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Russian providers, part 2 with 3 VPS/providers
This is a new second part of my older "Russian VPS" thread. Next to my own personal interest it was inspired both by constructive criticism/suggestions by some users (@raynor, to name one) as well as a couple of users contacting me privately with questions. Other than the LET typical request for cheap (but halfway decent) VPS there seems to be some interest in VPS with higher bandwith than the usual 100 or 200 Mb/s. Et voila, here you go ... albeit with a grain of salt:
The first VPS comes from 'hosting-russia' and costs a beestick over €2 per month. Note though that it's not their cheapest VPS which costs a bit under €1/mo, but only provides 100 Mb/s. This one however comes with 1 Gb/s, 1 vCore, 1 GB mem., 20 GB SSD, 30 TB traffic and up to 10 Gb/s DDOS protection.
So far the theory, here are the real world data (based on about 35 runs):
Version 2.5.0, (c) 2018+ jsg (->lowendtalk.com)
Machine: amd64, Arch.: amd64, Model: QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
OS, version: FreeBSD 13.0, Mem.: 990 MB
CPU - Cores: 1, Family/Model/Stepping: 6/13/3
Cache: 32K/32K L1d/L1i, 2M L2, 16M L3
Std. Flags: fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36
cflsh mmx fxsr sse sse2 sse3 cx16 x2apic hypervisor
Ext. Flags: syscall nx lm lahf_lm
AES? No
Nested Virt.? No
HW RNG? No
ProcMem SC [MB/s]: avg 134.7 - min 41.1 (30.5 %), max 228.8 (169.8 %)
ProcMem MA [MB/s]: avg 220.5 - min 207.6 (94.1 %), max 232.1 (105.3 %)
ProcMem MB [MB/s]: avg 222.5 - min 210.1 (94.4 %), max 232.6 (104.5 %)
ProcMem AES [MB/s]: avg 223.5 - min 205.7 (92.0 %), max 235.7 (105.5 %)
ProcMem RSA [kp/s]: avg 48.0 - min 41.1 (85.5 %), max 51.5 (107.2 %)
Not even AES hardware support, meeh, and (my educated guess) Xeon 24xxL performance. Funnily RSA performance is better than quite a few other lowest cost VPS from other providers. Also note the quite acceptably low spread except for single-core mode.
Now, on to the disk:
--- Disk 4 KB - Buffered ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 8.57 - min 7.76 (90.6%), max 9.29 (108.4%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 8.36 - min 7.58 (90.7%), max 9.50 (113.7%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 25.17 - min 21.96 (87.2%), max 28.17 (111.9%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 21.88 - min 19.24 (87.9%), max 24.82 (113.4%)
--- Disk 4 KB - Sync/Direct ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 7.52 - min 6.13 (81.5%), max 8.73 (116.1%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 7.47 - min 6.67 (89.3%), max 8.60 (115.1%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 23.59 - min 17.02 (72.1%), max 27.88 (118.2%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 21.11 - min 16.35 (77.4%), max 24.41 (115.6%)
--- Disk 64 KB - Buffered ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 59.14 - min 47.46 (80.3%), max 68.38 (115.6%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 70.47 - min 58.85 (83.5%), max 81.85 (116.1%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 774.51 - min 662.73 (85.6%), max 883.64 (114.1%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 288.49 - min 264.00 (91.5%), max 325.72 (112.9%)
--- Disk 64 KB - Sync/Direct ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 6.15 - min 5.48 (89.2%), max 6.75 (109.8%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 4.62 - min 4.26 (92.3%), max 4.96 (107.4%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 764.29 - min 554.60 (72.6%), max 848.10 (111.0%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 272.55 - min 216.29 (79.4%), max 311.22 (114.2%)
--- Disk 1 MB - Buffered ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 69.80 - min 59.83 (85.7%), max 77.98 (111.7%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 158.09 - min 136.77 (86.5%), max 184.37 (116.6%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 1249.75 - min 913.03 (73.1%), max 1423.08 (113.9%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 920.23 - min 767.87 (83.4%), max 1128.65 (122.6%)
--- Disk 1 MB - Sync/Direct ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 39.83 - min 34.57 (86.8%), max 44.58 (111.9%)
Write rnd. [MB/s]: avg 53.85 - min 47.66 (88.5%), max 60.42 (112.2%)
Read seq. [MB/s]: avg 1255.14 - min 1137.88 (90.7%), max 1425.57 (113.6%)
Read rnd. [MB/s]: avg 930.13 - min 773.95 (83.2%), max 1110.05 (119.3%)
--- Disk IOps (Sync/Direct) ---
Write seq. [MB/s]: avg 9.10 - min 8.37 (92.0%), max 10.10 (111.0%)
IOps : avg 2330.21 - min 2142.56 (91.9%), max 2584.66 (110.9%)
Nice, really nice for such a cheap VPS. Being at that I'd like to mention something interesting: this machine has completed about 2 to 3 times the number of test runs the other 2 machines achieved in about the same time, although it has a processor that is relatively slow. Why is that interesting? Because most of your systems don't run CPU-heavy tasks either and while often sitting in the second or third row disk performance is important and push an otherwise good VPS down or pull a not so great VPS quite a bit up.
