Jesse, VPS of Operations at VPSDeals.org, has sent me some “special exclusive” offer for the LowEndBox readers. And from the offer they seem to understand what LowEndBox is really about — running services on a low-spec box rather than just a cheap VPS. Welcome to 2009, where you can still buy VPS with just 64MB of memory. However since people are discussing how low can their VPS’s memory go, I might as well post this offer. You can get the following for $3.99/month with this sign up link.
- 64MB guaranteed/128MB burstable memory
- 5GB storage
- 500GB/month data transfer
- OpenVZ/SolusVM
Payment in either PayPal or credit card. Servers in Chicago with SingleHop. VPSDeals/ServerDeals is part of Nexeon Technologies that was founded in 2008.
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The Founder at LowEndBox
The original owner of LowEndBox known as LowEndAdmin or LEA for short founded LowEndBox in 2008 and created the concept of hosting applications on low resource Low End Boxes. After creating the roots of the community that we know today, LEA stepped aside and allowed others to carry the torch forward.
Latest posts by LEA (see all)
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
I still have atleast two 65MB/5$ VPSes from 2008 (datarealm.com, welcome2inter.net…) and I have attempt to keep them while I cancelled lately few LEB VPSes with much bigger specs for lower or similar prices. Why? Because those two vpses, each with some year or uptime, perfrom better than most other my low end boxes.
Some tasks don’t eat much resources but require stabilitay so 65MB can’t be always – (minus) factor.
Unfortunately very few providers keep the VPS initial performance for a long time. Yesterday once again I had the bad surprise of a great VPS at deployment time (2009) now performing badly (I/O @ 1.8MB/s).
Yeah, you’re right, but I see this more often with those new “one man” hosts. Some of them are really good on beginning. Servers work great, guys are almost 24/7 online, fast polite support… but after some time they seems sick and tired of this business and let us wait per days…
That’s why I prefer in most cases (not always, just mostly) real companies instead those one man hosts where everything depend from one guy.
I think some hosts think it’s OK to just squeeze one more… and one more… and one more VPS onto a node, right up until customers notice and complain.
Those who’ve been in the game long enough have a big enough sample to be able to estimate how many of each size of VPS will fit on a node. They know that people on average use x amount of ram, or x amount of bandwidth or cpu. Work that out, leave headroom for people to burst.
And a lot don’t seem to monitor anything either. I’ve had hosts who didn’t know about problems until I pointed them out, but who then fixed them quickly. Why not have one VPS per node doing periodic tests to make sure drive IO is reasonable, or have load monitoring on the nodes? :/
Time goes by, memory drops in price quite sharply.
Today you can get servers with 32-48GB of RAM for the price that was unthinkable even 2-3 years ago.
So the definition of what a “low memory VPS” is, changes over time.
I don’t think a 64 MB offer makes any sense in this day, and certainly not at this price point.
Besides, if a hypothetical provider of 64MB VPSes takes pride in “non-oversold”, let’s take an average-ish 16GB of RAM server, he’s going to do what, fit 250 users on that box, 64 MB/each? Yeah, and they will certainly enjoy ‘non-oversold’ disk I/O performance on such box.
I have a few boxes where I don’t use more than 20MB of ram. 64MB makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Say for IRC bouncers (yeah, I’m always banging on about IRC). An IRC bouncer will rarely access the hard drive, just to add a line to a log here and there. Their ram usage is fairly static too. Low-end (low-spec really) boxes still have a place. This VM for example:
>free -m
> total used free shared >buffers cached
>Mem: 100 97 2 0 >55 15
>-/+ buffers/cache: 26 73
>Swap: 99 1 98
> 22:18:37 up 8 days, 3:42, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.04, 0.00
The low uptime is more or less how long I’ve had the VPS. ;)
The load spike was caused by me SSH-ing in. All it does is run two instances of psybnc. I could get the memory usage down lower by installing dropbear, but it’s already well under its 100MB ram allotment, so why bother? :)
All that box needs is stability. It doesn’t need to have a fat pipe (averages less than 1KB/sec), a big hard drive (834MB used, and I could optimise that a LOT), tons of ram (see above) and a fast CPU (it’s got access to one 2ghz core of an E5335 and I’m sure the CPU barely notices it).
Why would a provider have to put 250 users on one box? At $4 per 64MB VM, they can afford to put a lot less on a node. Hell, they’d more than cover their costs with 50 VPSes on a node. That’d be 3.2GB of ram.
Some hosts are interested in providing quality services. Just because it’s possible to cram 250 VPSes on a node doesn’t mean they will.
Conversely, they could fit 250 VPSes on it, with a monster RAID setup to ensure a decent amount of drive IO, and still make a ton of money. If the revenue from the node is $1000/month they could put a fair few SSDs in it to ensure good performance.
Point is, having significant amouns of RAM today is cheap, not a lot of added cost compared to just having a server in a DC with connectivity/rackspace/power, and if a provider does that (i.e. runs with at least 8-16 GB/machine), they instantly can compete in a higher league, let’s say offer 256MB guaranteed for those $5, which in turn means their services will appeal to a MUCH wider audience, not just a few freaks like you and me who use IRC bouncers. :P
Provider posting a 64MB offer can only mean two things: they save pennies by running crappy hardware with 2-4GB of RAM per box, or they use powerful nodes but put ra huge amount of users on each.
And btw asking $4 for 64MB is also a sign of being completely, utterly out of touch with the current state of the market and competitor offers, which is a bad bad sign that could mean problems in other aspects with the provider.
