[Review] AIT.com SSD VPS Starter (512MB, 25GB, Xen HVM)

sundaymouse

This VPS plan was on sale for $1 first month, and $5 hereafter.

Location: Fayetteville, North Carolina, United states. Being right next to Fort Benning, I suppose they may employing some military dependents or veterans, if that's your thing.

Setup: They do not have WHMCS, and appears to use an in-house panel, and appears to have a significant proportion of legacy systems interfaced. Manual verification and setup took a day, but once on the phone, they were quick to get things running.

Operating system was installed manually or semi-manually, cannot see options for VNC or automated reinstall. Presumably you will have to contact support for that.

Overall reliability: No service quality issue observed over two weeks.

CPU: The hypervisor says one hardware thread of Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 0 @ 2.50GHz.

Benchmark:

-------------------------------------------------
 nench.sh v2018.04.14 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
 benchmark timestamp:    2018-05-08 01:01:46 UTC
-------------------------------------------------

Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 0 @ 2.50GHz
CPU cores:    1
Frequency:    2500.086 MHz
RAM:          486M
Swap:         1.9G
Kernel:       Linux 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64

Disks:
xvda     25G  SSD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    4.495 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    6.973 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    1.883 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 98.4 us / 180.9 us / 6.45 ms / 152.4 us
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 3.67 k requests in 5.00 s, 918 MiB, 734 iops, 183.6 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    242.23 MiB/s
    2nd run:    247.00 MiB/s
    3rd run:    247.00 MiB/s
    average:    245.41 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:    216.117.144.xxxx

    Cachefly CDN:         13.75 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        0.96 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   2.50 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      1.42 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         2.57 MiB/s

No IPv6 connectivity detected
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The network appears to be half Level3 and half Cogent. Supposedly an 1 Gbps unlimited bandwidth, but either the network is saturated due to that being available, or other bits of the network aren't that good.

SSD performance is reasonable.

Will I renew for $5? Probably not, but overall a reasonable provider for mid-East Coast.