more customer :)

    July 27, 2010 @ 9:15 am | Reply
  43. Pascal:

    @earl
    I use my lowend VPS as API server for a paid iPhone app (among other things) which has been sold over 12000 times. 192MB Xen VPS from yisp.nl.

    July 27, 2010 @ 11:28 am | Reply
  44. @Pascal – What is your App called?

    July 27, 2010 @ 11:28 am | Reply
  45. Pascal:

    It’s called “Pin!”, it’s an app for the Dutch App Store only. It displays the nearest ATM machines.

    July 27, 2010 @ 11:36 am | Reply
  46. Nice xD

    July 27, 2010 @ 11:41 am | Reply
  47. I’ve tested a lot of low end hosting provider, find myself always returning to either Thrust:VPS or RackVM. Their service is really good and support is also very good. My website, http://freedomvpn.info is hosted with Thrust:VPS on a not so low end box. My VPN service is also hosted with those guys. I also offer seedbox hosting if anyone is interested. Just check us out!!

    July 27, 2010 @ 3:43 pm | Reply
  48. LEA said no advertisements … That’s why your comment was removed in the first place.

    July 27, 2010 @ 4:08 pm | Reply
  49. Freedom of speech lets me say what ever whenever wherever I want. If you don’t like it, well that’s to bad for you! The only one that can “censore” me here is LEA. And even if he does I’ll be back again. That’s is exactly why people need a VPN account, so we can bypass stupid restrictions put in place by stupid square minded people. Apparently you like such restriction! Fine by me. If you like big brother sticking it up your arse…

    July 27, 2010 @ 4:18 pm | Reply
  50. Do free VPSs count?

    July 27, 2010 @ 5:56 pm | Reply
  51. IWTFI:

    where you got freevps?

    July 27, 2010 @ 6:20 pm | Reply
  52. Freedom-vpn-sucks:

    FreedomVPN has freedom..lol.. to make himself look like an obnoxious ass who thinks being rude to people when representing his company is a smart move

    July 28, 2010 @ 1:07 am | Reply
  53. Great job guys making these lowend boxes work for you best ^^

    July 28, 2010 @ 2:23 am | Reply
  54. pp2010:

    So now i’ve left one of my openVZ boxes.
    Its running a TOR relay, and im going to add some endpoint adressses like slashdot,google etc when i get time.

    limited to 5GB a day i shouldn’t kill my bandwith quota.

    August 4, 2010 @ 7:50 pm | Reply
  55. Now using 67MB of RAM after a couple of load pages.

    I have 256MB RAM (Burtable to 384MB from SpaceRich Networks). I have the LowEndBox boot strap install. (Debian, nginx, MySQL, PHP, Exim.)

    I thought I may as well make the most of the RAM and installed Squid too.

    Jack xD

    August 6, 2010 @ 3:28 pm | Reply
  56. I am new to the LEB arena, but in the last week I have signed up for about 5 LEBs through various threads on this site and started using them for multiple purposes. I own/operate a small development/design company out of Tulsa, Oklahoma and we currently host with PRYME in VA, but they were recently bought out. I am not promoting them (cause they’re gone,) but we still use one of their guys there for hosting within the new datacenter for large projects. But, for smaller 1off projects and development environments.. YOU CANNOT BEAT a few bucks a month!!!!

    I am curious however if you guys know who all offers/allows IRC for private use on their network and has some decent FreeBSD / Archlinux support on xen or openvz for arch.

    September 18, 2010 @ 11:25 pm | Reply
  57. @Shat — Archlinux should be easily available from Xen or OpenVZ.

    As of FreeBSD, you might want to check out some VMWare based providers that lets you load your own ISO (eNetSouth Cloud for example). Or Xen HVM based providers — for example ThrustVPS.

    September 19, 2010 @ 10:29 am | Reply
  58. Invius:

    i know buyvm carries arch and allows irc w/ ipv6 :3

    September 19, 2010 @ 10:38 am | Reply

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