Cough. Another “advertiser special” here — although I’m expecting more negative comments in this one. Anyhow. Virpus is offering a promo code for LowEndBox readers — LEB-11 to get $2 off each month on their Budget VPS, which you pay monthly. So their “Basic VPS” is now $5/month (ordering link here).
- 512MB guaranteed/2048MB burstable memory
- 50GB storage
- 1000GB/month data transfer
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
Servers in Kansas City (test IP: 208.89.210.1), and you can read more about their infrastructure/setup here. Virpus has been around for quite a while, and their 512MB budget VPS has been hovering between $5-$7 for more than a year now. Yes it is cheaper than the previous QuickWeb offer, has more memory, bigger disk, and more monthly data, although from some past experience you do get what you have paid for. I guess the question would be — how good are they when you compare with other OpenVZ providers selling VPS at ~$5-$6 with 512MB guaranteed memory?
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LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
VPS
The most important thing is Stability!!
So, How to balance cheap and Stability? Virpus!!!
Cheap, Performance and Stability. Any provider has all 3?
My bHost VPS cost me $0 and its been up for months, has awesome performance and well you can’t beat $0 😛
How to get it free? 😛
bHost is cheap, efficient and enough stable but it’s not free 🙂
If it was “pick any two”, it wouldn’t be worth it to even run this blog.
But yes, actually some do have all 3.
Virpus is unstable and slow.
I’ve used Virpus before and their Xen VPSs had the best performance and stability of any provider I had used. Their support was lacking though and if you do a search for them on WHT you’ll find some current horror stories. The only reason I left them is because when I tried to upgrade my VPS they wouldn’t reply to my ticket so I had to move elsewhere or run out of space. 🙁
I’ve been using Virpus for a few months now (3+). From what I can tell, their I/O isn’t up to par but they have decent uptime. Some time ago, they started doing automated backups. That really kills the I/O during certain hours of the day.
We are working on optimizing the priority of gzips (which as you said, does affect node performance during certain hours). So far it has helped reduce the load during times of backups. We’ll be applying the same config on more nodes.
I don’t see these backups are necessary. Why run backups when it’s not your responsibility to do so? Especially at the cost of performance of the whole node.
You should email customers once a week (or some other timeframe of your preference) to backup their data.
Before the automated backups, the servers were extremely fast, now the I/O is terrible from 6 – 11 PM everyday.
I hope you can discuss this issue internally. Thanks 🙂
Agreeing with Steven here.
How do the provider know which files should back up? A lot of files I have on my filesystems are considered “transient”, i.e. they can be easily re-generated from my important files which I keep regular backups, in a schedule that’s suitable to my usage pattern.
I much prefer to be on the node with no backups, with a bunch of neighbours who know what they are doing.
I have to agree, in fact, I would prefer it if a company did not make backups of my data on my servers. If Virpus’ case, I would set a side some nodes that do not run backups and have the client opt-in for automated backups (or even charge extra for them or only include them with your managed packages if you offer managed/unmanaged).
There’s a offsite backup option enabled in SolusVM and from what I can tell, each user can click that button themselves. An email once a week or however long (probably an opt in option or an unsubscribe option so it’s not spam) reminding users to backup their data is more than enough.
Virpus or, virus?
Truth about virpus (so called virus) :
1. Extremely terrible slow server 😛
2. Support ticket are worthless (*_*) they cant give priority support in time.
3. If you open ticket, they will give you some funny and joking answer.
4. They purchase their server from wholesaleinternet, if you want to fresh start just start your own company from wholesaleinternet directly. But not with virpus. They oversold every 49$ server that they get from wholesaleinternet. And put nearly 20~30 customers per server. How this will give you guaranteed 512MB memory when the main server memory is only 4GB? 4 GB with HDD shared memory oversold to these 30 customers :))
5. Previously their vps was hacked. Search on webhostingtalk. Nearly 200 person leave this people because of poor support and recent data loss. After that their support even goes worst much longer. Check virpus-forum. See how customers are blaming them, even they did not check those forum posts, lol 😀
Wow, did you just completely caugh up this load of nonsense?
We own ALL of our gear. We are simply a colocation customer of Wholesale Internet. You can see our space on our facebook account as well.
Not sure where you got ANY of your information, but everything you posted on completely off base. Only speak of what you know, please.
Virpus, they had a limited offer a while ago on their website, the lower OpenVZ plan becomes $3 by annual payment 🙂
Their VPS is a good fit for backup use. Also good choice for cheap DirectAdmin CP with low budget.
Aside from that, performance and uptime might be not always good, or the best you can get.
