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ValueVPS - £2.99 OpenVZ VPS with 64MB in UK

ValueVPS Via this WHT offer. ValueVPS is an UK based Xen/OpenVZ VPS provider started back in late 2008, but is also part of Starteck Online that has been around since 2004. Last time they got featured on this blog was more than 19 months ago. The same product that they made available back then has not changed although the “competitors” have moved to packages that offer more resource. For £2.99/month you can now get their cheap OpenVZ plan (not available as an Xen option).

  • 64MB guaranteed/128MB burstable memory
  • 3GB storage
  • 10GB/month data transfer
  • OpenVZ/SolusVM

UK based server. IRC permitted (though you’ll be null-routed on DDoS).

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

21 Comments

  1. meh:

    Why even waste time posting offers like this. Compared to other posts on the site, specs for the price is laughable.

    August 30, 2010 @ 6:29 am | Reply
  2. Gary:

    If that’s all you need, I guess it’s a valid offer. There might be people who just need one for DNS for example. And since they allow IRC, it’s enough BW and space for a few instances of PSYBNC and a few Eggdrops.

    In raw numbers it’s a terrible deal, but it’s only 3 pounds, so if it’s sufficient for what a person needs, they’ll be hard pushed to find cheaper. There are two UK-based VPSes in the last month that are cheaper. Neither allow IRC.

    August 30, 2010 @ 10:57 am | Reply
  3. I agree. Compared to other offers on here, it doesn’t really compare, but if someone is specifically after a UK VPS that allows IRC, at the end of the day, £2.99/month isn’t a fortune!

    August 30, 2010 @ 11:54 am | Reply
  4. Spirit:

    Exactly! I wont leave my OLD stable legacy hosts with 64MB guaranteed ram which serve well to me just because recently some new with 512MB guaranteed appeared.
    If this would be Xen server (with posability to set up IPv6 tunnel) I would consider this offer.

    August 30, 2010 @ 12:12 pm | Reply
  5. Mike:

    Thing is, if you’re doing things that aren’t terribly resource intensive, there’s a good chance that a really lower-spec VPS like this one will outperform most of the heavily-oversold services with much higher on-paper specs. The problem (as I see it) with the hosts who offer 20+GB of space is that they attract people who are bound and determined to use every megabyte of that allocation, often in retarded and CPU/disk-intensive ways (rapidleech, anyone?) which degrades performance for everyone else.

    The second-best performing VPS I have is a $3.95/mo, 256MB RAM Xen machine from Quickweb, with 10GB of storage. The best-performing VPS I have is a 7Euro/month (nearly $9), 128MB RAM OpenVZ machine with 3GB of diskspace, from vps4less.de… which has four 100MHz (yes, 0.1GHz) CPU slices. On paper, the Xen machine is a (much) better deal than the OpenVZ one; in the real world, it’s not nearly as cut and dried…

    (Obligatory nerd note: ValueVPS have redundant nameservers, yay. Still one of the better signs of a competent host. Odd, that…)

    August 30, 2010 @ 12:55 pm | Reply
  6. Gary:

    You’ve got to look at what’s a realistic price. $5 for 1TB transfer, 256MB and 50GB drive space just isn’t sustainable. The resources cost more than that per month. Sure, most people won’t use their whole allotted resources, but if you get stuck on a box with a few people who do, you’ll notice it.

    Conversely, £3/month for this package is more than it costs. There’s a decent margin in there. People with 64MB and only 3GB storage and 10GB transfer aren’t doing anything intensive (bandwidth or disk IO). The box will always feel fast.

    I was on a box used for shells, for irc bouncers and the like. There were over a hundred accounts on the box, and it flew. Load of 0.0 0.0 0.0 constantly, because every process was more or less idle. The network throughput was fast when you needed it, and the box was stable. (Goscomb’s network, less so…)

    The box probably didn’t cost over 100 pounds a month in total, and the minimum account cost was 2 pounds a month, more if you needed your own IP etc, which were either charged at cost or above. a 100% profit margin (assuming 100 accounts) is something most hosting companies could only dream about.

