This is the story of the VPS and how it came to be:
In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.
I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.
Then a lightbulb went on ...
A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004, I sold the company.
We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually caught on.
JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...
The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".
I believe it was independent reinvention, because the paper by Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson regarding FreeBSD Jails, which was presented at a conference in 2000, says
"The jail facility has already seen widespread deployment in particular as a vehicle for delivering "virtual private server" services."
We started bytemark.co.uk around the same time, with the same lightbulb, using User-Mode Linux which was way slower :) We're still selling virtual machines (using KVM), and dedicated servers at bigv.io which I submitted to the site, and have our own data centre in York. It's still a great business to be in.
Needs an option for less than 1TB of bandwidth. Some of us just want to crunch data and have no need for such large bandwidth. You even have an option for 1GB disk, so what about adding an option for 100GB bandwidth?
As another commenter has said, cores mean nothing unless they're dedicated to my VM. There needs to be a better metric, but unfortunately it's very difficult to "benchmark" a VPS objectively. Any ideas?
Is that 600GB of HDD or 600GB of SSD, or 600GB of SSD-cached HDD? Those are all very different things, and the little icon to the left of the capacity is neither noticeable nor searchable.
Big countries like Canada and the United States need to be broken down into 3-4 regions for latency-sensitive customers.
Users should be able to choose the currency. Right now you're second-guessing the currency based on my location/Accept-Language/whatever and it doesn't seem to be changeable.
Having a column for the virtualization platform might be useful for some people. Is it OpenVZ, KVM, Xen-PV or Xen-HVM?
The filter by single country is not particularly useful. I'd like to search by all countries (or checkbox some of them) instead of having to perform N searches to find who's the best provider.
If you really want this site to have useful rankings for anyone aside from those looking to pay the bare minimum, consider gathering some additional information:
a) Uptime statistics
b) Customer-Support ratings
c) Technical ratings (user assessment of various tools provided by the VPS, ease of migration, etc.)
Small VPS are dime a dozen on Lowendbox.com. You can grab them for $1 and below.
They tend to be unstable, slow as molasses, poorly supported, and the hosters sometimes just disappear overnight (often to relaunch under a new name a few months later...).
They are almost never worth the hassle since DigitalOcean will sell you a proper VM for $5.
So if you want to compare them, you need more creative metrics. A simple "does this company exist for over a year?"-column would already weed out many of the worst ones.
I would add the option to have sub-1GB RAM VPS's. Lots of them still are offered in the 512 MB range. Include the option to filter by number of IPv6 addresses offered. Also, add a filter for virtualization technology and if they use SolusVM or a custom control panel. Otherwise very cool and useful!
- I'm currently in Laos, but I think/operate in USD/€, not in LAK. Please give me the chance to decide which currency I want to see.
- 1 GB as the lowest memory threshold leaves out plenty of good deals.
- Sometimes we need a bunch of machines for a short period of time. Can I pay per minute? Hour? Day?
- Which payment methods do they accept?
- Maybe, if possible, the ability to see for how long they've been around. Cheap hosters tend to disappear often.
- Maybe, if possible, uptime stats.
Number of geographic locations available (this gets tricky, depending on how you treat country. Is it locations within the selected country, or total locations?)
In addition to basic info, it includes things like virtualization type and even a bunch of benchmarks, all usable as filters or sort criteria. TBH some of the variation in the benchmark numbers makes me wonder about their methodology, but it's still a very useful site.
If you care about quality of a company and not just the raw specs, you might find http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare useful. It uses people's twitter comments to determine which hosting companies people have favorable opinions of. (Disclaimer: I created it)
Honest question: is there legitimate demand for this for legitimate reasons?
I was big into Bitcoin about four years ago and work for an ISP nowadays. We provide services as well and I've considered mail/web hosting/VPS/dedicated offerings (on a small scale) with Bitcoin as a payment option but I don't want to end up attracting the "wrong type" of people.
