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The best VPS hosting options in Europe

February 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 4 Comments

The best VPS hosting in Europe

The other day someone left me a comment regarding the lack of good VPS options in Europe at a low price. His claim was that there are much better option in the USA and for a lower cost.

I thought that this would be an excellent topic for a post as I’m aware of several good VPS hosting options with servers located in Europe that are available for a reasonable price. In this post I’m going to provide you with some basic details regarding each VPS hosting service and make recommendations based on my own personal experience from actual usage, as well as extensive benchmarks that both I and other VPS hosting customers have compiled via ServerBear.com. I won’t be delving into the minutia of the benchmark result but if you’re into that I recommend that you head over to Server Bear and check them out. (Hopefully after reading this post)

Although the topic of this post is the VPS hosting on servers located in Europe, each of these VPS hosting companies also has data centers located in in the United States as well as in Asia and my recommendations are the same regardless of the location of the data center.

With the price of a managed VPS of acceptable quality, now as low as 4€ a month there is really no excuse for using low quality shared hosting any longer.

The reasons for choosing a VPS host in Europe

Proximity to your users

If you plan on configuring your VPS as a web server then page load times are important. The closer you are to the majority of your users the happier they will be with your site. People are willing to spend more time on sites that load quickly. Packets take time to travel from your server to your end users browser and the closer you servers are physically located to your users the less network latency your users will experience. This is part of the reason many large sites such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook use geological based DNS and load balancing.

If you’re planning on using your VPS for some other purpose the same latency concerns are still an issue. When it comes to latency it’s generally better for the server to located as near to the majority of the people that will actually be using it.

Privacy concerns

Many people have concerns regarding NSA and other government agencies snooping on USA based servers. My personal opinion is that the location of the servers won’t actually make much of a difference. I’m not sure exactly how much additional privacy protection hosting in Europe actually provides. Given that many European countries will work in cooperation with USA government agencies and the fact that the NSA snoops on the traffic that flows via underwater fiber cables that are connecting pretty much everyone. However if you’re of the belief that the benefit is real hosting in Europe may be of interest to you.

Bypassin IP based geolocation access restrictions

You or your users may be located in a country that does not have access to content that is restricted based on the location associated with your IP address. A common way around such restrictions is the use of a virtual private network (VPN) or proxy located in the country that is allowed access to the gelocation restricted content. A hypothetical examples would be setting up a VPN so that you could access to UK based Netflix while you’re living in Moscow. There are several services that provide DNS based proxy services which bypass location based access restrictions. The best of which is probably Smart DNS Proxy. If you wanted to build yourself a clone of a service like this you would need servers with IP addresses that have access to the content.

What are the European VPS hosting options?

There are literally hundreds of options to choose from. I hate the blog posts that list the “top 100” type lists that provide a lot of links but don’t offer any real insight. I’m not going to waste you time and try to overwhelm you with low quality options. I personally use each of the VPS hosting companies mentioned and each for a different purpose.

Each of the four VPS host have the following in common:

Overwhelmingly positive reputations
Offer solid state drives for faster IO
Provide 1GB or better network connections
I have personal experience and am able to personally recommend their service.

I’m listing them in alphabetical order but will provide my recommendations after I’ve provided a brief synopsis of each service.

Digital Ocean

European data centers

Digital ocean has a total of four European data centers.

Three located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
One in London, England

Pros

Of the four VPS hosting companies in this review Digital Ocean has the most refined user interface on their website. They appear to be targeting novices to Linux Systems administration and they’re doing an excellent job at it. Their tutorial are excellent and I often find my self reading over them while I’m configuring servers with other hosts.

Servers are billed for by the hour or monthly. Support for many different Linux distributions and Free BSD.

You can scale your server up as your site grows and requires more resources.

If you want to get up and running quickly Digital Ocean offers several applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Appache and Nginx which can be automatically installed and configured at the time of deployment. You can have everything up and running literally within two minutes.

Digital Ocean offers and entry level VPS with 512MB RAM, 1 CPU, 20 GB SSD, and 1000GB of monthly data transfer for $5 a month. These specifications are more than adequate for most small blogs or even several dozen static sites. If managing a VPS isn’t something you’re interesting in attempting you can get the same $5 Digital Ocean VPS with management for the same price if you order it via CloudWays managed VPS service.

An API is available for integration and deploying servers.

Cons

Digital Ocean’s network can get congested which can add about one half of a second to your servers response time. If you’re hosting a web page where every additional milliseconds can and does have a negative effect on the number of page views and sales. The CPU performance is by no means bad but it can be the worst of the four compared if your on a heavily utilized host server.

Slowest SSD disk IO of the four VPS hosts compared.

Linode

European data centers

Linode currently only has one European data center with and additional one being opened in the spring of 2015

London, England
Frankfurt, Germany (Spring 2015)

Pros

Linode is targeting a different demographic than Digital Ocean. They’re marketing more to businesses that have knowledgeable staff that are experienced with Linux systems administration looking for a better option than the bigger and more expensive cloud hosting services such as Amazon EC2 or Microsofts Azure. Linode’s network is five times faster than that of each of the other VPS hosts mentioned in this post. (5GB vs 1GB) and the SSD that they are using are the quickest when compared to the others.

With Linode you have the ability to scale your VPS up or down depending on expected usage. This can be useful if you have a site that does not receive much traffic throughout the year but get a large amount of traffic around Christmas you can scale the site up for a month or two and then back down after the rush which saves money. The process will take the site offline for about half an hour each way so you would want to also have a fail over server. With the other Hosts mentioned in this post you can scale up but not back down so this can be a big advantage to using Linode if you have large variations in seasonal traffic patters.

If you need load balancing Linode is the only host on this list to offer them as I’ve mentioned previously they’re the host most appropriate for a site that’s getting a lot of traffic.

The price may not be as the lowest but at $10 for a VPS with 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU, 24GB of SSD storage and 2TB of data transfer it’s still an incredible deal.

Linode offers a web based server resource monitoring tool called LongView which provides terrific insight. None of the other VPS hosts on this list offer anything comparable.

Managed hosting and hourly systems administration are available. Linode bills $100 per month per server in addition to the cost of the VPS for managed hosting and they offer systems administration at $100 per hour. It may not be the cheapest but If you’re in a pinch and you need it it’s available.

