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Virtio - £4.30/Month 256MB SSD KVM in Kent, United Kingdom

James Hadley (formerly James Todd) has sent in an offer from his latest brand Virtio which is meant to offer incredibly high performance.

VirtIO LowEndBox Promo

  • 256MB Dedicated Ram
  • 3GB SSD Diskspace
  • 100GB Bandwidth
  • 100mbit Port
  • 1x IPv4 Address
  • Daily Backups
  • Solus/KVM
  • £4.30/Month, Direct Signup
    Promo Code: LOWENDBOX

Virtio advertises its nodes as HP DL120 G7 servers with Intel Xeon E3’s utilising SSD storage arrays capable of “230K IOPS” and “1900/1600MB/s read/write speed.” On top of this the control panel environment currently is SolusVM, however Virtio is migrating to Onapp this coming Wednesday. Network transit is provided by Level3 and nodes leased in the Custodian Data Center, Kent United Kingdom. The website looks very professional, clean and well thought out, however the “About Us” page still holds generic text.

James was the former owner of Quality Servers, he closed that brand after selling a plethora of “yearly sales” and pro-rata refunded individuals then went on to launch his next brand “TheUKCloud.” The launch of TheUKCloud was seen to be an exit from the LEB market. A few short months later he sold TheUKCloud, and launched “KillerIO” on LET last month before even having the servers ready. At time of submitting this offer “KillerIO” is now rebranded as “Virtio” and has gone from offering the OpenVZ/Solus plans to KVM/Onapp, so we aren’t sure what exactly it will be called in 6 months from now or if this is another short term “hobby brand” to be sold again in the near future. We are however interested in your benchmarks and results to see if they match expectations.

Test IP: 91.227.221.128
Test File: http://91.227.221.128/100mb.bin

37 Comments

  1. Yomero:

    Pretty interesting offer for a high concurrent database and so.

    But since all the history of unstable business, I pass.

    July 7, 2012 @ 12:56 pm | Reply
    • I’m trying to use what I’ve learned with 7 years of (mainly) successes and (a few) failures in hosting, and also by really listening to what people want to get it perfect this time.

      Either way, I have a year contract with the suppliers against my personal name as well as a couple of large clients already so even if I wanted it it, virtio isn’t going anywhere ;)

      July 7, 2012 @ 1:02 pm | Reply
    • Matthew B:

      Just remember as said by James:

      “Haha thanks :) It’s just a hobby though so it’s not really a hosting company”

      July 7, 2012 @ 3:14 pm | Reply
  2. As Yomero said, the speed looks like it’ll be great but I too would rather pass based on the business history…
    That said, good luck to James, hopefully he pulls through and runs the company well!

    July 7, 2012 @ 1:00 pm | Reply
  3. liam:

    The chat now thing is kind of annoying. I would sign up however I’ve already been with two of your ‘failed’ companies ;/

    July 7, 2012 @ 2:37 pm | Reply
    • Hi Liam

      I’ll remove the automatic invitations to make it less in-your-face :)

      I have made some comments above about why the situation is different to QualityServers/UKCloud and I’ll gladly go into more detail about that if it helps sway you :)

      July 7, 2012 @ 2:43 pm | Reply
      • Fair enough! Didn’t see your post before, I’ll certainly try you seen as you’re being totaly honest about the whole situation.

        July 7, 2012 @ 10:01 pm | Reply
      • Liam:

        Fair enough! Didn’t see your post before, I’ll certainly try you seen as you’re being totaly honest about the whole situation.

        July 7, 2012 @ 10:02 pm | Reply
  4. Spirit:

    Well written company introduction.

    July 7, 2012 @ 2:46 pm | Reply
  5. Matthew B:

    Last time I checked with the OnApp guys in January there was no way to convert to OnApp from SolusVM according to there experts?

    July 7, 2012 @ 3:16 pm | Reply
    • Matthew B:

      Other than have another server online, and migrate them manually one by one onto the new server then swap the IP block over onto the new server.

      July 7, 2012 @ 3:16 pm | Reply
    • They now have a script for Xen but not for KVM, so it’s going to be a manual process.

      July 7, 2012 @ 3:53 pm | Reply
      • Andrew:

        How long does the manual process take?

        July 7, 2012 @ 11:12 pm | Reply
        • I need to speak to OnApp on Monday to double check whether it’s going to be a dump and re-import of all the disks or just a few MySQL queries – either way it shouldn’t take too long as a result of the SSDs.

          July 8, 2012 @ 8:22 am | Reply
  6. Agree with the Comments on Business history.