I realize that there are people who simply want to be anonymous and I'm totally fine with that (I do run Tor relays, for example) but my fear is that the majority of customers this would attract would be those that are "up to no good".
Thinking out loud, perhaps a mail hosting service payable with Bitcoin would be a good way to test the waters -- that is, we could take care of domain registration, DNS configuration/hosting, etc. and allow access over Tor for those looking for "anonymous e-mail" (although I'd be implementing pretty low limits on volume, at least initially).
Be careful X core means nothing reliable, for 99.9% of VPS providers, they are not dedicated nor rated and could be divisible by up to 2000 guests (particularly with OpenVZ provider), at least on Rackspace, AWS, Azure the CPU performance is generally within a specific range (variability due to minor hardware config differences, and noisy neighbours, but appropriately restrained). In addition 99.5% of these providers don't have the sufficient knowledge to run a VPS operation, they purchase a few dedicated servers and copy of SolusVM and WHMCS and hope and pray for the best.
I work for an ISP and can put as many machines in our datacenters as I want (within reason, of course) so I only have a few (small) VPSes nowadays. When I used to have a bunch of them, however, I quickly learned to avoid anything OpenVZ-based like the plague.
This is anecdotal, of course, but OpenVZ "feels" very much inferior and the providers running OpenVZ (more often than not) very much seemed like fly-by-night operations simply trying to squeeze as many VMs as possible onto a physical host without any regard to performance.
I can't imagine not using Linode as my default option.
They are without doubt my favourite IT company, in 7 years with between 3-4 and a lot more instances I've had to talk to them exactly 3 times (once for a query, once to ask for a bandwidth cap change and once related to billing).
But independently from your selected location linode is routing through the US. That's a bummer for way too many possible customers with sensitive data.
OVH classic 1 has 10GB hdd not 25GB. Would be nice to be able to see the virtualization method in the table (vmware/openvz etc).
It would be also nice to be able to show all products from a region, e.g. western Europe, northern Europe and so on (I don't care if it's in FR,DE or NL)
Seems to be missing all of the Digital Ocean UK prices. Also would like to see what OS flavours are offered, what networking options (private net, IPv6 range, IPv4 costs etc), hide plans that use non-SSD, which providers offer 2FA logins, backup costs.
[+] [-] rsync|11 years ago|reply
In August of 2001 I was flying from Denver to San Diego to do some contract datacenter work.
I had a Toshiba Libretto 110CT that was running FreeBSD and I was trying to troubleshoot an OS config issue, so I tried jail. It gave me a complete, new FreeBSD system inside of a directory.
Then a lightbulb went on ...
A month later I posted beta invites to the cDc and 303 mailing lists and in December "JohnCompanies" was born. I advertised almost solely on kuro5hin.org and grew the company from my apartment in Aspen, Colorado. In February, 2004, I sold the company.
We called them "server instances", but "VPS" is the name that eventually caught on.
JohnCompanies still lives on today. Not sure where they'd fit on the "VPS Compare" list. I see our ad is still up on kuro5hin, if only because Rusty is too lazy to remove it, after more than 10 years...
The backup system(s) that we built for JohnCompanies customers was reworked and launched as a standalone product in 2006. You know it as "rsync.net".
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
"The jail facility has already seen widespread deployment in particular as a vehicle for delivering "virtual private server" services."
http://www.sane.nl/events/sane2000/papers/kamp.pdf
[+] [-] nikcub|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattbee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|11 years ago|reply
As another commenter has said, cores mean nothing unless they're dedicated to my VM. There needs to be a better metric, but unfortunately it's very difficult to "benchmark" a VPS objectively. Any ideas?
Is that 600GB of HDD or 600GB of SSD, or 600GB of SSD-cached HDD? Those are all very different things, and the little icon to the left of the capacity is neither noticeable nor searchable.
Big countries like Canada and the United States need to be broken down into 3-4 regions for latency-sensitive customers.
Users should be able to choose the currency. Right now you're second-guessing the currency based on my location/Accept-Language/whatever and it doesn't seem to be changeable.
