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My review of Skhron's EPYC 7002 VPS (Sweden) - Great experience after first 3 months

olokeoloke Member, Host Rep
edited September 2025 in Reviews

I bought a Skhron VPS around 3 months ago, it was right after skhron introduced EPYC CPUs to their offer. I never used EPYC server before and also I always wanted to try Skhron, so I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to test them both.

My ER-SE-1 plan which includes:

  • 1 shared EPYC 7002 core (FUP 13% but bursts to 100% allowed)
  • 1GB RAM
  • 15GB NVMe storage
  • 1 TiB traffic (up+down)
  • IPv4 and IPv6 /64

And costs 3.30 EUR/mo without or 1.81 EUR/mo with discount.

A bit of background

I first came across skhron some time in 2023 while browsing researching privacy focused VPS providers. Back then it was still a very new project. Privacy oriented vps provider with cheap servers in Poland (later also Sweden) taking payments in crypto was certainly unique, however ultimately I didn't have a use for it. Later I just forgot about it for a while.
When I registered on LET in January this year, it was nice to see @tentor being active on the forum.

A bit about Skhron

Skhron is a company registered in Estonia πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ͺ, but the people behind it are Ukrainians πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦. As of today, they exist for 26 months. From the start their focus was on privacy and price - they have an onion domain so that everything can be managed over Tor.

They use 2 self-hosted cryptocurrency payment gateways:

Credit card payment is also possible via Paysera or Stripe.

Skhron uses WHMCS and VirtFusion - pretty standard for modern day providers.

Networking

Skhron owns AS215467, the networking is great overall. In Sweden they upstream to obe.net (AS3399) and HE (AS6939).
You can see the full nws.sh result here. Skhron advertises 5Gbps shared on EPYC plans and delievers just that - basically 5Gbps bidirectional to Warsaw πŸ‡΅πŸ‡± and Amsterdam πŸ‡³πŸ‡± with pings around 20 ms.
The speeds are obviously lower in the more distant regions, but getting over 1 Gbps to New York πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ (91 ms) and over 500 mbps to Singapore πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬ (163 ms) isn't bad either.

Performance

The overall performance is great, system feels snappy and as I mentioned earlier, there's basically no CPU limiting/oversell in place. You get a full EPYC core and that shows in benchmarks.

All benchmarks were performed on Debian 13.1, I manually upgraded from Debian 12.
I had 1 GB of zstd-compressed zram swap enabled while doing the benchmarks, however most of the time it was barely used.

Obligatory YABS

# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
#              Yet-Another-Bench-Script              #
#                     v2025-04-20                    #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #

Tue Sep 23 02:26:04 AM CEST 2025

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime     : 0 days, 0 hours, 13 minutes
Processor  : AMD EPYC-Rome Processor
CPU cores  : 1 @ 1999.997 MHz
AES-NI     : βœ” Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 929.1 MiB
Swap       : 1024.0 MiB
Disk       : 14.9 GiB
Distro     : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Kernel     : 6.12.43+deb13-amd64
VM Type    : KVM
IPv4/IPv6  : βœ” Online / βœ” Online

IPv6 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP        : Skhron OU
ASN        : AS215467 Skhron OU
Host       : Skhron OU
Location   : Stockholm, Stockholm County (AB)
Country    : Sweden

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vda3):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 148.01 MB/s  (37.0k) | 1.92 GB/s    (30.1k)
Write      | 148.40 MB/s  (37.1k) | 1.93 GB/s    (30.3k)
Total      | 296.41 MB/s  (74.1k) | 3.86 GB/s    (60.4k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 2.45 GB/s     (4.7k) | 1.71 GB/s     (1.6k)
Write      | 2.58 GB/s     (5.0k) | 1.83 GB/s     (1.7k)
Total      | 5.03 GB/s     (9.8k) | 3.54 GB/s     (3.4k)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 5.28 Gbits/sec  | 3.03 Gbits/sec  | 23.8 ms        
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 5.37 Gbits/sec  | 4.16 Gbits/sec  | 17.9 ms        
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 2.83 Gbits/sec  | 2.26 Gbits/sec  | 73.4 ms        
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 871 Mbits/sec   | 1.25 Gbits/sec  | 170 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 1.20 Gbits/sec  | 475 Mbits/sec   | 146 ms         
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 1.89 Gbits/sec  | 2.55 Gbits/sec  | 96.7 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 447 Mbits/sec   | 739 Mbits/sec   | 193 ms         

