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ServaRICA (Lobster Unlimited Expanding Storage Plan) review
Here's a quick review of my ServaRICA Lobster unlimited expanding storage VPS. This plan costs $10 per month and has the following specs:
4 Shared CPU cores
3 GB RAM
Unlimited transfer on 100mbps or 6TB limit on 1gbps
1x IPv4
IPv6 available by request
Initial Disk Space of 2TB and daily increase of 3GB
The daily 3 GB disk space increase is really what makes this plan unique. Introduced by @servarica_hani for the AppSumo market and long-term users, all of the ServaRICA unlimited expanding storage plans grow over time, with different starting disk space and daily increases. While these plans are more expensive than equivalent fixed storage plans, the daily 3 GB disk space increase is perfect for me and gives me peace of mind that I can continue backing up all of my important data offsite following the 3-2-1 backup rule.
As a plan that I picked up exclusively for offsite backups, I don't use this VPS for any compute. Regardless, it's got some nice specs, so I ran a YABS to gauge typical performance:
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# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2023-04-23 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
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Mon 24 Apr 2023 05:28:14 PM UTC
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime : 5 days, 13 hours, 1 minutes
Processor : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz
CPU cores : 4 @ 2593.512 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 2.9 GiB
Swap : 2.0 GiB
Disk : 3.0 TiB
Distro : Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
Kernel : 5.4.0-146-generic
VM Type : XEN
IPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ❌ Offline
IPv4 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP : Rica Web Services
ASN : AS26832 Rica Web Services
Host : Rica Web Services
Location : Montreal, Quebec (QC)
Country : Canada
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
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Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 29.35 MB/s (7.3k) | 178.94 MB/s (2.7k)
Write | 29.36 MB/s (7.3k) | 179.88 MB/s (2.8k)
Total | 58.72 MB/s (14.6k) | 358.82 MB/s (5.6k)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 198.24 MB/s (387) | 188.62 MB/s (184)
Write | 208.77 MB/s (407) | 201.18 MB/s (196)
Total | 407.01 MB/s (794) | 389.80 MB/s (380)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
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Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed | Ping
----- | ----- | ---- | ---- | ----
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 951 Mbits/sec | 934 Mbits/sec | 78.9 ms
Scaleway | Paris, FR (10G) | busy | busy | 83.3 ms
NovoServe | North Holland, NL (40G) | 939 Mbits/sec | busy | 83.0 ms
Uztelecom | Tashkent, UZ (10G) | 857 Mbits/sec | 731 Mbits/sec | 174 ms
Clouvider | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 658 Mbits/sec | busy | 85.2 ms
Clouvider | Dallas, TX, US (10G) | 875 Mbits/sec | 957 Mbits/sec | 42.6 ms
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 212 Mbits/sec | 282 Mbits/sec | 72.2 ms
Geekbench 6 Benchmark Test:
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Test | Value
|
Single Core | 480
Multi Core | 1487
Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1033655
I haven't noticed any issues pushing data to the VPS through SFTP using rclone over the past year. My rclone setup performs multiple simultaneous transfers, and with large files all transferring at once, I can hit a full 200 Mbps (self-imposed limit in order to not saturate my full connection). Transferring small files is predictably slower due to disk I/O but still yields good performance.
Claiming the extra disk space is extremely easy. The VPS needs to be rebooted in the ServaRICA panel. Once it comes back up in a minute or two, the space is there, and the volume is automatically expanded. The panel keeps track of your total extra disk space earned and what has been claimed.
If you're looking for a storage VPS with a fixed monthly price that grows with your needs, I highly recommend this ServaRICA plan. This is a truly unique offering that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.
Comments
I am really glad that you liked our services
By the way we never ask for reviews and we have never gave incentives for writing reviews so this is one of the rare moment when users write positive reviews without being asked
So thanks again
Many people like your services. Many people left compliments over time on LET, LES, HT and other forums. Many people bought and still buy your services. Sometimes customers transfer them easily just so that your services are not terminated (because they care for your services). There were no incentives for it and there is no need for incentives, because the best incentive is the quality with price of the service itself.
My very first service (VPS) with you is since 2019, it is still active and still running like a champ. This is the best feedback in my opinion. Thank you.
I laughed at this, because to me as a native English speaker, this reads like the positive reviews are rare, rather than reviews without being asked.
That said, I've only heard good things about you guys, and was tempted by the Lobster plan this Black Friday. I do like the concept, but personally I went with HH because their 3 year deal this time was the same price of 1 year of Lobster, so to me it still worked out the better long-term option as if I eve do run out of space, I'd just get an additional package. But in principle, the idea of slowly expanding resources is perfect for people like me who only use it as write-only incremental backups with a long retention policy.
The other thing I really respect is that your packages are available all year round at amazing prices, rather than just during special events.
Thank you all for the great feedback
I have a very different experience with Servarica, I'm actually moving my data away from them because it's been unbearably slow, just connecting through SSH takes a few minutes, any command takes a long time to run. I've started YABS, it's taking a few minutes just to start.
I've been transferring less than 1TB away and it's taking days.
Is this possibly a latency or peering issue? I'm on Verizon Fios in the US and haven't experienced this.
Servarica is great people to deal with. Never had issues with them and they're willing to help if ever there are. cheap prices. great stuff
This is what I get from YABS:
Definitely not the same as the OP
Those aren't terrible speeds and don't account for slow SSH logins. You didn't include a geekbench score or a top output showing CPU bottleneck. It sounds like you don't know how to troubleshoot the issue and I suspect it isn't the server. What did Support say?
Same for me. Just starting a SSH session was very slow, much slower than any of my other VPS with other providers. Prompt for login/password is quick, but then it takes a long time for the next prompt to show.
Copying data locally (from one folder to another) was very slow too.
It's not a latency or network peering issue. Just a slow host with slow storage.
I didn't contact support, just moved to another provider, slightly more expensive, but with better performance. More suitable for my needs.
Oh I know how to troubleshoot. Geekbench failed to run with YABS with
Geekbench 6 test failed. Run manually to determine cause.. It's not a network issue.Support is moving my VM to a better node, at least that's what they said. I hope it improves things.
Exactly what I was doing, but this thread gave me hope, I hope support can help.
@r4h156
Thank you for your detailed review, this is the first view about the plan "Lobster Unlimited Expanding Storage Plan" I have found on internet. I also have a serious considering about this plan, whose daily increasing is quite attractive!
Here's my yabs for comparison. Just note that it's not 2TB, but 2 x 1TB + a 10GB for boot. I don't know if this is new or the previous posters didn't mention it.
With the iso mounting option, I was able to install nixos. It was a bit of a pain since the ISO was for 22.11 and the nix language has evolved since. I probably could have asked support to update them, but it ended being that bad installing 22.11 and applying my configuration to it. If you're going to go my route, just update the channel to the latest one (23.11) and then run
nix-shell -p nixand you'll have the latest nix. Then you can just git clone your config or upload and deploy it there. Since the system boots with legacy bios,you need to install the bootloader on to/dev/xvdaexplicitlylI ended with running BTRFS on LVM over luks. Because of LUKS, speeds are not great, and was limited by the cpu. It's reporting 6 TB presumably because of 3 BTRFS subvolumes.