Btw. note that this system is consistent with little spread that is, while the disk is "only" SSD, it is a quite good performer and you can rely on the performance. All in all I like it.
On to the network:
--- Network ---
US LAX lax.download.datapacket.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 60.1 - min 51.5 (85.6%), max 63.1 (104.9%)
Ping [ms]: avg 182.7 - min 179.0 (98.0%), max 189.4 (103.7%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 184.6 - min 180.7 (97.9%), max 198.5 (107.5%)
NO OSL speedtest.osl01.softlayer.com [F: 37]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 0.0 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 0.0 (0.0%)
Ping [ms]: avg 0.0 - min 0.0 (-nan%), max 0.0 (-nan%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 0.0 - min 0.0 (-nan%), max 0.0 (-nan%)
US SJC speedtest.sjc01.softlayer.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 54.6 - min 51.3 (93.9%), max 56.8 (104.0%)
Ping [ms]: avg 187.5 - min 187.1 (99.8%), max 189.2 (100.9%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 201.0 - min 187.1 (93.1%), max 699.7 (348.1%)
AU MEL speedtest.c1.mel1.dediserve.com [F: 4]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 25.5 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 29.6 (116.2%)
Ping [ms]: avg 325.1 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 355.2 (109.3%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 327.2 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 360.5 (110.2%)
JP TOK speedtest.tokyo2.linode.com [F: 28]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 6.3 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 35.8 (564.3%)
Ping [ms]: avg 167.2 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 198.1 (118.5%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 167.3 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 198.1 (118.4%)
IT MIL speedtest.mil01.softlayer.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 154.6 - min 148.8 (96.2%), max 157.2 (101.7%)
Ping [ms]: avg 65.3 - min 65.0 (99.5%), max 72.8 (111.4%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 65.7 - min 65.0 (98.9%), max 77.8 (118.4%)
TR UNK 185.65.204.169 [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 82.3 - min 41.5 (50.5%), max 85.3 (103.6%)
Ping [ms]: avg 77.4 - min 76.4 (98.7%), max 99.0 (127.9%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 77.9 - min 76.7 (98.5%), max 99.1 (127.3%)
FR PAR speedtest.par01.softlayer.com [F: 4]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 181.8 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 212.5 (116.8%)
Ping [ms]: avg 49.7 - min 49.4 (99.3%), max 51.7 (103.9%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 50.2 - min 49.5 (98.7%), max 51.7 (103.1%)
SG SGP mirror.sg.leaseweb.net [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 59.3 - min 49.7 (83.8%), max 60.5 (102.0%)
Ping [ms]: avg 189.4 - min 189.2 (99.9%), max 191.6 (101.1%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 189.9 - min 189.2 (99.7%), max 193.4 (101.9%)
BR SAO speedtest.sao01.softlayer.com [F: 6]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 36.2 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 45.4 (125.5%)
Ping [ms]: avg 244.3 - min 244.1 (99.9%), max 245.4 (100.4%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 263.7 - min 244.1 (92.6%), max 862.9 (327.2%)
IN CHN speedtest.che01.softlayer.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 58.2 - min 55.0 (94.6%), max 62.0 (106.5%)
Ping [ms]: avg 170.3 - min 164.2 (96.4%), max 179.7 (105.5%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 203.1 - min 165.2 (81.3%), max 752.4 (370.5%)
GR UNK speedtest.ftp.otenet.gr [F: 18]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 74.2 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 151.1 (203.8%)
Ping [ms]: avg 40.8 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 84.7 (207.6%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 41.1 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 90.9 (221.3%)
