Last Updated on October 18, 2022
Memory
RAM is one of the most important components of a server. Too little memory and you’ll constantly end up in swap with terrible performance.
The VPS has 4GB of ECC DDR4 RAM. There’s also 4GB of swap available as shown by the top command. This configuration is ample for many use cases.
Naturally, when you’re sharing a server’s RAM with other users, memory speeds will not match a dedicated machine. From our tests (which were limited because of the CPU utilisation policy) RAM speeds were in accordance with our expectations.
Performance of the VPS’s memory is good, not far off dual channel DDR4 RAM running on a dedicated server.
Hard Disk
The VPS plan is advertised offering NVMe disk space. Like the memory and I/O, you share the physical hard disk with the other users on the server. You therefore will not get anywhere near transfer rates of a dedicated server (or a home PC). With a fairly basic dedicated server using an inexpensive NMVe drive you typically achieve around 3,000-4,000 MB/s read speed using the dd test below.
$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
What does the VPS get with this test? Here’s our findings.
It’s important to remember that you are sharing the server and services with other people and therefore competing for resources. We therefore ran multiple tests for each test set, at defined points in the day. For the types of use cases of a VPS, Hostworld’s VPS disk speed will be more than sufficient.
If the services you want to run require a heavy transfer data to and from the physical disk space, you should look to using a dedicated server.
Network Connectivity
We’re offered a 1Gbps uplink which is faster than many VPS hosting plans. But what matters is the actual maximum download/upload transfer rates you’ll experience.
From our tests, we’ve compared hostworld’s connectivity with a few other UK based VPS providers offering plans at around the same price point. And hostworld was comfortably the quickest.
Here’s an example test result taken using the speedtest utility, a command line interface for testing internet bandwidth.
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from Rochut Group (5.XXX.XXX.5)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by toob Ltd (London) [1.12 km]: 11.439 ms Testing download speed................................. Download: 433.88 Mbit/s Testing upload speed............................................. Upload: 565.97 Mbit/s
We removed some of the dots for presentation purposes.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – CPU
Page 3 – Memory, Disk, Network
Page 4 – Admin UI
Page 5 – Summary
You are right about availability guarantees. I always ignore them.
For example, I see some VPS providers promise 99.999% availability. Pure advertising baloney. If huge multinationals like Meta and Google can’t deliver that with their own platforms, there’s no way a VPS provider will do it.
And when they don’t deliver the ‘guarantee’ what actually happens. A tiny refund amounting to nothing.
Availability:
99.9% – 8 hours 45 minutes 56 seconds downtime per year
99.99% – 52 minutes 45 seconds downtime per year
99.999% – 5 minutes 15 seconds downtime per year
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram had a 6 hour downtime in October 2021 alone.
I’ve never understood how VPS providers claim that resources are split over a number of physical servers. Does that really happen with CPU, memory?? Surely that’s not practical?
Fundamentally it’s possible to share CPU over a cluster of computer systems (nodes), but software running on VPS servers like KVM or VMWare doesn’t do that. It is used in supercomputers with an operating system designed for this purpose and isn’t available for general purpose use even on them.
Any marketing blurb from VPS providers claiming anything like this is just making it up. What they can do is move you easily to another server at the drop of a hat.
Good to see hostworld on this review, been using them for over 12 months and can’t fault the service.
This has given me serious food for thought as it is a way better deal than I’m getting with 2vCPU, 2GB RAM and 60GB hard drive space at Digital Ocean with a paid weekly backup for $2pm extra. I’m just going to have to set aside some serious time to plan a move as that is the more difficult part, migrating 5 or 6 running services.