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 5.12 Gbits/sec  | 4.23 Gbits/sec  | 23.7 ms        
Eranium         | Amsterdam, NL (100G)      | 5.36 Gbits/sec  | 4.19 Gbits/sec  | 17.9 ms        
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 2.76 Gbits/sec  | 2.48 Gbits/sec  | 73.3 ms        
Leaseweb        | Singapore, SG (10G)       | 1.12 Gbits/sec  | 1.30 Gbits/sec  | 170 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 1.19 Gbits/sec  | 892 Mbits/sec   | 146 ms         
Leaseweb        | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 2.07 Gbits/sec  | 2.43 Gbits/sec  | 96.4 ms        
Edgoo           | Sao Paulo, BR (1G)        | 1.03 Gbits/sec  | 328 Mbits/sec   | 193 ms         

Geekbench 4 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value                         
                |                               
Single Core     | 4156                          
Multi Core      | 3964                          
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/19036018

YABS completed in 11 min 54 sec

Other notable benchmarks include:

OpenSSL chacha20-poly1305 (the one wireguard uses)
It reaches around 1.6 GB/s on a single core, so here the bottleneck for wireguard should be the network :)

$ openssl speed -evp chacha20-poly1305

version: 3.5.1
built on: Sat Jul 12 16:49:06 2025 UTC
options: bn(64,64)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -pthread -m64 -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -fzero-call-used-regs=used-gpr -Wa,--noexecstack -g -O2 -Werror=implicit-function-declaration -ffile-prefix-map=/build/reproducible-path/openssl-3.5.1=. -fstack-protector-strong -fstack-clash-protection -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fcf-protection -DOPENSSL_USE_NODELETE -DL_ENDIAN -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_BUILDING_OPENSSL -DZLIB -DZSTD -DNDEBUG -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2
CPUINFO: OPENSSL_ia32cap=0xfff83203078bffff:0x00400004219c01ab:0x00000000ac000000:0x0000000000000000:0x0000000000000000
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
ChaCha20-Poly1305   229213.46k   411289.69k   836603.03k  1514127.50k  1604582.66k  1628251.78k

OpenSSL
Full, including PQC crypto stuff

cryptsetup
AES-XTS 512b key reaches 1.7 GB/s due to AES-NI acceleration.

$ cryptsetup benchmark

# Tests are approximate using memory only (no storage IO).
PBKDF2-sha1      1934642 iterations per second for 256-bit key
PBKDF2-sha256    3609555 iterations per second for 256-bit key
PBKDF2-sha512    1403716 iterations per second for 256-bit key
PBKDF2-ripemd160  669588 iterations per second for 256-bit key
PBKDF2-whirlpool  517049 iterations per second for 256-bit key
argon2i       4 iterations, 475708 memory, 4 parallel threads (CPUs) for 256-bit key (requested 2000 ms time)
argon2id      4 iterations, 475708 memory, 4 parallel threads (CPUs) for 256-bit key (requested 2000 ms time)
#     Algorithm |       Key |      Encryption |      Decryption
        aes-cbc        128b       628.5 MiB/s      1527.8 MiB/s
    serpent-cbc        128b        74.1 MiB/s       459.2 MiB/s
    twofish-cbc        128b       148.4 MiB/s       274.5 MiB/s
        aes-cbc        256b       615.0 MiB/s      1466.2 MiB/s
    serpent-cbc        256b        81.0 MiB/s       462.7 MiB/s
    twofish-cbc        256b       159.8 MiB/s       275.4 MiB/s
        aes-xts        256b      1837.1 MiB/s      1860.4 MiB/s
    serpent-xts        256b       403.1 MiB/s       407.2 MiB/s
    twofish-xts        256b       253.9 MiB/s       254.9 MiB/s
        aes-xts        512b      1701.5 MiB/s      1674.7 MiB/s
    serpent-xts        512b       412.4 MiB/s       407.7 MiB/s
    twofish-xts        512b       256.9 MiB/s       253.5 MiB/s