US WDC mirror.wdc1.us.leaseweb.net [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 100.0 - min 94.2 (94.2%), max 102.3 (102.3%)
Ping [ms]: avg 113.6 - min 112.6 (99.1%), max 119.1 (104.8%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 114.5 - min 112.6 (98.3%), max 121.8 (106.3%)
RU MOS speedtest.hostkey.ru [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 1017.7 - min 894.8 (87.9%), max 1103.1 (108.4%)
Ping [ms]: avg 1.3 - min 1.1 (88.0%), max 1.5 (120.0%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 1.8 - min 1.2 (67.1%), max 6.3 (352.1%)
US DAL speedtest.dal05.softlayer.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 63.9 - min 61.0 (95.6%), max 66.2 (103.7%)
Ping [ms]: avg 160.2 - min 159.9 (99.8%), max 160.6 (100.3%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 190.8 - min 159.9 (83.8%), max 1005.7 (527.1%)
UK LON speedtest.lon02.softlayer.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 217.1 - min 210.2 (96.8%), max 231.5 (106.7%)
Ping [ms]: avg 47.6 - min 47.3 (99.3%), max 50.4 (105.9%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 72.9 - min 47.4 (65.0%), max 997.2 (1367.7%)
US NYC nyc.download.datapacket.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 100.2 - min 91.2 (91.0%), max 105.1 (104.9%)
Ping [ms]: avg 110.8 - min 109.4 (98.7%), max 113.4 (102.3%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 113.1 - min 109.7 (97.0%), max 134.0 (118.5%)
RO BUC 185.183.99.8 [F: 1]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 167.7 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 183.4 (109.4%)
Ping [ms]: avg 63.9 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 71.9 (112.6%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 66.7 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 106.1 (159.1%)
NL AMS mirror.nl.leaseweb.net [F: 4]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 254.7 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 305.5 (119.9%)
Ping [ms]: avg 36.4 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 42.5 (116.7%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 45.9 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 398.0 (867.2%)
CN HK mirror.hk.leaseweb.net [F: 6]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 31.6 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 50.5 (160.0%)
Ping [ms]: avg 237.7 - min 223.0 (93.8%), max 269.9 (113.6%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 245.2 - min 224.2 (91.4%), max 282.4 (115.2%)
DE FRA fra.lg.core-backbone.com [F: 0]
DL [Mb/s]: avg 221.6 - min 58.5 (26.4%), max 330.1 (149.0%)
Ping [ms]: avg 37.5 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 43.4 (115.7%)
Web ping [ms]: avg 40.2 - min 0.0 (0.0%), max 45.0 (112.0%)
1 Gb/s? ... Well, yes - but only within Moscow ... so much for '1 Gb/s'.
To anywhere else connectivity is let's call it OK, read, within the usual frame besides a few major european targets being above 200 and up to 250 Mb/s.
Note that hosting-russia offers English both for the panel which is the ISPsystem panel often encountered with russian providers. And yes, you can mount ISOs too.
As for their support which presumably is available in English too, well I can't tell you anything because everything worked so well and easy (once one knows one's way around with that panel) that I simply didn't need any support. I want to mention though that I also didn't see any link to support or for opening a ticket; might be simply me not seeing it though.
Probably I'll benchmark their small 1€ VPS too over the weekend. If so you'll find a mini-review here.
Comments
--- part 2 ---
Now, on to the next provider which is quite well known and seems to have a decent reputation, VDSina. Note that this (tested) server is not at all cheap (ca.€11.30/mo) but it's not meant to be. I chose this model for two reasons, one of which is that I needed something better than their smallest VPS (about €4/mo) for something I had in mind (besides benchmarking).
