• 128MB guaranteed/256MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 50GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/VirtPanel

Servers are with RapidSwitch in UK. Our last post about them back in 31 May they were still using SolusVM, and it seems they have migrated to VirtPanel.

Daniel also said that if you mention LEB in the order form, they will give you 50GB/month data extra. By the way — your SSL certificate has expired today! Time for renewal :)

• 256MB guaranteed/2048MB burstable memory
• 20GB storage
• 200GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Servers are in their Chicago datacenter. Their website traceroute to Coloquest so I assume the servers are also located there. Their plans are also Fully Managed according to their VPS page, which includes “hardware management, network management, operating system and software support, proactive security patches and updates, proactive monitoring, firewall, spam prevention, server hardening and more”. Not too sure about their network though, as their network status page is still broken at the moment.

Digging into the company makes me confused. According to WHOIS the domain was registered in Feb 2009 to Falecto Solutions in Norway. Well, then OdishaHosting claimed purchasing it from Falecto in June 2009 — although the WHOIS info stays unchanged?! Doing a quick search on Vixile at Google reveals that they are hitting a new marketing campaign starting from around 20 July (lots of posts/PRs on blogs and forums). Has something changed there?

And Caleb, the 15 year old “Make Money Online” blogger and “promotion staff” at Vixile, was singing praises about Vixile as a customer just last week. Did “Vladimir” just hired him for his good review? Or his experience in selling or starting hosting companies? Not to mention Falecto also joined the discussion, and even posted some Vixile deals himself.

Anyway. Vixile.com has pretty good design. Cheap price. Just need someone more adventurous to test it out for us :)

WTF?!!! About 1.5 hours ago the out bound bandwidth utilization of this low end VPS went from ~50kbps to almost 5Mbps! I thought, hurray I have finally made it to the Slashdot. But then I looked through the logs and spotted something else instead. Someone was using Load Impact to “load testing” this very site. Who the @#$% did that?!

I have never used Load Impact before but I’ll be amazed that you can do free denial of service “load testing” on any site you wishes on the Internet — 50 simultaneous users are enough to crash some badly configured shared hosting sites. Anyway, this VPS at QuickWeb seems to cope pretty well. Here is the loadavg graph of the same period.

That’s it for today. Guys — don’t kill it while I am away.

Update 10 Hours Later…

Yup. LowEndBox got DDoS’ed.

Here is an updated graph of what was going on.

The big spike of in-bound traffic there 2 hours after someone’s “load test” is caused by floods invalid HTTP requests. It did not last very long, but this VPS becomes irresponsive shortly afterwards. Nginx’s error log got flooded with garbages so it filled up all the available disk space on this VPS (which only has 5GB storage). Access log also got truncated so it is not possible to get the full picture. The site did not come back properly until I free up more space.

• DDoS starts at around 15:31 UTC.
• 64,000+ requests after my logs died at 15:48 UTC.
• Top offenders are from Germany, Uruguay, Vietnam, Russia and Brazil. Most are residential IP addresses.

Someone did asked me 2 days ago that “just wondering what you use for DDoS protection on such a little RAM VPS — or don’t you?”. Okay here is my answer Jack — no I don’t have DDoS protection on this small VPS. Not worthwhile — if I want to spend more effort on it I’ll get a bigger meatier server with more active monitoring.

Now someone can go and boast to his mates on IRC “hey my botnet brought down that site with just 80MB of memory, l33t huh?!”.

Timothy from Dinix LLC emailed me a few days ago about some new VPS packages they are about to launch — BlazeVPS. While I have received the details and am still waiting for the “okay” to post, the deals appears on WHT first. Not really “low end box exclusive” as stated in the email exchange but, well, at least the offer is now in the open. Annual payment only, starting from $10/year with the following spec

• 128MB memory
• 25GB storage
• 1000GB/month data transfer on 1Gbps port
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Available locations are Chicago IL, Orlando FL, Phoenix AZ and London UK. There are other packages — $25/year for 256MB, $45/year for 512MB, etc.

Too good to be true? Without last week’s RackVM £6/year offer I would say yes. However many have their RackVM low end VPS delivered and are pretty happy with what they’ve got. RackVM’s domain was only registered in April so not much historical record either, but so far they’ve done pretty well.

BlazeVPS.com on the other hand was registered merely 2 days ago, from a company that still does not have its own website. Can’t seem to be able to find the LLC records in Arizona or Tennessee (but I am not in US so might be using the wrong tools). Andrew from 123Systems also picked some issues on page 3 of the WHT thread — worthwhile to have read.

I guess we’ll just have to wait for more reports to come in.

• 512MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 1,000GB/month data transfer
• 2 IP addresses
• OpenVZ/vePortal

Yeah, before someone yells out Yet Another BurstNET reseller, apparently their servers are with colo4dallas in Dallas TX. You are also getting 30 days money back guarantee and 24x7x365 support as claimed in its company page. Well they might have some experience under their belt if the registrant of the domain was senior sales executive of CI Host, and Corey got a few good reviews on the net.

• 256MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Servers are in Fremont CA with HE.net which has pretty good connectivity to Asia/Australia. There are other monthly offers from 123Systems if you are not comfortable to pay for a whole year up front.