Having a column for the virtualization platform might be useful for some people. Is it OpenVZ, KVM, Xen-PV or Xen-HVM?
If anyone is looking for cheaper offerings, there's http://lowendstock.com/
If anyone is looking for unusual locations, there's https://www.exoticvps.com/
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hurin|11 years ago|reply
a) Uptime statistics
b) Customer-Support ratings
c) Technical ratings (user assessment of various tools provided by the VPS, ease of migration, etc.)
[+] [-] moe|11 years ago|reply
Small VPS are dime a dozen on Lowendbox.com. You can grab them for $1 and below.
They tend to be unstable, slow as molasses, poorly supported, and the hosters sometimes just disappear overnight (often to relaunch under a new name a few months later...).
They are almost never worth the hassle since DigitalOcean will sell you a proper VM for $5.
So if you want to compare them, you need more creative metrics. A simple "does this company exist for over a year?"-column would already weed out many of the worst ones.
[+] [-] 7952|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshmn|11 years ago|reply
There's also ServerBear.com which is a bit more detailed than this.
[+] [-] cbhl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyalexej|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjbiddle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|11 years ago|reply
Minimum activity billing period: minute / 15 minutes / 30 minutes / hour / day, etc.
Provisioning through API: yes / no
Number of geographic locations available (this gets tricky, depending on how you treat country. Is it locations within the selected country, or total locations?)
[+] [-] dorfsmay|11 years ago|reply
Also, missing Atlantic.net (at least in Canada).
[+] [-] JimmaDaRustla|11 years ago|reply
Will bookmark this one though.
[+] [-] notacoward|11 years ago|reply
In addition to basic info, it includes things like virtualization type and even a bunch of benchmarks, all usable as filters or sort criteria. TBH some of the variation in the benchmark numbers makes me wonder about their methodology, but it's still a very useful site.
[+] [-] ruebenramirez|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlgaddis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohashi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlgaddis|11 years ago|reply
I was big into Bitcoin about four years ago and work for an ISP nowadays. We provide services as well and I've considered mail/web hosting/VPS/dedicated offerings (on a small scale) with Bitcoin as a payment option but I don't want to end up attracting the "wrong type" of people.
I realize that there are people who simply want to be anonymous and I'm totally fine with that (I do run Tor relays, for example) but my fear is that the majority of customers this would attract would be those that are "up to no good".
Thinking out loud, perhaps a mail hosting service payable with Bitcoin would be a good way to test the waters -- that is, we could take care of domain registration, DNS configuration/hosting, etc. and allow access over Tor for those looking for "anonymous e-mail" (although I'd be implementing pretty low limits on volume, at least initially).
[+] [-] lbft|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grubles|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonuby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgroins|11 years ago|reply
Where are these figures coming from?
[+] [-] jlgaddis|11 years ago|reply
This is anecdotal, of course, but OpenVZ "feels" very much inferior and the providers running OpenVZ (more often than not) very much seemed like fly-by-night operations simply trying to squeeze as many VMs as possible onto a physical host without any regard to performance.
[+] [-] jedberg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UnoriginalGuy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blackthorn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phantom_oracle|11 years ago|reply
Try cross-posting on a thread on lowendbox.com.
[+] [-] matheweis|11 years ago|reply
In fact, if OP could scrape the VPS deals forum from there, that would be super cool ( do something that doesn't scale. ;) )
[+] [-] noir_lord|11 years ago|reply
They are without doubt my favourite IT company, in 7 years with between 3-4 and a lot more instances I've had to talk to them exactly 3 times (once for a query, once to ask for a bandwidth cap change and once related to billing).
They set the standard for me at this point.
[+] [-] evook|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puzzlingcaptcha|11 years ago|reply
It would be also nice to be able to show all products from a region, e.g. western Europe, northern Europe and so on (I don't care if it's in FR,DE or NL)
[+] [-] dan1234|11 years ago|reply