@ Kjetil: You have a point, well done. And just to be fair regarding nodes, I think they looks to have at least several good/not-oversold nodes.. :p
I only see the Basic VPS got $4.55/m when pay annual, where to get $3/m?
We occasionally run a special of that magnitude, but it is currently expired.
I have been using virpus since 02/19/2010. My first one that I paid for 7/month with DAdm control panel work pretty good for 7 months. After that I went to the south like US housing market (e.g: up time, performance and even connectivity). I was aware of their problem with network and hardware problems.
After 3 more months of yo yo on my vps, I was deciding to cancel my vps.
At that time,virpus offered 35/year plan. So, I ordered one and canceled my 7/month account.
It’s not an excellent one but ok to ok plus for budget vps.
My Virpus VPS isn’t the best in the world, but I can’t really complain.
I/O:
Download:
Uptime:
Though, I have had a bad experiece with them before. It took them a whole month to fix a node having major hardware problems.
Also:
http://speedtest.net/result/1288365145.png
Remember. SpeedTest.net reports in bits, not bytes. So your getting 10mbps.
@Daniel
“His” is getting 86 Mbps (megabits per second) which is about 10 MBps (megabytes per second).
Note the “b” and “B” and use them properly before correcting people.
Indeed @ Daniel. Isn’t internet speed normally measured in bits? I expect 100 megabits per second, not 100 megabytes per second.
Hey, how to test VPS speed via speedtest? I’m new 😛
You will need to install vncserver and a desktop enviroment like Gnome
Yup, I have Xfce installed, along with VNC Server and Firefox.
Also, I’d just like to point out that some providers don’t allow you to install a desktop enviroment for some strange reason. You’re better checking with them first.
Alright so this is what i gotta say about Ken and Virpus Networks.
I had a reseller code through them since 08/09/2010, He gave me the code and we went about our business.
Now he comes back to me today, 5/9/2011 , and says that i am revoking your privileges due to you dont have the required services (6)
The thing is, He knew i didn’t have the required services on 08/09/2010 and he didn’t follow his own rules, and accepted my request for reseller.
And now, he has revoked my clients reseller code and now my pricing is back to normal.
Please do not go with them, there prices may look nice…but the owner is a jerk.
What is a jerk, is sending me messages every 2 minutes to the point of periodically blocking you. We have nearly 2000 VM’s – open a ticket – I’m sorry but I cannot attend to a single customer with less than a minute responses. I responded to you as a courtesy. My personal AIM is not a official channel to reach us on.
And after asking you 3 times now, it is obvious you STILL have not read the reseller agreement. You DO NOT need 6 VPS’s to resell our services. However by the 45th day, you would need at least 6 services to keep your discount, as said in our agreement. I’m not sure if your account was overlooked or what, but at the time you asked me about your situation, I looked at your account and saw you were getting a discount and shouldn’t – so I revoked it at the time.
The thing is, it was a year…thats way over that 45 days you say to me.
Hmm.
I just explained to you the reasoning. Please move on.
Maybe if you we’re helpful Ken, then maybe your clients wouldn’t need to spam you on MSN just to get an answer to tickets that they’ve had no luck on.
Quite contrary, he never bothered to open a ticket until I asked him to. As I have said to another user, please do not comment on things you have no knowledge on.
I would strongly advice to avoid Virpus.
I’ve been nothing but patient trying to get my issues solved, but I can’t even get a decent response from Virpus.
I’ve tried support tickets twice, escalating them, and contacting general@virpusnetworks.net directly; but I have been pointedly ignored.
I’m a pretty reasonable guy, but it’s impossible to deal with a company that is completely unresponsive.
My advice: pick someone else.
There node (ovzmebo) has been down for a day, there tech team gives me generic responses and did not fix it at all this weekend, and is probably waiting intill someone can (Ken)
There tech team is outsourced, and apprently cannot do anything to fix problems.
i recommend staying away, which is why when this node comes back up i am moving fully from Virpus networks.
[humour]You don’t know what you’re talking about since you used the wrong sense of Their. You can’t be a server admin since we all know we all have perfect grammar and pose.[/humour]
A bunch of bull if you ask me…
Anyway I’ve always wondered about outsourced tech. I outsource our first and second level tech and we split third level. They do have permission to contact the datacenter to request hands on if I’m not available, even if it’s billable. (I get like 5 hours included with each rack each month.) We’ve never really had an issue with them not being able to do something.
Not the best but great for the price!
Stop complaining people, unless you have severe downtime.
The boxes still perform
Seriously, I consider them no less than a scam.
The file io made them completely unusable for me; and when I tried to take it up with them (through multiple channels), I didn’t even get a reply. They’re not a serious company.
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