    Selling the Companies, starting again, selling and so forth – Just makes me think why your really in the industry.
    Sorry to say it, but your a marked man now.

    Either way, all the best.

    July 8, 2012 @ 7:48 am | Reply
    • I don’t want to bore you with details but UKCloud/QS *needed* someone with more muscle power to sort out the mess. It was the best thing for the customers to ensure they got what they paid for.

      July 8, 2012 @ 8:25 am | Reply
      • That might be true, but what makes you think you have the muscle power when this or if this gets in a mess?

        I tried qualityservers for a mail server, the service was spot on.

        But I hate to say – I hate it when people sell and come back, multiple times.
        And sell tons of yearly packages before they do.

        It’s the kind of thing I watched another guy do, he made a ton of cash from it and never returned to the industry.
        If you were a customer, what would you think?

        I do wish you luck and I know you are a decent provider, but stick with this one no matter what, put everything into it and keep it going.

        Best of luck James

        July 8, 2012 @ 6:24 pm | Reply
        • Hi Paul

          I didn’t make anything out of the acquisition of QS/UKCloud – all I got was the mess being sorted out properly. It was something I did for the customers to make sure they got what they paid for.

          The plan is to use what I have learned this time to make sure things don’t get into a mess like they did before.

          Finally the I’m trying to stay away from yearly plans for now. I know that some people prefer to pay yearly so obviously I was that option to be there for them, but I’m not pushing anyone to pay yearly.

          July 8, 2012 @ 8:34 pm | Reply
  7. tri:

    Hmmm…. Changing surnname and “company” name at the same time?

    July 8, 2012 @ 9:10 am | Reply
    • Not at the same time at all. The latter came some time before the former and has to do with getting married next month.

      July 8, 2012 @ 8:35 pm | Reply
  8. Well it is nice to hear you know what to do this time, and lessons have been learnt.

    I have every faith in you, especially with the manor you respond.

    I may sign up for a second mail server – So keep your eye out :)

    July 8, 2012 @ 9:16 pm | Reply
  9. ElliotJ:

    Since no-one has posted benchmarks, I’ll do the honours.
    Mine is a 512MB VPS (£12/mo), so not exactly LEB standard, but it’s on the same hardware.

    Onto the disk joys.

    root@ssd:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
    16384+0 records in
    16384+0 records out
    1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.67857 s, 640 MB/s
    
    root@ssd:~# ioping -R /
    
    --- / (ext3 /dev/disk/by-uuid/11cf6321-50ca-4002-bb47-2ed66fcd10d7) ioping statistics ---
    20924 requests completed in 3000.0 ms, 17102 iops, 66.8 mb/s
    min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/0.1/2.4/0.0 ms
    
    root@ssd:~# ioping /
    [ ... ]
    53 requests completed in 52260.6 ms, 7442 iops, 29.1 mb/s
    min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/0.1/0.3/0.1 ms
    

    Feels extremely fast from my end. :)

    July 8, 2012 @ 10:23 pm | Reply
  10. someperson:

    James,

    Are you the same person who formerly owned theukcloud?

    Thanks,

    Sam

    July 8, 2012 @ 10:35 pm | Reply
  11. Numanoids:

    Site down?

    July 9, 2012 @ 7:08 pm | Reply
  12. Numanoids:

    Nah sorry, good luck with the venture but think I’ll skip your offerings if the main page is down for this long.

    July 9, 2012 @ 8:45 pm | Reply
    • I’m sorry to hear that – if you decide to change your mind just email me, me[at]jhadley.net and I’ll sort out out with a nice SSD VPS :)

      July 9, 2012 @ 8:48 pm | Reply
    • It’s back now – sorry about that. Just had to move our own website to a new server to get some extensions enabled.

      July 9, 2012 @ 8:52 pm | Reply
  13. PAD:

    I agree James’ history in the industry is weird but the fact is he’s being honest, and he knows what he’s doing. As much as QS might have been a mess everyone learns from their mistakes and the fact that he’s chosen to jump back into the industry with careful consideration means that if anything he isn’t going to make the same mistakes that he did in the past, bad hardware, understaffed, etc. From what it looks like he’s gone pretty far to provide a great level of hardware (looking at those benchmarks) and keep the provider nice and small in the beginning so that he can assure it doesn’t get out of hand.

    Hit me up on LET if you ever need help with tickets James. Good luck!

    July 10, 2012 @ 3:43 am | Reply
  14. dark:

    3 GB en disco??????

    July 12, 2012 @ 3:56 am | Reply
  15. Well, the promotion code has expired.

    “# The promotion code entered has expired # “

    September 16, 2012 @ 11:03 am | Reply

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