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[Review] VMHaus - 6 months later
Hi guys,
I haven't done a review thread on LET before, mainly because I hadn't stuck with a single LET provider for anything semi-mission critical long enough to form opinions regarding uptime, network performance, IO performance and CPU performance.
Tagging @vmhaus... Here's a VMHaus review. They're relatively new but have gained popularity on LET over recent months. I hope to be as transparent as possible, but please forgive me if I fanboy a little. Auriga and the team have done a great job, and I'd like to share my experience with them.
Locations and Network Performance
I've been with VMHaus now for a little under 6 months, using their London location as a permanent VPN/gateway for all of my devices both at home and at University. VMHaus have two locations: London (UK) and more recently Los Angeles (US). Having a 200Mbps Virgin Media connection (when it works...) and 1Gbps connection through JANET has a given me a good chance to evaluate their London network's performance both in terms of latency and throughput.
With the exception of the planned downtime this weekend just gone and the outage we all experienced with a number of London providers a week or two ago, I've yet to notice my connection drop or my speeds impeded. They use a mixture of Clouvider's network and their own peering through HE, LINX, LONAP and (according to my spicy sauces) Cogent coming soon™. Latency from my Virgin connection is consistently lower than 20ms and from University sits well below 5ms (thanks to their JANET peering over LINX). I am able to receive full 1Gbps to a couple of speedtest servers when using JANET, indicating that their network utilisation is relatively low.
Disk/IO performance
Disk performance has always been stellar thanks to their NVMe fetish. If you're looking for FAST IO, then VMHaus is for you.
CPU performance
CPU-wise, I have found the node I'm on to be quiet/high performing. I'm running full table v4/v6 BGP on my VM and it handles this with relative ease. In London they're using E3-1270v6 CPUs (with great single core performance) and in LA they're using E5-2670 CPUs.
Pricing and competition
They bill hourly and at good rates, however more recently (thanks DO...) are less competitive than they once were. If you're looking for more storage, then Linode/Vultr/Digital Ocean are for you. If you're looking for FASK disk and CPU speeds though, and are happy to sacrifice a little storage, then look no further. Having said all of this, at $15 per year their 256MB offer is a steal and from a 'I only have $x.yz to spend per year' perspective, fits the bill perfectly!
Features
Full table BGP is available alongside competitively priced ASN registration through APNIC. They have a good selection of OSes ready to go out of the box. They have a minimum top-up requirement of only $3, perfect for those who are curious. Support for SSH keys out of the box and a custom control panel are also nice.
Support
I haven't often had to put in a ticket, but when I have they were answered relatively quickly. The team cover both EU and APAC timezones so have pretty good coverage around the clock.
Improvements I'd like to see
Reverse DNS and custom ISOs are two things that I personally feel are missing. I'm not cloud-init's biggest fan by any stretch, but have made do with a cheeky apt remove. It'd be nice to have the ability to install my own OS from scratch.
More transparent network configurations for when I (inevitably) cock things up would also be a plus. At the moment all I get in terms of control panel information is my IP... knowing the gateway and subnet masks would be helpful!
Whilst BGP is an awesome feature to offer, it'd be cool if it was in some way automated. It took a while for my prefixes to be unfiltered (I can't complain given the price, but still - AUTOMATION 
). I know Vultr offers this, however I understand that this is a relatively niche feature.
No crypto payments as of yet - not a biggie, but I imagine for some this is almost a requirement.
Benchmarks
I've whacked up a couple of LET-priced ($7) VMs and ran a ServerScope bench on each one (each running 17.10). Hopefully this'll give you an indication of what you can expect.
(Just waiting for the Unixbenches to complete, will update thread soon!) :-)
Edit: Benches have uploaded. Haven't had a chance to take a look at them, but hopefully they reflect my comments accurately. In the middle of cooking curry so will take a peak later.
London: https://serverscope.io/trials/WVYK
Los Angeles: https://serverscope.io/trials/y5DK
Comments
Great, nice, complete review.
Agreed with everything. I'd say that their panel needs to be improved, but I see them willing to do so, and haven't stopped adding features. It's fast, stable, works fine. Hopefully we'll have custom ISOs, rDNS, Graphs, Snapshots and a few more things I'd love to see there.
Glad we can agree on something! ;-)
Plenty for them to be cracking on with, that's for sure!
Thanks for the review Jack!
$50 has been deposited into your Paypal, as agreed.
kidding of course.
@jarland - o wait fuck
I've been quite happy with @vmhaus, and I wish them the best with their expanding network of goodness.
W...what? But you gave me $50 credit!
... In my dream.
Nice man. I was going to switch a month later but because of reliability and good support I am afraid to. Also I found the hard disk space they give fair.
The biggest non-custom plan gives you 50 gb for $14 and I added 30 gb extra with a ticket for $3 extra.
SHILLING
@AnthonySmith
Benches uploaded
I'll throw in my benchmark from when I had a node @ London: https://serverscope.io/trials/ZJ5G