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VMHosts - £4.40 256MB Xen VPS in UK

VMHosts Michael from VMHosts emailed me their LowEndBox exclusive special. It has less resource and a lot cheaper than their “Cloud Infrastructure” VPS packages listed on their website. At £4.40/month (~USD$6.88) with this direct sign up link, you get

  • 256MB memory
  • 20GB storage on RAID10
  • 150GB/month data transfer
  • 1x vCPU core
  • Xen

PayPal is the only available payment method. Their servers are with BlueSquare in Maidenhead UK, according to their About Us page. On the same page they also stated that they use HP Proliant for servers and LeftHand for SAN storage. Michael disclosed that VMHosts provide “True Cloud XEN infrastructure” without any specific details. OnApp maybe?

Domain has been registered for 18 months, although “VMHosts” does not exist in CompanyHouse. Michael seems to be a seasoned IT solutionist though. Reasonable ToS — no IRC, no torrent, and no dodgy Perl scripts.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

11 Comments

  1. NickM:

    For those of you running Debian, the following list of software may not be run on your VPS with VMHosts due to dependencies on perl: http://pastebin.com/wKPG7ftH

    Of particular note: apache2.2-common, courier, debconf, mysql-server, sendmail, spamassassin

    January 4, 2012 @ 8:17 am | Reply
    • NickM:

      Oh, also, it apparently says no shell scripts in their TOS as well. So, good luck even booting your Debian install without breaking their TOS.

      January 4, 2012 @ 8:25 am | Reply
    • Hi NickM

      Debian is fully supported. We have 5.0 X64, X86 and 6.0 X64 templates available. Apache and MySQL are also allowed. I will get our TOS updated to avoid any confusion

      Cheers

      Michael

      January 4, 2012 @ 9:26 am | Reply
    • NickM:

      Sorry for the double post, but here’s a link to the list that won’t expire in 30 days like the first one I posted:

      http://pastebin.com/EHehEV6W

      January 4, 2012 @ 11:01 am | Reply
  2. Hi – Thank you for posting our offer. We are registered on CompanyHouse may need to search for VMhosts Ltd. Our company number is 7320695

    ToS are fairly generic and still need a bit of tuning. Customers have full root access to isolated virtual machines. We are happy for customers to use these machines for any legal activities.

    We are running XEN with onapp for this cluster. We also have a lot of experience implementing and maintaining small and large VMware clusters.

    If you have any questions just let us know

    January 4, 2012 @ 9:22 am | Reply
  3. rm:

    Pfff… so dodgy Python scripts are okay I guess?

    January 4, 2012 @ 9:37 am | Reply
  4. Our terms of service have been updated. Sorry for any confusion

    January 5, 2012 @ 10:57 am | Reply
  5. grummyv:

    I’ve got this LBE offering and I’m quiet happy with the over all performance so far and the support; Michael was very helpful.

    Installed Debian x86 on it with no issues, it’s Xen based virtualization infrastructure and uses OnApp (for management I guess?) so the web based control panel is different from SolusVM and needs a little bit of getting used to, but it’s intuitive nonetheless.

    1 vcpu:

    $ cat /proc/cpuinfo 
    processor       : 0
    vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
    cpu family      : 16
    model           : 2
    model name      : Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2352
    stepping        : 2
    cpu MHz         : 2100.074
    cache size      : 512 KB
    fdiv_bug        : no
    hlt_bug         : no
    f00f_bug        : no
    coma_bug        : no
    fpu             : yes
    fpu_exception   : yes
    cpuid level     : 5
    wp              : yes
    flags           : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 cmov pat clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc up nonstop_tsc pni popcnt hypervisor cmp_legacy extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch
    bogomips        : 4200.14
    clflush size    : 64
    cache_alignment : 64
    address sizes   : 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
    power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate
    

    cachefly speed test:

    $ wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
    --2012-01-09 08:33:57--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
    Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 140.99.94.175
    Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|140.99.94.175|:80... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
    Saving to: “/dev/null”
    
    100%[===============================================================>] 104,857,600 52.3M/s   in 1.9s    
    
    2012-01-09 08:33:59 (52.3 MB/s) - “/dev/null” saved [104857600/104857600]
    

    Disk IO:

    $ 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, 35.1102 s, 30.6 MB/s
    
    $ ./ioping -c 10 .
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=1 time=0.9 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=2 time=1.6 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=3 time=1.3 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=4 time=1.3 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=5 time=1.4 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=6 time=1.3 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=7 time=1.3 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=8 time=1.4 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=9 time=2.2 ms
    4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=10 time=1.1 ms
    
    --- . (ext3 /dev/xvda1) ioping statistics ---
    10 requests completed in 9017.0 ms, 720 iops, 2.8 mb/s
    min/avg/max/mdev = 0.9/1.4/2.2/0.3 ms
    
    January 9, 2012 @ 8:50 am | Reply
    • Tom:

      1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 35.1102 s, 30.6 MB/s

      Dat is clearly not running on SAN. So no SAN and I’ll bet no HA.
      So much for another provider with onapp and a fake cloud.

      January 9, 2012 @ 10:44 am | Reply
      • @Tom I can assure you all virtual machines are running on our clustered storage array will full HA.

        We do not operate a “fake cloud”

        Our SAN keeps 2 copies off all data clustered across the storage nodes connected to a dedicated infiniband management network.

        Due to the way our SAN works it is optimised for random IO and not sequential writes, this will affect some of the performance tests ran against it. However sequential writes and reads are not typical of most application work load.

        I am not suggesting our storage is right for every application and if you have a very busy database doing a lot of sequential writes you maybe better off using a provider with local storage or a storage array which is not clustered. The trade-off for this is reduced redundancy, but this maybe acceptable for some customers

        January 9, 2012 @ 10:58 am | Reply

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