"Whoa, that's expensive!" you say? I'm not disagreeing, but read on ... (there are good newy too re. price)
For a start this is one of the not exactly many englisch speaking providers in Russia that offers more than the usual 100 or 200 Mb/s connectivity, plus it's a well respected good provider who btw. offers patient, friendly, excellent and very fast (usually just a few minutes even in the middle of the (russian) night) support, so it can't really be compared to super cheap providers.
Before I go on with my review ...
... let's look at the data, processor and memory first:
OK, no nested virtualization, but both AES and PRNG hardware support, nice!
Not so nice is single core performance; while somewhere in the Xeon 26xxv3 or v4 range, I don't like to see the high spread. somewhere between about 75 and 310? Sorry, VDSina, for that kind of money I don't expect a lottery game or in other word a bloody overcrowded node! Yuck.
The rest is quite nice though; almost 100% more performance with 2 vCores and decent crypro results, too. If it weren't so bloody overcrowded that could be a very nice VPS approaching Epyc performance and worth the high price.
Meeh, let's go on to the disk ("NVMe"):
Hmmm, this "NVMe" has a performance quite similar to the hosting-russia SSD above when looking a multithreaded IO and IOPS but is actually slower than the SSD above. Sad, but still in a reasonable ("well usable") range.
Being at it, why the hell should we go for an NVMe - and pay the price for it - when what we actually get is SSD like performance? Dear providers, either shell out the $$ for a "real" (fast) decent NVMe or just call - and price - itas what it really is, a SSD, albeit in NVMe form factor.
Oh well, let's go ahead and look at their connectivity:
Yay, now we're talking! Ok, not really 500 Mb/s but close to 450, but more importantly, this VPS doesn't deliver decent speed only within Moscow. DE, FRA, arguably the european reference target achives over 300 Mb/s and the other major european targets are above or at least not far away from 200 or 250 Mb/s too. Also note that the US east coast isn't far away from 100 Mb/s, Singapore is about 60 Mb/s and even Chennai is near 50 Mb/s.
Re. "not the full advertised speed", well (a) "advertised" usually is a euphemism for lies, and (b) I guess it's providers setting the config limit a bit (usually about 10%) lower well knowing that there is some air (reaction time, etc) in software control.
All in all a very respectable result for a russian provider, me pleased.
Before going on to the next provider I have to lay out 2 price related points. First, yes, there are rebates when you pay for longer periods (typ. a year), but it's somewhat weird. They call it "bonus" and, if I got it right, it works like this: If you put 5000 Rubles (ca. €57, $65) into your VDSina account you get a 10% "bonus" or, if you put in double that amount you get 20% "bonus" - with a weird 'but': that bonus can only pay renewals. Example: My VPS costs 990*12 = 11880 Rubles or about €136. If I did put 10000 Rubles into my VDSina account the 10000 would pay my VPS for a bit over 10 months, after which (when the 10000 are used up) the 20% "bonus" would kick in and pay the remaining 2 months.
But there is another point and a potentially very interesting one and also the second reason why I tested this VPS: They also sell "eternal VPS" where you pay 18 months worth of the corresponding "Hi-CPU" VPS (the kind I tested) and get it forever. Now obviously "forever" is very relative with servers because in 5 years what is hot today is a "slow box" in 5 years. But still, when you look back 5 years you are likely to find that a box from back then still is quite usable today.
So the (at least mine) idea is to pay 18 months front-up and get a box for 4 or 5 years. If you calculate 4.5 years (3 x 18 months) you basically have the VPS for one third of its normal price. Might be interesting for some, besides the psychological factor of "phew, finally a box I need not be afraid to be late in paying and finding it terminated". Nope, you pay once for 18 months and have, say some sites important to you running forever (well, kind of). The "bad" news: there evidently is no renewal for eternal systems so forget about the rebate/"bonus" system.
Oh btw, I'll highly likely test their above mentioned cheapest VPS too over the weekend. And yes it comes with the same connectivity as this one if I'm not mistaken.
Any yabs?