An API is available for integration and deploying servers.

Cons

The UI of their website isn’t the most user friendly. It looks like it was designed by a systems administrator. Everything is functional but at times I find myself searching the page for the correct link.

The CPU performance isn’t that good when compared to RamNode or Vultr.

RamNode

European data centers

RamNode currently has a single data center in Europe

Rotterdam (suburb), Netherlands

Pros

When benchmarked their servers perform the best of the four VPS hosts when it comes to raw CPU speed.

Super low price low end servers ideal for hosting small static sites that don’t receive much traffic. As low as $15 per year for an OpenVZ based VPS.

Their current customers love them and their support. You usually won’t get anyone willing to go above and beyond for you at larger hosting companies.

Support for Windows VPS, if you need to set up a windows server for an additional cost it’s an option with RamNode.

Cons

Their website is clearly made up of several separate systems that have not been fully integrated into each other. The UI is confusing and frustrating to use at times. When using their site It quickly becomes very apparent that they are a small hosting company.

RamNode only offers monthly billing. If you like to set up a VPS from a backup specifically for testing new functionality and then destroy the clone after testing this is a major con.

Most of the self service functionality available via the other VPS hosts mentioned in this post are missing from RamNode. Nearly everything requires opening a support ticket.

No API means there is no way to deploy and configure new VPS’s via code.

Vultr

European data centers

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Frankfurt, Germany
London, England
Paris France

Pros

Vultr seems to have positioned themselves as a direct competitor to Digital Ocean and Vultr outperforms Digital Ocean in every benchmark. They have a clean easy to use interface that makes deploying servers relativity painless. They’re lowest price plan is €4.5 which is the same and Digital Ocean’s lowest priced VPS but the specs are better on the Vultr Server with 768MB of Ram, 1 CPU, 15GB of SSD and 1000 GB of monthly data transfer.

Vultr offers support of Windows VPS at an additional cost as well as the ability to deploy a custom ISO which is unique among the four VPS hosts that are being compared.

Hourly billing.

API for provisioning and monitoring VPS.

cons

Vultr’s network can get a bit congested and the IO rate off the SSD can be slow at times. This is a common issue among many VPS hosts.

Conclusion and recommendation

So what are my recommendations? It really depends on your needs. Do you need a managed VPS or will you do the management yourself?

Managed virtual private servers (VPS)

Small web site, low cost managed VPS hosting

If you plan on using your VPS for web hosting and you would rather not have to worry about installation, security, and updating yourself you would go with a managed VPS. The least expensive way to go for a typical smaller website would be to use a CloudWays managed VPS on top of Digital Oceans “cloud”. A reasonably provisioned server with 1GB of RAM will only cost you around €13.50 monthly.

Select CloudWays

CloudWays is currently offering a 15 day free trial on their managed VPS with 1GB of RAM.

Large site with redundancy managed VPS hosting

If you’re a larger business that has the need for fail over servers and load balancing and you would like to outsource the management of the servers for your site I would recommend going with Linode and paying the additional $100 per month per server in addition to the server costs for management.

A typical 2 server configuration plus load balancer with management will run you around €300 per month. That price may sound steep but when compared to other managed server options it’s quite inexpensive.

Choose Linode

Self managed virtual private servers (VPS)

Web server with caching or static content

On web servers faster CPU speeds don’t usually equate to faster websites. For serving static content such as images, static HTML, CSS and JS files the quality of the network connection and the speed which the files are read from the disk have a greater effect on a web sites performance and Linode has both the best network and the fastest disks. In case you were wondering what I use for my own site, this site currently hosted with Linode. I currently host the majority of my clients sites on Linode and do most of my development on Vultr.

Choose Linode

CPU intensive websites or Windows VPS

If you have a web site that can’t make use of caching and every page is served dynamically a faster CPU can improve a web sites performance. Both RamNode and Vultr offer excellent CPU performance and they both also offer Windows as an option. The only thing that is keeping me from recommending RamNodes is the lack of hourly billing. I will often find myself testing new server configuration options using a cloned server based on a snapshot of live server. Fore this reason as well as the additional data centers I’m going to recommend Vultr. If hourly billing isn’t something you will need or want then by all means go give RamNode a try. I have a VPS with them that I use as a VPN/Proxy and it works great.

Choose Vultr

Try RamNode

You may have noticed that I didn’t recommend Digital Ocean for anything. They’ve been thoroughly defeated by Vultr in nearly every way considerable and I currently only recommend using them in conjunction with CloudWays.

I have a page with coupons, promo and discount codes for each of these services that I update frequently. You may be interested in taking a look if you’re planing on giving one of them a try. Rather than post the coupon codes here and potentially forget to update them in the future it makes more sense to link out to the coupon page and I’ll update them there as needed.

That’s it for this post I hope that you’ve found the information in it useful and that I’ve been able to help you select the European based VPS with SSD that suits your needs. If you have any comments or suggestions please leave me a comment. If you would like a personal recommendation based on your needs either leave a comment or fill out the contact form. If you have any other questions that you would like answered I’ve also launched a new forum section for Q & A. You can also join my mailing list by filling out the form on the right hand navigation.

Thank you for reading.

Feeling defrauded by Linode

January 21, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

Linode.com Logo

Late last year a client that I work with decided that they would like to have Moodle set up on a VPS and they selected Linode to host it.

After they set up billing they provided me with access to their VPS and I went through the process of setting up Moodle on their VPS.

Around this same time I was thinking about starting a blog related to software, programming, hosting and technology which became this very blog that you’re currently reading.

I was fairly impressed with Linode so I decided to use them as the host of my own VPS. I figured that I would do my client a favor and use their referral link since it was them giving me access to their server which is what led to me selecting Linode to host my own VPS.

A couple of months have passed and during that time I’ve written a few posts regarding or relating to Linode’s services. When I write about something that relates to Linode I link to them using my referral link. I use and like their service and if sending other people in their direction leads to me getting a couple of months of free hosting all the better. These links in turn have led to a non trivial amount of traffic being sent to their site.