    Not everything needs hundreds of GB transfer a month, etc.

    August 30, 2010 @ 2:03 pm | Reply
  7. Yes. These are probably what I wanted to say. The best performing lowendbox I have at the moment is probably the QuickWeb box that serves this website, which I think QuickWeb has recently raised to $6/month and comes with only 80MB of memory.

    August 30, 2010 @ 2:41 pm | Reply
  8. Gary:

    It’d be nice to hear from customers how the VPSes featured here perform. Obviously LEA doesn’t have time to benchmark everything, even if the providers did offer him a free trial, and there’d be no way to know the provider didn’t cherry pick the box with the lowest load to put his test VPS on, etc.

    Of course, just because the VPS I have performs well doesn’t mean one on another node will, but it’d be nice to see. I know a few people have been pasting unixbench results. I’ve written something to do batch wget to test inbound speed from a few different places, but I can’t think of a way to test outbound speed, apart from getting others to wget from me, and making a speedtest file url public is a good way to get people to burn through your BW allowance…

    August 30, 2010 @ 3:05 pm | Reply
  9. Mike:

    IMO, benchmark and test results are fairly meaningless. All Wget does is test single-connection inbound speeds, which is a nigh-useless metric for 99% of applications. (Keeping in mind that most people in the world don’t even have 5Mbps connections, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cachefly wget test for a VPS that was less than 1MB/s, i.e. 8Mbps.) Unixbench doesn’t measure network latency, packet loss, or disk i/o performance, the latter of which is usually the achille’s heel of VPSes, and the usual dd tests are almost certainly useless.

    Much more interesting would be to have people post their /proc/user_beancounters (for OpenVZ systems, anyway). Whether a host has set rational limits there, or left some of the more insane default limits (999,999 numproc and 23 million numfile come immediately to mind) may be both a pretty good indicator both of whether the host knows what they’re doing, and how well the VM is going to perform.

    August 30, 2010 @ 4:38 pm | Reply
  10. Gary:

    Knowing how well a provider can pipe data to another provider is handy, especially for those of us with multiple boxes dotted around the place. Deploying changes quickly is nice.

    Most people in the world not having more than 5mbps is one thing, but it depends what your VPS does and who its userbase is. We’re not all running websites. For most of mine, the sit idle almost 24 hours a day, but once or twice a day I need to move data around quickly, so knowing how fast I can get data to and from another datacentre helps me choose a provider.

    Unixbench is an interesting metric to compare one VPS to another using a single handy tool, but I agree there are more things we need to know. There’s no such thing as too much information, imo, so the more benchmarks people do, of whatever type, will help us make an informed decision about a provider.

    August 30, 2010 @ 4:44 pm | Reply
  11. Mike:

    I *did* say “…for 99% of applications”; yours is just in that other one percent. :)

    August 30, 2010 @ 5:46 pm | Reply
  12. heh:

    > a really lower-spec VPS like this one will outperform most of the heavily-oversold services with much higher on-paper specs.
    What makes you think *this* VPS is not oversold as well, maybe they’re just being greedy :)

    > If this would be Xen server (with posability to set up IPv6 tunnel) I would consider this offer.
    On some/many/most(?) OpenVZ hosts IPv6 tunnelling is possible too.

    > It’d be nice to hear from customers how the VPSes featured here perform.
    That’s kinda tricky, because when you’re not alone on a box, its performance will vary quite wildly, and a benchmark one moment may be ten times lower than some minites or an hour later…

    August 30, 2010 @ 5:55 pm | Reply
  13. mrm2005:

    I was a customer of ValueVPS (1 OpenVZ 128MB & 1 Xen 128MB).Both performances was descent. in OpenVZ i had access to 2 cores of a quad core Intel and in Xen i had access to 4 Opteron cores. DL speed from both was around 40~50mbs (if i remember correctly, maybe more). I had them for around 3 months (openVz 1 month, Xen 3 months). both were performing well. no problem.a bit slow support (Out of usual business time) ,but overall was Good. Currently i consider them for their Xen-HVM Plans. You can read my reviews about them @ WHT.

