RamNode VPS hosting

RamNode coupon, promo, and discount codes

February 2, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 2 Comments

Last updated May 7th 2015

RamNode Coupons

I’ve been looking over my search engine referrals and I noticed that I’m getting several users per day looking for RamNode coupon, promo, or discount codes. Up until now I didn’t have any information regarding RamNode coupons on my site but If it’s what people are looking for I thought I would create a page specifically with that information.

What is RamNode?

RamNode is a small virtual private server(VPS) hosting company with a terrific reputation for their quality and responsive support, extremely fast servers and low prices. I personally their inexpensive KVM VPS when setting up VPN’s and proxy servers but the majority of their clients use their virtual private servers as web servers.

They have data centers in :

New York New York, USA
Seattle Washington, USA
Los Angeles California, USA
Atlanta Georgia, USA
Rotterdam, Netherlands

Currently available RamNode coupons

You can clink on the following big green button and use the coupon below.

Choose RamNode

The coupon code “NICE10” (without the quotes) This will entitle you to 10% off of new KVM virtual servers in RamNode’s Atlanta Georgia or Seattle Washington data centers.

I’ll be sure to update this page as new coupons become available. If you know of a coupon, promo code that’s better, please leave a comment containing that information. If this coupon stops working please be sure to let me know.

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.

DIY VPS Netflix proxy

January 20, 2015 by Benjamin Knigge 7 Comments

Netflix logo

I’m an American currently living in Moldova. Unfortunately this means that Netflix (along with many other sites) isn’t available to me here. So being the tech savvy guy that I am I thought that I would build my own.

I could have gone the easy route and set up a VPN but that would slow down all of my internet traffic. I waned to build something that would only proxy the traffic for the geographically restricted services.

After much searching I found this config generator for Haproxy on github and managed to get haproxy configured on Ubuntu 14.04 along with bind which I’m using for DNS as opposed to dnsmasq which is outlined on the github project. I used the SNA only mode for the config generator. I had a bit of credit that is about to expire from a $20 Vultr coupon so I used Vultr to host the VPS. I would recommend using something even cheaper. a $15 a year ultra low end VPS with RamNode would suffice. (edit : I tried setting this up on a Ramnode OpenVZ based VPS and it won’t work on a VPS using OpenVZ without editing OpenVZ settings on the host. Most VPS hosts won’t do that so avoid a VPS using OpenVZ) If I didn’t have the Vultr credit it’s what I would have used and after my existing credit runs out on Vultr I will probably move this over to RamNode myself. So far everything is working great on my laptop.

I’ve spend way too much time over the past couple of days trying to duplicate this same functionality using Nginx. I was attempting to use a TCP proxy to pass the SSL encrypted traffic directly to the end user. This would prevent the need for an SSL cert on the proxy server. I found and was working with this Nginx TCP proxy module but I ran into an obstacles that I don’t think I can overcome at the moment. Nginx doesn’t currently support passing the SNA host via proxy_pass. SNA proxy sport is in the development branch of 1.7. My plan was to simply forward all traffic on ports 80 and 443 to the host in the request headers.

I had planned on doing a DIY tutorial on getting this up and running with Nginx but for the moment at least, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

If you need any help getting the Haproxy method working feel free to leave a comment. If I have the time and their is enough interest I could do a post on that.

Once the 1.7 branch is stable I might take another look at this but for now I’ll still with the haproxy method.

A far less expensive and even simpler solution would have been to just spend a couple of dollar for the proxy/vpn service at SmartDNSProxy.com. I’ve set it up for a couple of acquaintances that I’ve met over here and it’s working great for them. It’s what I would recommend for anyone that doesn’t want to spend the time learning how to configure Haproxy.

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.

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The best VPS hosting options in Europe