It’s been a while and I decided to take a look at my referral stats with Linode and to my surprise there’s a big fat zero in my referrals. That seems rather odd given the amount of traffic that I’ve been sending to them so I decided to look into if there was something wrong. I contacted their support department who then put me in contact with their marketing department. Their marketing department informed me that my account has been marked as fraudulent. The reason being, that I used a link from my clients account which I had access to when I opened my own account. Marketing recommended that I try to clear this up with their support department.

I opened a support ticket and a few hours later they insisted that I had opened multiple accounts in an attempt to defraud them. This isn’t true, but they don’t seem to care all that much, and it’s easier for them to tell me to take a hike than to fix this mess. I’ve been informed that I’ve been blacklisted from their referral program for this “fraud” that I’ve never committed.

Apparently theirs nothing within the support departments power that can undo this once that a decision has been made.

If Linode’s support department doesn’t care maybe someone else in the company will.

I thought I would try to get someone at Linode to pay attention via a blog post.

If they’re not willing to correct this, I’ll send the couple of hundred users a month that I’ve been sending them to this page instead.

I’m in Europe and it’s late so I’m off to bed.

Hopefully in the morning I’ll have so kind of positive reply from them.

It’s frustrating that I’ve had to take things this far.

Update

I woke up this morning with an email from the VP of their support department in my inbox. He informed me that my account is no longer marked as having taken part in “referral fraud” He apologized and said that he would follow up with me today regarding any referrals that I’ve made in the past month (if there are any) being credited. It’s the middle of the night on the east coast of the USA so we’ll see what happens in a few hours.

Update 2

In the end the VP of support gave me a $50 credit and apologized for handling the situation poorly which is more than what I was asked for. I would have been happy if they stopped saying I had committed fraud and told me what was going on with their referral program. The support VP told me that he was unable to find any referrals from my account, which is kind of hard to believe based on the traffic, but it is what it is. If they’re referral program is doing such a poor job of converting interested users into paying customers then they really need to address that. For comparison 2.5% of the traffic I send to DigitalOcean sign up and 9.8% of the traffic I send to Vultr. Linode costs a little bit more than either of them but it’s also more consistent and reliable with faster IO and a better network.

Update 3

A couple of months have gone by and despite sending Linode a fair amount of traffic I still haven’t seen a single referral. I’ve asked them several times to resolve what ever issue they’re having. Either Linode is incredibly bad at converting potential customers into paying clients or their referral system doesn’t work properly. Either way I’m through putting in any effort at steering potential clients their way and I plan on moving my own site over to RamNode once my existing credit with Linode is used up.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had a similar negative experience with Linode.

Linode vs. Vultr – two leading VPS hosts compared.

January 16, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

Linode Vs. Vultr a comparison of two leading low cost VPS hosting providers

While looking through my Google Webmaster Tools search engine referrals I see that there are several people making their way to my site looking for a comparison of “Linode vs. Vultr”. I thought I would oblige and do a direct comparison between these two virtual private server (VPS) hosting services. So without wasting any more time here’s my comparison of Linode and Vultr.

Linode

Linode has been around for several years and have recently done multiple upgrades to their network. They have a good reputation and are marketing themselves to experienced developers and corporations looking or lower cost “cloud” providers than alternative such as Amazon EC2.

Pros

Low cost

The $10 1GB 1 cpu plan maybe be twice the price as the lowest plan on at Vultr and $3 more expensive that a VPS with 1GB of ram on Vultr. They may not be the least expensive but at $10 it’s still a great value.

Scale Up or Down

Linode offers the ability to scale an individual “node” (Linodes name of a VPS) both up and down as needed. If you’re expecting a holiday rush in November and December you could scale you’re node up at the end of October and then back down at the beginning of January.

5GB Network

Linode offers the fastest network of any lower cost VPS provider. Each server is connected with to a 5GB network and each data center has a 20GB network connection

Fast SSD

The SSD that Linode is using are faster and more consistent that the SSD used by Vultr.

Multiple Data centers

Linode offers data centers in London UK, Tokyo Japan , Newark New Jersey, Atlanta Georgia, Dallas Texas and Fremont California

Load Balancers

Linode offers load balancers.

Server Stats

LongView is the name of Linodes server stats package that you can use to monitor utilization. The free version displays information for the past 12 hours. It very useful in determining if you should upgrade your node or diagnosing any issues that may arise.

Support

The support department seems to be pretty well trained and easily accessible. I’ve had a few questions and they were answered quickly.

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting and hourly system administration are available. A managed VPS is going to cost you $100 per month more than the same package that is self managed.

Cons

Low speed CPU
By no means are they slow but they’re significantly slower than some of their competitors offerings. However the performance is more consistent.

Higher minimum cost

There’s not $5 option the lowest price VPS is $10 on Linode. A similarly configured server with Vultr would cost you $7.

Linode Benchmarks

$10 1GB RAM 1CPU

UnixBench score: 520.1

I/O rate: 693.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 44.1 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Vultr

Vultr is relatively new to the VPS market although their parent company Choopa.com has been in he business of leasing dedicated servers around for over a decade and has a relatively good reputation. I haven’t personally deployed anything with them yet although I plan to in the near future. Their benchmarks are very impressive and they have a few unique features that some people may find advantageous.

Pros

Low cost

The $5 VPS with 768MB of RAM is one of the best deals you’re likely to find for VPS with SSD. Linode’s lowest cost server is $10 for 1GB RAM.

Multiple Data centers

At the time of writing Vultr has a total of 14 different data centers around the world. They have data centers in each of the following cities: Chicago Illinois, New Jersey, Dallas Texas, Atlanta Georgia, Miami Florida, Silicon Valley California, Los Angeles California, Seattle Washington, Sydney Australia, Tokyo Japan, Amsterdam Netherlands, Frankfurt Germany, London UK, and Paris France

Support for Windows Servers

They offer support of Windows VPSs at an additional cost or if you have your own license you can create your own disk image and upload it.

Performance

The CPU performance of the Vultr VPS are Great as you will see when you get to the benchmarks.

Cons

Network

The data connection can be slow at times.

Disk IO

Disk IO performance can be inconsistent fast one moment and very slow the next.

Vultr Benchmarks

For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com

I had a credit on my account that was about to expire so I decided to test the $15 a month plan and $70 a month plans as well. I also ran the same benchmarks on Vultr servers located in Sydney Australia. The results were similar with the exception of the bandwidth rate being much lower.