I get your point, but at the same time a lot of providers are running on tiny profit margins. I’d rather a provider made a sensible margin and stayed in business, so I wouldn’t have to edit my reverse DNS yet again. :)
That, and it’s nice to be on a box with a fair bit of headroom in terms of CPU and bandwidth sometimes. Cramming the VPSes on just means it’s mediocre 24/7. I’d rather pay a little extra each month so that when I go to compile something it takes seconds rather than minutes.
Well, just keep in mind that simply because some offer is overpriced and underspecced, it doesn’t automatically mean it will be more stable…
IMO a VPS with low resources doesn’t imply crap hardware or zillions of VPS per node. If the provider is offering VPSs with reduced resources chances are these VPSs will run light applications with low impact on the node and everyone will have good performance. If a VPS has a lot of memory, disk, bandwidth, probably it is going to be used in shared hosting, backup, streamming, etc.
I definitely wouldn’t assume either way, I’m just playing devil’s advocate. :)
Right enough that on a 64MB VPS with 5GB space you won’t be getting hammered by the seedbox next door. :)
@rm
Not only providers but also we, spoiled LEB users, are sometimes utterly out of touch with the current state of the market as there out is more than just LEB.
Even LEB admin pays MORE (to Linode if I remember correct) for more serious hosting projects disregarding the fact that he can get similar or even better resources specification from some of LEB featured host for less money – if you understand what I mean. Keep some health realism which isn’t limited only on those FEW lowendbox featured hosts.
You mentioned “256MB guaranteed for those $5″… like something completely normal, standard, etc… Well, yes it’s normal and standard here at LEB community… Community which makes only small percentage vps hosting business population. VPSDeals wants for higher package, lets say yours “256MB guaranteed” $9.99. Is this for you outrageous expensive price? :) Of course not. That’s “normal” price with one advantage -> I can pay even less, much less ($3.99/month) in case that I don’t need 256MB guaranted.
Look, in 1980 if you needed a computer you had to pay $5000 and it would be slower than a today’s calculator. Now you pay $200 and get a PC that’s many million times faster and has more storage, also likely ligher, less power-consuming and less noisy.
Sooo, by your logic, today’s computer users are totally spoiled, “out of touch with the computer market”, and they should damn keep buying those $5000 “real”, super reliable, non-oversold(whoops, that’s from a different tale), computers? :D
THINGS CHANGE, get on with it, go to a computer store, look at DDR3 prices for example, if you haven’t in a while. 4GB stick used to cost $300-400, now you can get one perhaps for the price of one pizza. Nothing spoiled about getting more for the same buck (or less), if advances in the tech pefrectly allow.
Free market means you are free to buy wherever you get the most value for your money. If you don’t do just that, you are likely just not aware of all the options. And indeed, a lot of people just do not know about LEB and can’t imagine there’s something better than e.g. the Linode prices. I had this not once and not twice, I show people LEB, they go “wow, that’s 4 times less than what I currently pay”, switch over to some of the LEB providers and have no problems whatsoever afterwards.
“most value for your money” is really all about subjective values.
rm is the guy who wants 100%CPU utilisation+1GB RAM+100GB space+1GBit unmetered for $ 10 and still be yelling at the damn host trying to oversell and make a living.
1980?!! Going into extremes is never a good way to argument something. Beside that you don’t answer me directly on any of my arguments. So, do you agree with ANYTHING what I posted or disagree with everything?
Tell me atleast one thing – do you consider “256MB guaranteed” plan for $9.99 as abnormal expensive?
(yes, I know that we can get such plans for way lower price at LEB but that’s not a question).
btw. I think that LEB admin know very well that he can get vps for lower price than he pays to Linode, but I am afraid that you’re missing my point because either you don’t read carefully what I posted, either you don’t want to understand what I posted for the sake of disagreement.
side note. one of vpses which I cancelled lately was this huge mega extreme big plan from chicagovps for 7$. But I’am still keeping little 64MB welcome2inter.net plan with similar price. Why? It serve me better than chicagovps (which, to be honest with LEB average performance isn’t that bad) would. As simple as that.
It’s not everything about numbers on paper – that’s my whole point.
The question to me is, does buying that plan make any sense whatsoever.
Looks like a generic LEB offer except twice more expensive. If a shop would be selling loafs of bread at 2x price compared to another shop next door, would you consider them “abnormal expensive”?
And on LEB you can even get Xen and not OpenVZ, while staying well within that price. So the cheaper shop’s bread is also more tasty. Wait, an upper bound of $10 also easily allows you to get not just 256, but 512 MB Xen! So you even get more proverbial bread there. Hmm, tough choice?
(Oh and don’t tell me “yeah but they don’t perform / oversold”. Read reviews, there’s a lot of hosts satisfying what I outlined and with only positive reviews regarding performance. And another point, you haven’t actually tried the “256 MB for $9.99” plan to argue it performs somehow better than everything else.)
But that’s a Linode. Some service that I just leave there and forget. It’s easy to get 300+ days of uptime on their Dallas nodes. When something goes wrong (like their Fremont nodes recently) I do not need to file tickets to tell them that my box is down — they just get fixed.
$3.99/month for a 64MB node would be justifiable if it’s from a reputable brand with track record stability. I think some listed on LowEndBox might actually have it. Not sure about VPSDeals though.
LEB admin, little correction: “VPSDeals/ServerDeals is part of Nexeon Technologies that was founded in 2006.”
Their site says: 2008
http://www.vpsdeals.org/about.php
Thanks. Fixed.
We’ve adjusted the specs and pricing.
20GB Disk Space
128MB DDR3 RAM Guaranteed
256MB DDR3 RAM Burstable
1000GB Bandwidth
Monthly: $3.99
Quarterly: $11 ($3.66 per month)
Semi-Annually: $20 ($3.33 per month)
Annually: $36 ($3 per month)
These are also available in Germany by request via sales ticket. We also accept AlertPay – just ask sales.
-Charles