--- part 3 ---
Finally the third and last (for today) russian VPS. This one from HostVds is a bit of a grey zone as that company has a tainted reputation because their Cloud was announced with a lot of noise and then ... pretty much nothing happened. A while later they actually went operational but there seem to have been frequent problems. But then, they sell a 1 vCore, 1 GB mem. , 10 GB NVMe (with a "50.000 IOPS" label) and 50 Mb/s VPS thingy for just 80 cents a month ... Could I, an avid hunter of dirt cheap VPS, resist that temptation? Kind of. I "resisted" by taking the next higher model for ca. $1.60/month g which offers also 1 vCore but 2 GB mem., 20 GB NVMe, and importantly, a more reasonable 200 Mb/ connectivity.
Front up: They do not provide ISO support like the other two and only offer a couple of linux templates, plus they don't yet support snapshots and some other features, but hey, you get a quite decent spec for less than a dollar. I mention it anyway because (please don't hate me, it's just what I observed over and over again) linux "lies" about disk performance, so take the results with a grain of salt.
Before I continue: yes I had a problem right away; their system had problems with my debian template install, so I opened a ticket - yes, they provide both their site and support in english - and the problem was resolved. Since (a few days) the box worked without any hiccups, but the ticket response was slow.
Here's the data:
Pardon me, 124 single core might be forgivable but a spread of about 75 in both directions? Thanks, no, that's clearly overselling driven to an extreme. They support nested virtualization - that must be a joke, who on earth would put yet another layer of virtualization on such a crappy, brutally overold VPS, and mind you this isn't the 80 cents a month thingy.
On to the "NVMe":
Hmm, OK, those numbers indicate that this is yet another "NVMe" in form factor only but for a SSD on a €1.50/mo VP I wont complain. After all the "NVMe" on the €11+ VPS wasn't that much better ...
So, on to their network:
First, once again we find that even in their home town the network actually achieves only the advertised speed minus about 10%, but hey, keep in mind that we're looking at a €1.50/mo thingy, so about 170 Mb/s within Moscow is perfectly fine. Nice surprise: the speed to DE,FRA is pretty much the same as within Moscow and NL,AMS is closely behind, nice. But wait, it gets even funnier/better. US,LAX almost 85 Mb/s which funny becaue it's on the "bad" end of the USA; that's a very decent result, as is NYC which, just like UK,LON is about 115 Mb/s! While 115 Mb/s to London from Russia is decent but not special, 115 Mb/s to NYC is noteworthy. Some other targets like e.g. SGP are quite decent too.
Clearly this network is a winner (for the low price), which brings me to the next and final point: Assuming that the even cheaper 80 cents per month box has the same connectivity albeit limited to 50 Mb/s I think that the super-cheap thingy might actually be a nice deal for low traffic use cases like e.g. a name server; the latency is easily good enough (ca. 35 ms to FRA).
Btw. the Oslo target being bad with all and with many failures is quite likely to do with the target not with the tested VPS.
My resumee for today: There is no clear winner IMO but each VPS has some points on their side.
VDSina clearly is sh_t expensive and you don't get a VPS that's adequate for the high price but you get a very decent network, kind of good vCores, an acceptable SSD (called "NVMe" by them), and excellent and unearthly fast support, albeit tending to keep answers brief and somewhat canned (they love to point to their knowledge base which however is a bit hard to navigate for non Russian speakers).
Hosting-russia probably is my winner if there is one. Nothing is particularly great but neither is anything particularly crappy - and the prices are really low and the network kind of decent.
HostVDS is a bit of a wild card plus their support is slow and they offer linux only (no ISOs), so for me they are the least attractive.
Probably interesting side note: Many russian providers offer quite low-cost additional IPs; I've seen prices typically under $1/mo/IP.
Finally, I have a lemon to award. It goes to Qwarta because they seem to be psychologically deranged. Their offers look really attractive and nice but they seem to be hardcore russian language only plus they reacted psycho when I politely requested their help because they demand a phone number for registration and apparently accept russian numbers only. Instead of reacting halfway helpful - after all I was a prospective customer - their support ("Sergey") acted almost aggressively and front-up accused me of highly likely being a bad guy with criminal intentions (I kid you not. They really said that) because why else would someone from Europe want a VPS in Russia. When I tried to explain it politely, even friendly, they got even more aggressive and told me that my explanation is, I quote, "no excuse". Sad, really sad; they seem to have really nice product but seem to employ only from mental asylums.