cryptopp
A bit old-school benchmark, but I really wanted to do it as it includes various interesting cryptographic algorithms.

7-zip 24.09
LZMA compression 4.6 MB/s on preset 5 while decompression around 65 MB/s
ZIP compression 5.4 MB/s on preset 7 while decompression around 160 MB/s

lz4
fastest compression 325 MB/s while decompression around 2.4 GB/s

$ lz4 -V
*** lz4 v1.10.0 64-bit multithread, by Yann Collet ***

$ lz4 -b1 -e12

Benchmarking levels from 1 to 12
 1#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   4690337 (2.132), 325.0 MB/s, 2404.4 MB/s 
 2#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   4227637 (2.365), 242.0 MB/s, 2241.5 MB/s 
 3#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3908374 (2.559),  65.9 MB/s, 2550.3 MB/s 
 4#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3751248 (2.666),  45.7 MB/s, 2644.3 MB/s 
 5#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3634435 (2.751),  32.4 MB/s, 2712.7 MB/s 
 6#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3552927 (2.815),  22.8 MB/s, 2729.2 MB/s 
 7#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3517813 (2.843),  17.8 MB/s, 2749.5 MB/s 
 8#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3508692 (2.850),  15.9 MB/s, 2760.2 MB/s 
 9#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3507509 (2.851),  15.5 MB/s, 2770.2 MB/s 
10#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3448053 (2.900),  11.3 MB/s, 2788.7 MB/s 
11#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3443852 (2.904),  10.8 MB/s, 2787.2 MB/s 
12#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3443857 (2.904),   9.1 MB/s, 2802.6 MB/s

zstd
fastest compression 185 MB/s while decompression around 730 MB/s

$ zstd -V
*** Zstandard CLI (64-bit) v1.5.7, by Yann Collet ***

$ zstd -b1 -e19 
 1#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3239077 (x3.087),  184.1 MB/s,  732.5 MB/s
 2#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   3130527 (x3.194),  187.9 MB/s,  597.5 MB/s
 3#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2981954 (x3.354),  140.4 MB/s,  617.6 MB/s
 4#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2945477 (x3.395),  138.3 MB/s,  607.6 MB/s
 5#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2949165 (x3.391),   61.1 MB/s,  609.0 MB/s
 6#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2881919 (x3.470),   42.1 MB/s,  641.6 MB/s
 7#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2854060 (x3.504),   34.0 MB/s,  665.2 MB/s
 8#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2835302 (x3.527),   25.9 MB/s,  682.2 MB/s
 9#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2832147 (x3.531),   22.1 MB/s,  684.0 MB/s
10#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2789510 (x3.585),   16.1 MB/s,  693.1 MB/s
11#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2740078 (x3.650),   10.3 MB/s,  688.3 MB/s
12#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2737495 (x3.653),   9.84 MB/s,  664.7 MB/s
13#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2602918 (x3.842),   3.38 MB/s,  672.9 MB/s
14#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2506070 (x3.990),   2.32 MB/s,  716.1 MB/s
15#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2480545 (x4.031),   1.84 MB/s,  709.3 MB/s
16#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2356665 (x4.243),   1.83 MB/s,  698.0 MB/s
17#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2348756 (x4.258),   1.55 MB/s,  687.1 MB/s
18#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2312001 (x4.325),   1.18 MB/s,  661.4 MB/s
19#Lorem ipsum       :  10000000 ->   2305368 (x4.338),   1.13 MB/s,  559.8 MB/s

I also ran some tests from Phoronix Test Suite, most notably Nginx, Redis and SQLite benchmarks that may be indicative of typical VPS use. This way you can compare your current setup to my VPS using the custom suite I made.