Vultr 1GB RAM 1 CPU $7 plan

UnixBench score: 2250.4

I/O rate: 447.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 31.3 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Vurtr 2GB RAM 2CPU $15 plan

UnixBench score: 2723.4

I/O rate: 378.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 91.6 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Vultr 8GB RAM 4CUP $70 plan

UnixBench score: 2707.7

I/O rate: 288.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 81.3 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmark for this server

Conclusions

If you were paying attention you would notice that the $15 plan at Vultr actually outperformed the $70 plan. This highlights the difficulty in benchmarking a VPS depending on how the host server has been configured to allocate resources a server could perform great one moment and horribly the next. Vultr has faster CPUs but slower SSD and a slower network. It’s easier for the VM on the server to find 1 free CPU than it is to find 4 underutilized CPUs.

Recomendations

With the extra CPU power and the ability to host a Windows VPS Vultr’s great. Despite having faster CPUs the majority of websites would actually perform better on Linode due to the faster network and faster SSD. I’m hosting this site on a $10 Linode VPS but as soon as my existing credit is used up I plan on moving it over to Vultr.

use the coupon code “LINODE10” (without the quotes) for $10 credit

use coupon code “SSDVPS” (without the quotes) for $20 in free credit but it must be used within 30 days

If you decide to sign up with either Linode or Vultr and have some questions regarding configuration, security or software recommendations feel free to contact me by either leaving a comment on this page or using the link to the contact form at the top of the page.
After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at

CloudWays Managed VPS

CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network

That’s it for Linode vs. Vultr. I hope that you’ve found the information in this post helpful. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. If you would like to keep updated periodically regarding new content please join my mailing list by filling out the form in the right side navigation. Thank you for reading.

Linode coupon and promo codes

January 10, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge Leave a Comment

This page was last updated on April 20th 2015

Linode coupon and promo codes

I’ve been looking over my Google webmaster tools and I’ve been getting a bit of traffic from people looking for Linode coupon codes and promo codes. So I thought that I would give people what they want. I’ll do my best to keep this page updated with the most recent and best coupon codes and promo codes for Linode.

use the above big green link with the coupon code “LINODE10” (without the quotes) for $10 in free credit.

I’ve also done several comparisons of Linode with other SSD VPS providers.

Here are the links to those posts.

Linode vs. DigitalOcean

Linode vs. Vultr

A comparison between Linode, DigitalOcean ,Vultr and RamNode

I’ll do my best to keep this page updated. If this coupon expires please let me know and if you know of a better coupon code to use please post it in the comments.

DigitalOcean vs. Vultr – which is the better VPS?

January 1, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 6 Comments

If you’re looking for an in depth comparison of DigitalOcean vs. Vultr you’re in the right place. In this post I’m going to outline the pros and cons of each, provide you with benchmarks and makes my own recommendations.

Let’s get started. What are the pros and cos of Each.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has been growing rapidly in the past year. They seem to be marketing themselves to developers new to the world of visualization, and those with an extremely low budget.

Pros

low cost of Entry

The lowest cost server with DigitalOcean is currently $5 for a server with 1 cpu 512MB of ram and 20GB SSD
Scale Up
The ability to scale an individual VPS up with your requirements.

Better than average performance

I’ve included some benchmarks at the bottom of this article but to summarize DigitalOcean performs better than average in benchmarks.

Multiple Data centers

At the time of writing DigitalOcean has 7 available data centers (of 9, 2 are sold out) Located in New York (2 of 3), Amsterdam (2 of 3), San Francisco, Singapore and London

Easy to use interface

They’ve clearly spend a good deal of effort making their web interface intuitive. Of the many VPS providers I’ve used their interface is the best.

Quickly deployment of common applications

While setting up your “droplet” (DigitalOcean’s terminology for a virtual server) you are given to option to select one of many common applications. For example WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, lamp stack, lemp stack, magento this allows you to get up and running very quickly.

Cons

1GB Network

Shared 1GB network connection between all VPS on a server. This can lead to a slow connection. This is also a problem I’ve noticed on Vultr.

High network latency

The initial response times for a web request can be 100ms slower than with other VPS providers.

Slower SSDs

The Solid State Drives (SSDs) that DigitalOcean is using on it’s server are slower than some other providers.

Support

Their tutorials are terrific an the support department is generally helpful but isn’t always the most well informed. This could be the result of their rapid growth or it could just be poor training but the support department can be spotty.

DigitalOcean Benchmarks

For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider. I chose the 1GB $10 plan for DigitalOcean to compare to compare to a $7 plan with similar specifications at Vultr.

System Specs

RAM	994 MB
HDD	31 GB
CPU Model	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz
CPU Cores	1
CPU Speed	2399 MHz
CPU Cache	15360 KB

UnixBench

UnixBench (w/ all processors)	1408.5
UnixBench (w/ one processor)	1372.3

FIO

Read IOPS	49028.0
Read Bandwidth	196.1 MB/second
Write IOPS	8636.0
Write Bandwidth	34.5 MB/second

Download Speed (100MB File)

Location	Rate
Cachefly	41.0 MB/s
Linode, Atlanta, GA, USA	15.0 MB/s
Linode, Dallas, TX, USA	13.0 MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP	6.22 MB/s
Linode, London, UK	87.6 MB/s
OVH, Paris, France	95.2 MB/s
SmartDC, Rotterdam, Netherlands	74.3 MB/s
Hetzner, Nuernberg, Germany	18.8 MB/s
iiNet, Perth, WA, Australia	1.89 MB/s
MammothVPS, Sydney, Australia	148 KB/s
Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL	58.5 MB/s
Leaseweb, Manassas, VA, USA	10.6 MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore	5.09 MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA, USA	12.4 MB/s
Softlayer, San Jose, CA, USA	2.90 MB/s
Softlayer, Washington, DC, USA	3.70 MB/s

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Vultr

Vultr is still new to the VPS market and I haven’t personally deployed anything with them yet. Their benchmarks are very impressive and they have functionality some people may find advantageous.