    August 30, 2010 @ 9:53 pm | Reply
  14. Having good connectivity is very important if you do something like MySQL or CouchDB replication over SSH tunnel between two data centers :)

    But yes for normal websites it is a lot less important. With the amount of memory provided, you’ll probably be struggle to run a content site sending out more than 1Mbps (assuming you are not running a video/photo or warez sharing site).

    August 30, 2010 @ 11:31 pm | Reply
  15. @heh — the fact that they have been around at this “ridiculously expensive price” for a while and still survived? Obviously I am not suggesting that they are not overselling — it could be a possibility. Search around for genuine reviews would probably be a good idea.

    August 30, 2010 @ 11:35 pm | Reply
  16. A.:

    Most providers offering large amounts of network transfer for a relatively low price will kick you off for arbitrary reasons if you actually use the resources.

    There’s nothing wrong with a more humble, honest and realistic offer like this.

    August 31, 2010 @ 11:35 pm | Reply
  17. @A – I only know one host that has done that and they offer dedis’ and colo :( It’s pretty lame to say the least.

    August 31, 2010 @ 11:38 pm | Reply
  18. Gary:

    It’s an economy of scale as well. The more customers you have, the more you can handle a few of them using the maximum resources possible. I guess most providers who offer a lot work out how much you’re likely to use on average, and what percentage of users rattle it, and work out what they can get away with offering, even if they know you probably won’t use it.

    Couple that with the fact that most people don’t realise just how little they can get away with resource-wise on linux (I know people using $100 dedicated servers who’d notice absolutely no difference with a $15 VPS, in fact they’d probably see a performance increase if anything) and that people overestimate how popular their site will be, and they can get away with overselling.

    @ Francisco – which company boots people for approaching their limits?

    September 1, 2010 @ 12:21 am | Reply
  19. Hi All,

    I am one of the directors of ValueVPS.co.uk and found this page as it’s listed as a referrer in our logs. I think some of the comments here are very valid, however, when it comes to pricing the services we offer we must factor in a good profit margin that allows us to sustain a good level of service and future expansion. Many budget hosts have come and gone in the time that ValueVPS (formerly Starteck Online) has been trading and it always seems to be down to them not having enough money in the pot to keep running at an acceptable level (i.e. can’t afford to purchase new servers when needed etc). Over the past 2 years we’ve moved to our own cabinets in a datacentre closer to our office, purchased our own servers, KVMoIP modules, Remote switched PDU’s, Switches etc and have still managed to continue as a company that has no debts or loans. In the last 6 months we have gone from 1 person to 2 people working for us – this was to resolve the slow support responses we were experiencing, last week I started training 2 new support staff taking our numbers to 4. Latest reviews found on the web prove that we are getting things right :-) Our pricing is also based around a very important factor. For anyone with a knowledge of the United Kingdom, ValueVPS has moved from the south (well connected) part of the UK to the North (not so well connected) which means that we have to pay a premium for our three fibre connections to London and Manchester. Our bandwidth isn’t oversold like certain providers I could mention – it’s a real commodity that does cost us considerably more than if we were in the south. On the plus side, our network and connectivity is so rock solid that since our move the uptime stats have been through the roof. This only goes to prove that you really do get what you pay for. Anyway, if anyone has any questions or wants to query anythign i have posted in this comment…fire away :-)

    September 15, 2010 @ 11:18 pm | Reply
  20. These guys also have this site, buildavps ( http://www.buildavps.net/ ) and you can spend time (like I should have) and get 64MB of ram, 3GB of disk space, 50GB of bandwidth and an ip for…£1.79 per month

    That’s amazing!!!!

    And the same company…..

    November 20, 2010 @ 2:13 am | Reply
  21. An old post i know but have just seen this and wanted to comment on Jason’s post.

    http://www.buildavps.net is not (and never has been) related to ValueVPS.co.uk, Starteck Online or It’s owners/staff.

    Thanks,

    David

    October 17, 2011 @ 11:29 pm | Reply

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