Oh, and a big middle-finger to the CloudF#%! f_cktards who first annoyed me with a capture about once per minute and finally forced me to split my post to get it through their shitfuckery ("sakkurity"). Can't the NSA afford better goons?
Try some gcore.
Can you link the offers or pm them?
None are special. All three are standard products. The links are:
@Neoon
Re "gcore": got that tip already a few times. Unfortunately though they seem to be a Luxembourg company (and not russian), plus they aren't particularly cheap.
I guess all Moscow? Sadly 90% of them are Moscow.
They are russian.
At their roots they are Russians indeed. 2015 they relocated to LX, probably due to government pressure to gather "extra information" about foreign clients. But their engineering and service quality is still at legendary "Russian quality". They are top premium.
"Originally started in Russia" != "they are russian".
As I already occasionally mentioned the point is this: If anything, be it company, be it the headquarters, be it the DC is in a 14 eyes country you may,, to put it somewhat pointedly, as well ask NSA or GHCQ for a dedi or VPS.
That said, I might anyway test one of their products because I've repeatedly heard good things about them and because some people don't care for 14 eyes.
Yandex is registered in Netherlands so I guess its not russian either?
Its completly normal for russian companies to be registered somewhere else, they can bypass sanctions that way.
Gcore Labs and Yandex are russian.
Their job offers are targeted at Russians/Belarusians
https://gcorelabs.com/careers/cyber-security-engineer/
They are all Russian/Belarusian
https://www.signalhire.com/companies/g-core-labs-s-a/employees
You can purchase services from https://ruhosting.gcorelabs.com, this site is served by its original Russian team Джи-Кор Рус / G-Core Rus (formerly SkyparkCDN). For regions outside the CIS, they offer their services as G-Core labs S.A. by default.
From my personal experience with them, their Russian team was very responsive in tickets, but poor in actually solving problems.
I get that point, but: If even just 1 element is outside of Russia and in 14-eyes territory one isn't safe anymore because 14-eyes is known to push and if needed even blackmail providers to give them what they want; hell, they even kidnap people.
If that is of no concern, and for many it probably isn't, then just go ahead. Yes, I'll highly likely look at them and try them, but my original intent was to test pure russian providers.
@jsg are you russian?
Меня уже поймали.
The results need to be put into a spreadsheet or database so comparisons can be done between providers and servers. Otherwise, the numbers are nearly useless since its your proprietary program and not something public and reproducible. Way too much opinion and commentary instead of results speaking for themselves.
Water is wet.
@TimboJones wisdom is unlimited.
As promised here's the next and for the time being final round, with 4 new contenders including gcorelabs which was kind of heavily promoted by a few users, but alas turned out to be rather mediocre albeit really cheap.
Before I present the product mini reviews I have to mention something: As you may have heard I never, nevar, accept criticism or suggestions (according to some reality ignoring morons and haters). Not that reality matters in an idiocracy, but I'll mention it anyway: Actually I have looked at and considered quite a bit of criticism and suggestions which led to quite a few enhancements and changes both in my software and in how I present results.
Recently I considered a particularly nasty a__hole's bleating and found that for once he actually had a point (albeit of course presented in a nasty way) and since then I adapted my presentation. Similarly the other long-time obtrusive jsg hater recently surprised me with a criticism and an implicit suggestion that looked quite reasonable - et voilà today's review of multiple providers includes a small table with some basic data that might help you to quickly get the big picture. You'll find that little table near after the single reviews, along with a kind of summary.
I examined the gcorelabs 'KVM-SSD-0 DH', ca. €1/mo (in 3-month batches, not avail. everywhere), in Yekaterinburg. ISO (incl. upload) is supported but the FreeBSD version in their standard options is v. 11 (stoneage). Their ISPmanager panel is well usable but they play weird login password games (a secure 12 digit password (min. 2c2C2D) with or without special chars is rejected and I ended up accepting their poor 8 bytes "suggestion".
Here's the results, based on a bit over 60 runs, as usual processor and memory first:
Hardware AES and random support, good. But the general performance, meee, not nice, but hey, let u keep in mind that the other candidates are much more expensive (as in "3 x the cost"), plus I give a bonus point for not hiding behind "Qemu blabla" but actually naming the CPU.