Pros

low cost of Entry

$5 VPS with 768MB of RAM vs. 512 for the $5 VPS at DigitalOcean

Multiple Data centers

At the time of writing Vultr had data centers in Chicago Illinois, New Jersey, Dallas Texas, Atlanta Georgia, Miami Florida, Silicon Valley California, Los Angeles California, Seattle Washington, Sydney Australia, Tokyo Japan, Amsterdam Netherlands, Frankfurt Germany, London UK, and Paris France

Support for Windows Servers

They offer support of Windows VPSs at an additional cost.

Performance

The performance of the Vultr VPS are Great as you will see when you get to the benchmarks.

Cons

Network

The data connection can be slow at times. This is also a common problem with DigitalOcean as well.

Interface

The interface isn’t as refined as that of DigitalOcean

Vultr Benchmarks

For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider. I chose the 1GB $7 plan for Vultr to compare to the similar $10 plan with DigitalOcean.

System Specs

RAM	993 MB
HDD	21 GB
CPU Model	Vultr Virtual CPU 2
CPU Cores	1
CPU Speed	3392 MHz
CPU Cache	4096 KB

UnixBench

UnixBench (w/ all processors)	2250.4
UnixBench (w/ one processor)	2261.5

FIO

Read IOPS	51840.0
Read Bandwidth	207.3 MB/second
Write IOPS	61035.0
Write Bandwidth	244.1 MB/second

Download Speed (100MB File)

Location	Rate
Cachefly	31.3 MB/s
Linode, Atlanta, GA, USA	15.9 MB/s
Linode, Dallas, TX, USA	13.1 MB/s
Linode, Tokyo, JP	6.13 MB/s
Linode, London, UK	96.1 MB/s
OVH, Paris, France	95.2 MB/s
SmartDC, Rotterdam, Netherlands	67.0 MB/s
Hetzner, Nuernberg, Germany	43.4 MB/s
iiNet, Perth, WA, Australia	2.07 MB/s
MammothVPS, Sydney, Australia	54.2 KB/s
Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL	69.0 MB/s
Leaseweb, Manassas, VA, USA	16.0 MB/s
Softlayer, Singapore	4.48 MB/s
Softlayer, Seattle, WA, USA	11.4 MB/s
Softlayer, San Jose, CA, USA	12.1 MB/s
Softlayer, Washington, DC, USA	19.3 MB/s

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Conclusions

DigitalOceans tutorials are excellent and their platform is aimed more at novices. Vultr offers superior processing power, a larger selection of data center locations and support of Windows servers. There’s nothing stopping someone using Vultr or any other VPS hosting service from reading the excellent tutorials that DigitalOcean has created.

Recomendations

Vultr out performs DigitalOcean in nearly every respect when it comes to their core business of VPS hosting and they managed to do it while costing a little bit less. If you’re just beginning in the world of virtual servers and could use the additional support DigitalOcean’s tutorials are incredibly well written but there’s nothing stopping you form using them on another VPS host. If I personally had to choose between the two I would go with Vultr. The only reason I’m still using DigitalOcean is because I have a couple of hundred dollars in non transferable credit with them.

After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at CloudWays managed virtual private servers. CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network. They have plans that start for as little as $5 and it removes the headache of having to manage your own VPS so that you can stick the development without having to worry about keeping your server stack updated.

Try CloudWays Managed VPS

I also keep track of the latest discounts and coupons available for each of the VPS hosting services mentioned in this post.

Here are the links to the applicable coupons

That’s it for DigitalOcean vs. Vultr. I hope that you’ve found the information in this post useful. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m an idiot or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. If you would like me to do some benchmarks of the other plans offered by these VPS providers let me know. To keep updated periodically regarding new content please join my mailing list by filling out the form in the right side navigation. Thank you for reading.

Digital Ocean vs. Linode – Which virtual server?

December 31, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 8 Comments

DigitalOcean vs. Linode

If you’re reading this you’re probably on the hunt For the best Virtual Private Server (VPS) that you can find and you’ve come to the correct conclusion that it comes down to DigitalOcean vs. Linode.

In this post I’m going to outline the pros and cons of each, present you the benchmarks and hopefully help you come to an informed conclusion. So let’s get started with DigitalOcean vs. Linode.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean logo

DigitalOcean has been growing rapidly in the past year. They seem to be marketing themselves to developers new to the world of virtual servers and those with an extremely low budget.

Pros

low cost of Entry

The lowest cost server with DigitalOcean is currently $5 for a server with 1 cpu 512MB of ram and 2GGB SSD
Scale Up
The ability to scale an individual VPS up with your requirements.

Better than average performance

I’ve included some benchmarks at the bottom of this article but to summarize DigitalOcean performs better than average in benchmarks.

Multiple Data centers

At the time of writing DigitalOcean has 7 available data centers (of 9, 2 are sold out) Located in New York (2 of 3), Amsterdam (2 of 3), San Francisco, Singapore and London

Easy to use interface

They’ve clearly spend a good deal of effort making their web interface intuitive. Of the many VPS providers I’ve used, their interface is the best.

Quickly deployment of common applications

Cons

1GB Network

Shared 1GB network connection between all VPS on a server.

High network latency

The initial response times for a web request can be 100ms slower than with other VPS providers.

Slower SSDs

The Solid State Drives (SSDs) that DigitalOcean is using on it’s server are slower than some other providers.

Support

Their tutorials are terrific and the support department is generally helpful but isn’t always the most well informed. This could be the result of their rapid growth or it could just be poor training but the support department can be spotty.

DigitalOcean Benchmarks

For the benchmarks I used, the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider. I chose the 1GB $10 plan for DigitalOcean to compare to the similar $10 plan at Linode.

UnixBench score: 1460.8

I/O rate: 273.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 48.4 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Linode

Linode.com Logo

Pros

Low cost of Entry
The $10 1GB 1 cpu plan maybe be twice the price as the lowest plan on at DigitalOcean but it also offers twice the memory.

Scale Up or Down

5GB Network

Linode offers the fastest network of any lower cost VPS provider. Each server is connected with to a 5GB network and and each data center has a 20GB network connection

Fast SSD

The SSD that Linode is using are faster than those of DigitalOcean.

Multiple Data centers

Linode offers data centers in London UK, Tokyo Japan , Newark New Jersey, Atlanta Georgia, Dallas Texas and Fremont California

Load Balancers

With Linode load balancers as an option.

Server Stats

Support

The support department seems to be pretty well trained and easily accessible.

