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[Review] SSD Nodes
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[Review] SSD Nodes

After a year of patchy uptime on shared hosting, I decided to take my blogs to a VPS. After all, there were new competitive offers coming up each day. I had setup a VPS on Linode for a friend of mine and even though I had to redo the node after a KVM upgrade, I enjoyed the experience. LEB had a great offer from SSDnodes - 4GB RAM, 40 GB SSD space, 4 vCores and 4TB bandwidth for an amazing price of $48/year. I decided it was time.

Sign-Up

I usually check reviews before buying and this purchase was no different. All the reviews I read were positive and I knew I was making a good choice. Sign-up was a breeze. Orders are reviewed before provisioning and I got an email in less than an hour that my VPS node was ready. A quick side-note, some other reviews indicate that orders may be marked as fraud when the sign-up IP and Billing address aren't in the same location. I didn't have any such issues though I was on a VPN which would indicate my IP to be somewhere in New York.

Your welcome email contains the IP for your node, the link to find your root password. BTW, I chose the Montreal data center.

Setup

Once you login, you get the WHMCS panel listing the products you have with SSDnodes. The VPS is under the services section. You specify an OS to install when you sign-up, but if you change your mind, reinstalling another flavor is a button away. You can re-install an OS of your choice - CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian (you know.. the usual suspects). I chose the CentOS 6.5 Minimal. The root account is created with the same password as before. If you are worried about the root password being openly stored on your WHMCS panel, disable remote root login through SSH and create a new user in the super user group.

The control panel also has links to Restart/Shutdown, which I think is pretty much standard now. The one feature I would like to see is if they would have some turnkey images such as a webserver with everything pre-installed along with the OS. Purists might argue that it takes the fun out of setting up your VPS and I wouldn't argue too much other than a prebuilt image would save time.

Performance

As of this writing, my node has been running for 31 days now and haven't really seen any major issues. There are some numbers I would like to share though

Network speed through wget gave me mixed results. A 100mb download from cachefly clocked 83.2 MB/s

2016-08-09 23:57:00 (83.2 MB/s) - '/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]

Another 100mb from Linode's Atlanta server managed only a 3.45 MB/s speed

2016-08-09 23:52:01 (6.94 MB/s) - '/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]

I tried another approach and tested the website load speed through pingdom. From New York, the site performed better than 84% of sites they tested. From San Jose, the site dropped down to being faster than only 23% of tested sites. So, in terms of network speed, I would say the jury's out on this one.

Disk I/O gave a decent 131 MB/s (I couldn't find a good benchmark, some users boast speeds of 300+MB/s, while complaints are for 11MB/s), but the number is out there for those interested.

Support

Customer support is amazing. Soon after sign-up, you get a mail from Matt, the owner asking you how things are. I replied back asking him his opinion on OS setup and I got a reply within an hour (I hadn't actually expected such a quick response). The same goes for the Support Tickets. When I had issues in connecting to my node, my ticket was responded to within 3 minutes. A more recent ticket that had nothing to do with the hardware, but an application issue was responded to in an hour (I had marked the ticket as Low Priority). The response was also well written (not copied text from some Google result) which shows the team knows exactly what they are doing. If a company shows such dedication to connecting with their customers, I think it speaks volumes.

Final Thoughts

At a fraction of the price of other SSD VPS, SSDnodes gives amazing value. I would recommend this host.

Comments

  • I agree. Was with them, few months ago, and it was quite an excellent experience. Kudos for SSD Nodes.

  • Did you joined just to post this review?

    Show some proofs, like invoice snap.

    Sorry but flagged.

  • dailydaily Member
    edited August 2016

    @MikeIn said:
    Did you joined just to post this review?

    Show some proofs, like invoice snap.

    Sorry but flagged.

    This review doesn't strike me as fake immediately. A review makes a good first post, provided it's a good review.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    @daily said:

    @MikeIn said:
    Did you joined just to post this review?

    Show some proofs, like invoice snap.

    Sorry but flagged.

    This review doesn't strike me as fake immediately. A review makes a good first post, provided it's a good review.

    I also prefer the innocent until proven guilty view on reviews.

    Thanked by 2TheKiller emgh
  • I too have a vps in their canada location and service is good. Had a downtime of 5+ hours due to a hardware issue on my node probably a month back and still I feel the service is worth the price.

  • abytecuriousabytecurious Member
    edited August 2016

    @MikeIn: Fair enough. Here is the screenshot of a support ticket I raised (and have mentioned in my review).

    SSDnodes ticket

    BTW, I did join to post this review. They are a great host and I think it would help the community to know how they perform (considering the offer was posted on LEB).

    Thanked by 1MikeIn
  • cirrus_cloudcirrus_cloud Member
    edited August 2016

    This is when I got my VPS back in February (I'm in the Dallas data center), and I was getting really good results. I have a 4 GB / 40 GB SSD VPS.

    CPU: They were definitely new Xeons on the box. The results were pretty fantastic. I tested using 4 or 8 threads by making RSA tokens. Very amaze. I compared with Digital Ocean and a couple other VPSes, and it was obvious my node wasn't oversold.

    SSD: I used 4K chunks and had no trouble hitting 200k IOPS as advertised. I was getting 800MB - 1 GB/s with bigger chunks.

    Network: I used speedtest-cli. I had no trouble getting 2-3 gbps down on the right servers. I believe I was getting 1gbps+ upload. I did have to modify the test to send more upload data because it was ending too quickly to saturate the upload link. I was still getting like 600 mbps upload doing tests to Canada from Dallas or something like that, but that's only after modifying the upload test. Saturating was better with lower latency, like a server in Houston. But it would go from like 50 mbps on a server 2000 miles away to like 600 mbps. I don't know about all of the other testing methods, but it could be possible people aren't using a proper test when they post bad network results.

  • Thanks @cirrus_cloud. I will try the speedtest-cli to see how my node fares.

  • Is it have good connectivity to Asia?

  • cirrus_cloudcirrus_cloud Member
    edited August 2016

    @ramesh_vish said:
    Thanks @cirrus_cloud. I will try the speedtest-cli to see how my node fares.

    I can't help you right now, but there's somewhere in the script where there's a list of values. There should be a list for the upload and download portions of the best. To make the upload test longer, you need to add more values / make them bigger. There's somewhere in the script where it's like

    (1*5, 1*50, 1*500)

    Make those values bigger for the upload so it lasts longer. It should be pretty obvious by how long it takes if you did it right or not.

    Oh, and don't forget to use the flag (try speedtest-cli --help to find the flag) to get a list of servers to test. By default, I think it goes with the lowest latency one.

  • SSDnodes(1) is on my radar too:
    all the goodness of Incero's(2) network, minus the(2) apparent contempt for lowend customers.

  • SSDNodesSSDNodes Member, Host Rep

    Thank you very much for the review, we're glad to have you with us!

    If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask here or email me [email protected]

  • Using one 4GB plan myself and it has been going really good too.

  • ![](SSD Nodes is fraud and SCAM. )

    Don't get trapped with their offers. I personally tested them and they are the worst. Nil support.

    They sell other servers work as a reseller. They are money hunger.

    Don't signup. You will end up losing all your money.

  • HostEONSHostEONS Member, Patron Provider

    @aryanraj said:
    ![](SSD Nodes is fraud and SCAM. )

    Don't get trapped with their offers. I personally tested them and they are the worst. Nil support.

    They sell other servers work as a reseller. They are money hunger.

    Don't signup. You will end up losing all your money.

    Some proof please

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