Now, on to the disk:
OK, I'll spill the beans right here: that's the slowest disk of the bunch. But again, we're talking about a €1/mo box ...
Let's look at the network results:
Nothing to write home about but actually not that bad for a €1/mo thingy. It feels like some other super-cheap russian VPS, some of which btw. are more expensive. Plus, with gcorelabs you can get VPS all over the world although, again, this super-cheap box isn't available at all locations.
From VpsVille I tested their 'CAMP' VPS for ca. €3/mo. Similar to gcorelabs they also offer a stoneage FreeBSD version (11), but ISO (incl. upload) is also supported. Their templated install left me with networking not working due to a nonsensical default /etc/resolv which however was easy to correct (and had to be corrected in order to update). They have their own panel but it works well and has everything needed albeit sometimes feeling uncommon/confusing at the beginning, e.g. ISO mounting via VNC console.
Here are the results, based on about 90 runs:
While this is certainly not the slowest VPS, no hardware random support? Hmmm ... Wrt performance this VPS is about mid range.
IOps : avg 1688.07 - min 1369.46 (81.1%), max 1774.45 (105.1%)
This disk on the other hand is among the faster ones tested here and among the 2 fastest SSDs, surpassed only by an NVMe. Quite nice!
The network is kind of funny. While clearly leading the field in local (Moscow) speed with over 1.5 Gb/s it's quite lacking pretty much anywhere else. Unless you only have visitors from the Moscow region this is not a nice network.
The third provider is Sale-dedic whose 'MSK-Mini' forca. € 3.20/mo I tested. They offer a decent OS selection incl. a reasonably current FBSD. Their ISPmanager panel worked fine.
Here are the results, based on about 80 runs:
Also no nested virtualization but AES and random hardware support but unfortunately the performance is very similar to the gcorelabs VPS, rather poor to put it bluntly - but at about 3 times the price of gcorelabs! Meee
A (tiny) bit slower than the VpsVille box and quite decent SSD performance, nothing to complain about.
Less crappy than VpsVille's network outside Moscow but still, uhm, at the low end of mediocre.
Finally I looked at a Reg.ru VPS for ca. € 3.45/mo. They have their own panel and an ISO can be mounted but via support ticket. Their support is actually good but quite hidden away while the omni-present chat is a lobotomized useless bot. While their site is in Russian only they do have english support. And, warning, they seem to play ad email games to a degree that may be seen as spamming.
Here are the results, based on about 50 runs:
Second best performance of the field and close to the best one, nice! Also the only VPS supporting nested virtualization - whatever sense that may or may not make on a cheap small single core VPS.
A quite decent SSD albeit a bit higher IOPS would be nice. But then who runs high performance jobs on a cheap single core VPS ...
A nice network indeed, about on par with VDSina's.
Plus I tested a much cheaper VPSina VPS for ca €3.80/mo. Here are the results, based on 25 runs and without remarks because this is largely the same as the one already tested.
Or wait, there is something that really should be mentioned: This VPS seems to be running on the same node type it much more expensive (recently reviewed) sibling runs that is, you get basically the same processor, memory and NVMe for about 1/3 of the cost (and a smaller system obviously), but wait: If what you are after isn't a beefy VM but just decent connectivity and excellent (english speaking) support then this VPS is a nice deal.
The kind of bad news is that comparing the 2 VPS also shows how much lottery is in the game. For example the smaller VPS actually achieves better performance that the bigger one, but oh well, that come with pretty much all VPS (as opposed to VDS, and even those aren't really fully isolated from e.g. abusers on a node).
Unfortunately I could not test the supercheap (< €1/mo) hosting-russia VPS as planned because those are currently out of stock.
Finally the a.m little table that might be useful as an overview.
For the disk I used the two probably significant (to most) values, 1 MB blocks, read seq. buffered plus spread, and the 4k blocks, 4 threads, write seq. sync plus IOPS. And for the network I chose Moscow and 2 significant and well know targets each in NA, Europe, and Asia.
Now the big question: is there a clear winner and if so who?
While I'm quite confident that gcorelabs is quite overrated (and there are other options as well), their VPS still is the by far cheapest one in this roundup, so it shouldn't be brushed away.