Managed Hosting
Managed hosting and hourly system administration are available. A managed VPS is going to cost you $100 per month more than the same package that is unmanaged.

Cons

Low speed CPU
By no means are they slow but they’re significantly slower than some of their competitors offerings.

Less friendly UI

Although offering basically the same functionality the user interface is less intuitive than DigitalOcean.

Deploying applications on new VPS slower

Linode offers scripts that you can use to install most of the same applications that DigitalOcean does but that process is not as quick as easy as selecting the app or stack at the time of deployment.

Higher minimum cost

There’s not $5 option the lowest price VPS is $10.

Linode Benchmarks

For the benchmarks I used the benchmark script provided by ServerBear.com the tests were run on December 24th 2014 on VPS’s located in London for each provider.

UnixBench score: 520.1

I/O rate: 693.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 44.1 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Another option

For Raw Power there’s also another option that you may not even be aware of. This past year a new VPS provider offering SSD, multiple data centers and fast cpu’s has launched.

Vultr

Vultr logo

Vultr is still new and I haven’t deployed anything with them yet so I don’t have anything pro or con to say about them. They also have a $5 VPS with 768MB of RAM vs. 512 for the $5 VPS at DigitalOcean. Their benchmarks are also very impressive. If the only reason that you are choosing DigitalOcean over Linode is the CPU benchmarks Vultr may be an even better option for you.

Pros

low cost of Entry

The lowest cost server with Vultr is currently $5 for a server with 1 cpu 728MB of RAM

The servers are significantly faster than either DigitalOcean or Linode.

Cons

Nothing major some of the functionality such as IPV6 support is still in beta and can be a bit buggy.

Vultr Benchmarks

UnixBench score: 2250.4

I/O rate: 447.0 MB/second

Bandwidth rate: 31.3 MB/second

View the full ServerBear Benchmarks for this server.

Conclusions

DigitalOcean has almost three times the cpu power of a Linode VPS with similar specification however Linode is twice as fast and operations involving disk I/O. Simplified that means that DigitalOcean would be better at anything involving heavy calculations such as complicated database joins or on processing complicated PHP scripts while Linode would be better at serving up static content like images or html documents quickly.

Recomendations

I personally use both Linode and DigitalOcean and have overwhelmingly positive things to say about each of them. Other VPS’s that I use include those with Vultr and RamNode. This site is currently hosted on a $10 Linode VPS but I pan on moving it over to RamNode once my existing credit with Linode is used up. It’s important that you evaluate the requirements of your own applications. I primarily use DigitalOcean and Vultr for development and staging and RamNode or Linode for production. Linode offers better I/O on a superior network their support staff are excellent and if need be are available at an additional cost to help resolve any emergencies that may arise. You should evaluate the resource requirements of your own applications and if you need the extra cpu power Vultr maybe be the best choice for you but only if you are willing to tolerate slower I/O and a slower network. DigitalOcean may be a good middle ground and because of the simplified deployment of applications is an excellent choice to someone new to managing a VPS. I hope that this post has at least helped made a well informed decisions.

use the coupon code “LINODE10” (without the quotes) for $10 credit

Singn up for RamNode

use coupon code “SSDVPS” (without the quotes) for $20 in free credit but it must be used within 30 days

After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at

CloudWays Managed VPS

CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network

That’s it for my post on DigitalOcean vs. Linode. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m an ass hat or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. If you would like me to benchmark some of the other plans offered by these VPS providers let me know. If you would like to keep updated periodically regarding new content please join my mailing list by filling out the form in the right side navigation. Thank you for reading.

8 Mistakes when choosing a web host

December 30, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 1 Comment

8 common mistakes made when choosing a web host

Before I list out some of the most common mistakes people make when choosing a web host I should detail what the common types of hosting are.

What are the basic types of hosting?

Let’s begin with the premise that there are are three basic types of hosting :

Shared
Virtual Private
Dedicated

Shared

With shared hosting everyone is sharing all of the resources of a single dedicated or virtual server if one of the other shared hosting customers on the same server is getting a lot of traffic or running a resource intensive process the performance of everyone else’s web site on the same server is going to suffer the consequences. The companies that sell shared web hosting will often put thousands of websites on the same server. This is by far the most popular hosting option because of the price. Shared hosting is often incredibly cheap however it’s also incredibly unreliable. This may be an acceptable hosting option for a vanity blog or uploading some photos of your kids but it’s unreliable and I wouldn’t want my business to depend on it.

Virtual private server

A Virtual Private Server is usually referred to as a “VPS”. The way that a VPS works is that there is a host Operating System or “OS” that is responsible for managing the communicate with undying hardware for each guest OS that is assigned to a customer. Typically the resources of the server are allocated in different proportions to each guest. For example lets say that the underlying hardware is an 8 core CPU with 8GB of RAM an 80 GB hard drive. There are eight VPS hosted on this server and they each have 1 cpu 1GB RAM and 10 GB of hard drive the possibility of having a bad neighbor that hogs all of the resources is minimized. However many VPS hosting providers will sell that same server as either 8 core cpu VPS with 1GB RAM and then you’re back to having the same bad neighbor problem you had with shared hosting. It can be hard to figure out what you’re actually paying for with a virtual server.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicate hosting is also often referred to as collocated hosting. With a dedicated server you’ve got the server to yourself most of the time you won’t need more than only a few percent of the resources and there’s no one else to share the bill with. If there’s a hardware failure it may take a while to get things back up.

So now that we’ve defined what we’re talking about what are the common mistakes that people make when choosing a web host?

Common mistakes made when choosing a web host.

Letting a domain name registrar host your website.

I’ve never heard of this working out well for anyone and I’ve heard numerous horror stories. I’ll admit that it’s easy and cheap but when it comes to stuffing as many shared hosting plans as possible ( and often time far beyond ) domain name registrars are among the worst offenders. I’ve already mentioned why it’s a bad idea to depend on shared hosting if you’re dependent on your website for either revenue or marketing but to reiterate it’s often slow and unreliable due to the fact that you’re at the mercy of every other website that’s being hosted on the same server.

Choosing a service based on price alone.