Result: openbenchmarking / terminal output

Nginx did really well here (top 1% of benchmarks) which is probably the most important for a server ;)

Stability

During past 3 months, I have never experienced any performance issues or even a single outage. The CPU steal was also basically non-existent. You can see for yourself on my ltstats :)

Streaming Services ("MJJ benchmark")

While I see this more often on nodeseek, I also decided to run the Region Restriction Check script which results you can see here.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Meta are all available, however some streaming services (Netflix, Disney+ and Dazn) and Reddit block my IPv4 address (Netflix seems to be available on IPv6 with Polish region).

The Positives

IPv6 first

I like how Skhron tries to push IPv6 only plans by not including IPv4 by default. Some services do not require IPv4 and thus we all benefit by not wasting IP space. You can also get routed /56 (or even /48) subnet for free on request if you need it.

Authenticity

Skhron still being somewhat small provider remains authentic and genuine - they don't oversell, don't overpromise and always try to help their client. I deeply appreciate how helpful and honest person @tentor was from the start.

Price

While this is also mentioned below, if you look around a bit, you can get skhron VPS for rather cheap. The 50% discounts @tentor did for their EPYC launch is still active to this day. I could've easily get my ER-SE-1 plan for 1.81 EUR/mo which is a really good price.

The locations

I think Skhron has quite nice locations. It makes them stand out in the field since it's not another NL/DE/US host.
Also, I have really good (7ms) ping to skhron Poland from me ISP

The Negatives

Traffic Limit

Skhron has rather tight traffic limits. This makes it unsuitable for running stuff like relays, streaming services or mirrors.
For regular hosting, 1 TB included in my plan should be enough. It resets each month and the VPS doesn't get suspended if you exceed the limit (does get throttled to 10mbps tho).

That being said, I heard somewhere that you can get unmetered IPv6-only VPS if you have a use for it ;)
Big plus of smaller providers like Skhron is that you're often able to get something custom for cheap just by asking politely.

Price (wait, again?)

While @tentor does discounts or special under 10 eur/year deals for LET, their regular pricing is not really "low-end". I can't guarantee the promo will still be available when you're reading this. Paying 5.7 EUR/mo for 1c 2g 30g 2T VPS is not the worst value in the privacy hosters field, but with higher-end plans it becomes somewhat expensive.

No SEV

Despite having SEV-Capable EPYC CPUs, Skhron does not have AMD SEV support for their clients. Having encrypted memory helps with very sophisticated attack scenarios. Assuming you're running a VM with LUKS2 encrypted drive, someone who has live access to the Hypervisor can just extract LUKS2 key by dumping the memory.

While this is very uncommon scenario, I think memory encryption should be more widespread to protect the confidentiality of clients data. That is overall a very minor/niche thing and I talked about it with @tentor many times. There are roughly 3 VPS providers which support SEV.

TLDR

My overall experience with Skhron has been positive. I see them as trusted and honest provider.
They seem to have the best balance between privacy, price and reliability I have seen.
If I ever needed to host anything serious I would definitely do that with Skhron. <3

Disclaimer: I paid the full price for all 3 months of service, I have no incentive writing a positive review, it was not preapproved.

Thanks and credits:

  • @tentor for providing the service and support when needed.
  • @lukast__ for ltstats which was insanely useful for monitoring the server over time.
  • @sh97 for nws.sh script that was also used for benchmarking.
  • @emgh and @zGato for inspiration to do this review and also some feedback about skhron.
Β«134

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