For the rest have a look at the first section which shows you what you get for your money.
For me sale-dedics VPS falls out because you get more than double the disk space for 25 cents more from reg.ru and triple the space for 60 cents more from VDSina, although, granted, the 10 GB from sale-dedic are on a nice SSD. VpsVille even asks less for a larger disk; unfortunately their processor&memory performance isn't attractive enough, so IMO they're out, too.
Which leaves you with VDSina and Reg.ru, one of which has a strange "bonus" concept (rather than simply giving you 6 or 8 weeks for free if you pay yearly), while the other one has a non-standard panel and tends to email spam you. Tough choice but for me playing straight and excellent support win, so for me VPSina is the winner - relatively, that is. Because frankly, Russia (unfortunately) is (not yet at least) the country where I look for "serious" VPS, and, pardon me, paying 3+ Euros for a 1 GB mem., 10 - 30 GB SSD or not exactly fast NVMe and a single (and not exactly fast) old processor with at best mediocre connectivity (outside Russia) isn't something I consider attractive, sorry. Maybe I'm spoilt by european and us-american providers but that's how I see it. YMMV.
TL;DR Unless you absolutely need relatively good connectivity just stick to firstbyte, ihor, and the likes and pay just €10 - 15 per year for a VPS that is not worse or not much worse than those €3+/mo. VPS above.
I love you, Russia and Russians, but regarding hosting you really need to catch up.
Very informative, thanks for your efforts!
My 2 roubles. I (and my clients) have several VPS with VDSina (now) and reg.ru (past) both. VDSina is prem with hardware and support. reg.ru is large domain corporation, VPS/dedi are just for fun. And don't expect prices in Russia to be equal to EU/US, they're up to x2 mostly and this is our normal When you'll understand this you'll can afford good cheap Russian VPS
If I get desperate enough to go for a Russian provider, please shoot me, it means I've already lost my mind.
Well, they are good, just not LET-grade mostly, so keep your mind and money
What does the ca mean in "VPS for ca €3.80/mo"?
Short for "circa' = around
I have another suspicion:
For one, obviously one (well 85% of Russians) has to or tends to play with what one can get and/but - and more importantly IMO - Russians tend to be wonderfully feet-on-ground, while westerner tend to be more "I, I, I, need the best only!" plus they tend to be more malleable (e.g. by trend, ads, etc). Let's be honest, fact is that even "crappy stone-age" systems are in fact more than good enough for the vast majority of users and let us also remember that there was life and a working internet on this planet before SSDs were (available and) a big thing.
A friend of mine, for example, runs a quite significant (as in "in the top 25k sites in Europe") site on a "crappy stone-age" dedi (26xxv2 or 24xx ) with mediocre SSD (not even NVMe shriek) and it's not even using half of the available system power. And there virtually never was a complaint about his site being slow (because it really isn't). And yes, he also ticks like many Russians, with a feet-on-ground and "find and use the right size (dedi/VPS) for a job" attitude - and it evidently works well.
Here, on the other hand, I often find an attitude that looks down on e.g. a 26xxv4 system that doesn't have the fastest Samsung pro NVMe. No, no, an Epyc is the very minimum that is acceptable and actually most think if an offer doesn't have "Ryzen" in its title it's not even worth looking at.
That's btw, why I like the Xeon 26xxv4 so much. It's damn good enough (actually close to Epyc performance in most regards) yet (comparably) dirt cheap. And it's also the reason why I don't look down on decent SSDs (as opposed to NVMes). Most of us in most cases simply don't really need what we (were driven to) think we need.
Acordingly my grumbling above is not because some providers use SSDs or slow NVMes. Nope, it's because I don't like to get a drive called "NVMe" (possibly even with a label "50000 IOPS") when it's actually just an SSD in NVMe form factor (or a crappy SSD).
Or it may mean that you have been blocked by twitter, got shadow-banned on facebook, are called "Nazi" simply because you think that the constitution shouldn't be ignored and trampled on.
Or maybe because you want real free speech without woke "fact checkers" going after every word you say or you want some real privacy while your western country, like. e.g. the UK, seriously plans to maim or even prohibit encryption.