Not all hosting is created equal. If you’ve found a hosting package that costs $15 a year it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have any luck getting in contact with the support department if your site goes down at 3 am on a Saturday. If you’re fine with your web presence being slow and unreliable then by all means go cheap. If you would like something reliable, plan on spending between $15 and $30 a month for a moderately low traffic web site with a host with a fully staffed support department.

Paying for services they don’t need

If your website takes up 100MB of disk space and averages around 300 daily unique visitors and is only of interest to people in Boise Idaho looking for a dentist, you don’t need to pay for a 100GB of disk space on an 8 core VPS with with 32GB of RAM and a global content distribution network. The salesman on the other end of the phone line at the hosting company is not someone that should be trusted when it comes to what you should be paying for. Paying too much for hosting is almost as common as paying too little. Spending several times more for hosting for services that you will never use will not result in any better outcomes for your website. At least 90% of you should be spending $15 – $30 a month on hosting. I’m hosting this web site on a $10 a moth VPS with a $2.50 a month backup plan and it’s capable of handling 15,000 page requests per minute. How much traffic your site can handle will depend on what your web site is doing behind the scenes and how it has been configured.

Getting in over their head.

An unmanaged VPS is going to be much less expensive than a managed VPS, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and you are either unwilling or unable to dedicate the time to learn your’re going to end up bring you site down or getting hacked. Be honest with yourself. If you’re not in the business of keeping servers secure and properly configured you’re probably much better off with managed hosting. You may be limited in how you’re allowed access to your server and what you’re allowed to do but that’s the trade off for putting someone else in charge of your websites stability and security.

Choosing a host that’s too small.

A small company may have developed your site but they’re probably not be the right choice to host it. You’re neighbor Jim’s cousin John might be a genius but if the server he’s running in his bedroom closet crashes while he’s away on a two week vacation are you fine with your site being down until he get’s back to fix it? Choose a hosting company that has a good reputation and 24 hour support. If you’re planing on switching call or email them on a weekend nigh and see if you get a response. If you don’t hear from anyone until the following Monday their probably not worth doing business with.

Choosing a host that’s growing too fast.

When a hosting company is providing a good product at a fair price the word gets out and the hosting company can rapidly grow exponentially. This is great if you’re the owner of the hosting company, but can often be bad news for the hosting customers. They’ll need to bring on new employees or overwork the employees they have. The new employees may not have the same level of experience as the employees that were working when the hosting company established it’s stellar reputation. In addition to the employee problems the underlying infrastructure may not be able to handle additional load. Their 1GB connection maybe have been adequate when they were 1/10 the size but now the traffic from 10 times as many servers have clogged their narrow pipe.

Choosing a host that is brand new.

Doing business with a company with a good reputation is much less stressful than a company with no reputation. Mistakes happen and they’re more likely to happen at the beginning, when a company and it’s employees are new.

Choosing a host based solely on performance benchmarks.

The majority of websites don’t need to be hosted on incredibly powerful servers. One marketing ploy is to mention the speed speed of the CPU which is useful when you’re doing many complicated database queries but is almost meaningless when you’re serving up static files. For most websites the hosts data connection speed will be more important to their sites performance than the CPU speed on the server. For example this site is hosted on a $10 a month Linode VPS and is capable of serving up to 15,000 requests per minute because of the way I’ve configured it and the fact that my Linode server has a 40Gbps data connection on a 160Gbps network. The raw CPU power is actually significantly lower than what I can find with other VPS providers but many of those providers servers are only using 1Gbps data connections on a 10Gbps network.

Failure to have a backup

Lastly and it’s not a hosting mistake, so I didn’t count it as one but still deserving of a mention. The failure to ensure that there is an adequate backup plan in place. If something goes wrong and you don’t have a backup you are ultimately the one that will be left to face the repercussions. Get a back up of your site and keep it safe. Make sure that your site is regularly being backed up, and make sure you know what is needed to do in order to recover your site from the backup.

Hosting Recommendations

Personal non-revenue generating

If you’re hosting a family photo album or a blog that generates no revenue and the possibility of a bit of downtime is something you can live with, shared hosting is adequate for your needs but even then I don’t recommend it. A better option would be to use a $5 per month managed VPS with CloudWays. You won’t have any of the headache associated with managing your own VPS and getting everything up and running is painless.

Small business or individual with sysadmin skills

If you are a small business or individual with the necessary server management skills a $10 Linode VPS with the $2.50 backup option is most likely powerful enough for your needs. This is the plan that I’m hosting this site on.
Sign up for Linode

Small business managed hosting

For small businesses or individuals dependent on their web sites for revenue generation or marketing I’m going to recommend a low budget Managed VPS provided by Cloudways. CloudWays adds management and support to a VPS provided by either DigitalOcean or Amazon. You can choose which underlying hosting company you use at the time of registration. With this option you loose a bit of the freedom you would have with a self managed VPS but you gain security and stability. Based on both Price and Performance my recommendation is that you choose DigitalOcean as the underlying VPS provider and the $30 a month plan should be adequate for most small business.

Larger site managed hosting

For larger businesses and sites receiving substantial traffic that need powerful servers and don’t want the headache of having to manage them, I’m going to recommend Linode managed hosting. Linode charges $100 per month in addition per VPS for management. They also offer sysadmin and development services at the rate of $100 per hour.

Raw performance or large storage.

If for some reason you need a lot of raw performance at a low cost or large amounts of magnetic disk storage Vultr offers VPS’s that have both of those bases covers.

Sign up for Vultr
I think that pretty much covers everything there is to say in this post. If you’ve noticed a mistake, have a comment, suggestion, think I’m a jerk or would like a custom recommendation let me know in the comments. If you would like to keep updated periodically regarding new content please join my mailing list by filling out the form in the right side navigation. Thank you for reading.

Linode vs. DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. RamNode

December 10, 2014 by Benjamin Knigge 21 Comments

Comparing SSD cloud VPS hosting providers can be difficult

A virtual cpu core at one hosting provider won’t be equivalent to a virtual cpu core at another host or even another virtual cpu core at the same host depending on the specifications of the underlying hardware and the underlying hardware’s utilization at the time of comparison. I’ve seen both Vultr and RamNode mentions along with the cloud vps start-ups Linode and DigitalOcean and I thought that I would do a quick comparison between them all. For the record I use all four of these VPS hosting companies and wouldn’t have a problem recommending any one of them. (This site is currently hosted on a $10 per month Linode VPS and if you use one the links in this article and remain a happy customer I stand to receive a hosting credit for referring you.

I’ve tried to do a basic comparison of the low cost plans at 3 price points, that I feel most independent web developers would be most interested in.
One at the lowest cost available from each one of the 4 companies compared.

Lowest cost available
$10 – $15 with backups if available
$20 – $25 with backups if available

SSD cloud VPS comparison
	Lowest monthly plan	$10-$15	$20-$25
Linode	cost: $10Ram:1GBvirtual cores:1 Disk: 24GB Bandwidth: 2TB	cost: $12.50($10 + $2.50 for 4x backup images) Ram:1GB virtual cores:1 Disk: 24GB Bandwidth: 2TB	cost: $25($20 + $5 for 4x backup images) Ram:2GB virtual cores:2 Disk: 48GB Bandwidth: 3TB
DigitalOcean	cost: $5Ram: 512MBvirtual cores:1 Disk: 20GB Bandwidth: 1TB	cost: $12($10 + 20% for backups) Ram: 1GB virtual cores:1 Disk: 30GB Bandwidth: 2TB	cost: $24($20 + 20% for backups) Ram: 2GB virtual cores:2 Disk: 40GB Bandwidth: 3TB
Vultr	cost: $5Ram:768MBvirtual cores:1 Disk: 15GB Bandwidth: 1000GB	cost: $15Ram:2GBvirtual cores:2 Disk:40GB Bandwidth: 3000GB* (*for servers in the USA & Europe)	N/A(next price point is at $35)
RamNode	cost: $1.25($15 billed annually) Ram: 128MB virtual cores:1 Disk: 12GB Bandwidth: 50GB	cost: $14Ram: 2GBvirtual cores:2 Disk: 80GB Bandwidth: 3000GB	cost: $21Ram: 3GBvirtual cores:2 Disk: 100GB Bandwidth: 3500GB

At this point I think it’s important to note that RamNode isn’t offering the same type of service that Vultr, Linode and DigitalOcean are providing. RamNode can be more closely compared to traditional VPS provider as they lack, hourly billing, with only a monthly billing option available and also fail to provide an API for integration.

Let’s take a look at some benchmarks that have been provided by vpsbenchmarks.com

CPU utilization

Here we have the average CPU utilization this can give you a general idea of how each virtual CPU at each VPS provider actually performs. The reality is , It doesn’t really matter how many or how fast the virtual CPUs are assigned to your VPS. If they’ve been over allocated multiple virtual CPUs rated at a high speed may not perform as well as a single slower rated CPU that hasn’t been over allocated.

In this test DigitalOcean performs the worst, with Ramnode having the best performance. I wouldn’t categorize any of these servers as performing badly.

response time (lower is better)

This shows the average response time when making a request for a page on each VPS. Response time is a pretty important metric when it comes to web servers. Slower response times means that your users will have to wait longer and are more likely to lose interest and leave. In this test DigitalOcean didn’t perform very well when compared to the others but that’s only because the other VPS providers are performing exceptionally well. Vultr’s results are really outstanding.

If you head over to vpsbenchmarks they include a lot more benchmarks, reviews and other details regarding these four VPS providers as well as many others.

You can also check out the benchmarks over at ServerBear.com for a second set of results.

For many applications raw performance is what’s most important for other applications such as a website, network reliability and IO speed may be more important than raw cpu power. In this area both Vultr and RamNode perform exceptionally.

With DigitalOcean you can scale an individual VPS up but not back down again while with Linode you can scale and a single “node” up and then back down. Linode also has managed hosting as an option. They both have excellent support and the tutorials that DigitalOcean have been putting out are excellent.

In conclusion who you choose between these four VPS providers really depends on you and your application.

If you want the absolute lowest cost SSD VPS or getting the most performance for your dollar spent is the most important and you don’t want or need the ability to quickly resize your VPS or bring new servers online via an API RamNode is the way to go.

If you like the idea of quickly bring new instances on and offline with hourly billing either via the web gui or API with excellent performance and a low latency network or if you need to host a windows VPS, provide your own ISO or install CPanel Vultr is probably the right choice for you.

If you want the ability to easily and rapidly scale up but you only have $5 budget during development or you want a service that provides excellent documentation DigitalOcean would be the perfect fit.

If you want the ability to scale up rapidly or up and down on the same VPS and are willing to spend at least $10 a month for slightly better performance than Digitalocean go with Linode.

I’m personally using Linode currently for this site although I plan on moving everything over to RamNode once my existing credit is used up with Linode due to the dramatically better performance with RamNode. I’ve also set up clients sites at DgitalOcean and Vultr with Vultr offering both better performance and more memory for low end $5 VPS.

Staying on top of the management of a virtual server can be both time consuming and frustrating. If VPS management isn’t something within your skill set I would highly recommend using a managed VPS. A managed VPS will cost significantly more than a self managed VPS but you won’t have to worry about keeping the software updated, truncating log files or process monitoring. All of that ends up costing a bit more but you’ll feel a lot less stressed when something goes wrong at 3 am on a Saturday morning. For Managed VPS hosting I highly recommend RoseHosting. A Managed VPS that is more than adequate for a typical small business website with RoseHosting is going to cost just under $40 per month for hosting. Just give them your requirements and they’ll set everything up so that it meets their requirements. Although they state that they will make their best effort to configure your VPS to your requirements in their service agreement, the last time I spoke with their support department they told me that as of now they’ve never failed to configure a server as per a clients specifications.

Everything is subject to change and what was true at the time of writing may not be true tomorrow.

I hope you’ve found this information useful. Here are the links to each of the virtual private server hosting companies that I mentioned in this post.

I also have a pages with coupons, promo and discount codes for each of these services that I update frequently. You may be interested in taking a look if you’re planing on giving one of them a try. Rather than post the coupon codes here and potentially forget to update them in the future it makes more sense to link out to the coupon page and I’ll update them there as needed.

That’s it for this post. I hope that you’ve found this information helpful in your quest to choose a decent VPS host. If you have anything you would like to say on the topic please leave me a comment. If you would like to stay informed regarding the latest posts, please fill out the big black box on the right hand navigation and join the OdinSQL newsletter.