It is based on my previous script here, and it has been tested on both Debian 5 “Lenny” and Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. Sorry no other distributions are supported. It is currently hosted at github so feel free to branch it and tune it to your heart’s desire.

Usage

Here is a quick step by step on how to set up a WordPress blog running on Nginx, PHP/FastCGI and MySQL on a low end box. Let’s assume that you are going to set up a blog on hostname “blog.example.com“.

1. Go and buy a cheap VPS. Yes, you know where to find cheap virtual servers under $7/month, don’t you? :) I am using my 6 pound/year RackVM VPS with 128MB memory to test this script, and the performance turns out to be quite good. YMMV.

   Make sure it is either a Debian or a Ubuntu distro though.

2. After gaining root access to your VPS,

   # wget http://github.com/lowendbox/lowendscript/raw/master/setup-debian.sh
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh system
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh exim4
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh nginx
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh mysql
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh php
   ...
   # bash setup-debian.sh wordpress blog.example.com
   ...
   

3. Now altering your DNS entry to point blog.example.com to your new VPS (or alter your local /etc/hosts entry). Navigate to it from your browser, and you should be presented with WordPress set up page. Fill in your blog’s name, admin’s password and contact email, and your new WordPress is online!

   Just repeat the last step (running bash setup-debian.sh wordpress <hostname>) to set up more blogs on the same box.

That’s it!

Software Stack

It’s pretty similar to my own stack that runs LowEndBox.com.

• dropbear to replace openssh. Invoked from xinetd.
• inetutils-syslogd to replace rsyslog.
• exim4 to replace sendmail (if installed). Re-configured to allow Internet delivery.
• cron
• nginx
• mysql. Re-configured to remove innodb support, remove query cache and reduce key buffer size.
• php with built-in FastCGI interface. Running only 1 child process and respawn after 5,000 requests.

The lowendscript is also

• Removing some commonly bundled applications that should not be there in the first place for a minimal distro (apache2, sendmail, bind9, samba, nscd, etc).
• MySQL root is given a new password (which can be found in ~root/.my.cnf)
• Installing each WordPress site under /var/www/<hostname>. It will create appropriate database, users and password for the site.

I have to say that it is still “work in progress”, but if you want to figure out the internals please check the source code of that bash script.

Memory Usage

I am testing the same script on the following 3 systems:

• Ubuntu 10.04 64bit (RackVM)
• Debian 5 64bit (RackVM)
• Debian 5 32bit (VPSGuy)

They are all showing different memory usage. I am taking the snapshot of memory usage AFTER 10 page loads on the WordPress blog that has been created to ensure PHP process is fully loaded.

Ubuntu 10.04 64bit

root@ubuntu64:~# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.5  23300  1536 ?        Ss   06:58   0:00 init
root     10124  0.0  0.5  23576  1496 ?        Ss   07:34   0:00 dropbear -i
root     15742  0.0  0.7  17880  1944 pts/0    Ss   07:35   0:00 -bash
root     15754  0.0  0.4  14960  1084 pts/0    R+   07:35   0:00 ps aux
root     24290  0.0  0.3  12508   788 ?        S    07:22   0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root     24524  0.0  0.3  21064  1004 ?        Ss   07:22   0:00 cron
root     25689  0.0  0.3  19512   972 ?        Ss   07:22   0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
mysql    26346  0.0  4.2  61812 11248 ?        Ssl  07:23   0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
www-data 27920  0.0  2.6  87768  7048 ?        Ss   07:23   0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 27922  0.5 15.0 122460 39432 ?        S    07:23   0:04 /usr/bin/php-cg
103      30162  0.0  0.3  44356  1000 ?        Ss   07:24   0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
root     30267  0.0  0.3  28104   932 ?        Ss   07:24   0:00 nginx: master p
www-data 30268  0.0  0.8  28744  2196 ?        S    07:24   0:00 nginx: worker p

root@ubuntu64:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        262144     100500     161644          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:     100500     161644
Swap:            0          0          0

Memory Usage: 98.1MB

Debian 5 64bit

debian64:~# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.2  10304   740 ?        Ss   12:22   0:00 init [2]
106       1414  0.0  0.3  42708  1004 ?        Ss   12:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4
www-data  1655  0.0  2.5  72028  6560 ?        Ss   12:26   0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data  1657  0.9 11.7  98500 30928 ?        S    12:26   0:03 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data  3126  0.0  0.7  28380  1912 ?        S    12:29   0:00 nginx: worker p
root      7668  0.1  0.5  23340  1528 ?        Rs   12:31   0:00 dropbear -i
root      7831  0.0  0.6  17472  1716 pts/0    Ss   12:32   0:00 -bash
root      7836  0.0  0.3  14720   980 pts/0    R+   12:32   0:00 ps aux
root     20169  0.0  0.3  18540   936 ?        Ss   12:22   0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
root     24462  0.0  0.2  12236   732 ?        S    12:25   0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root     25637  0.0  0.3  19256   952 ?        Ss   12:25   0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
root     25694  0.0  0.5  28380  1552 ?        Ss   12:25   0:00 nginx: master p
root     32427  0.0  0.2   3872   588 ?        S    12:26   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql    32466  0.0  3.0  50420  8124 ?        Sl   12:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root     32468  0.0  0.2   3772   592 ?        S    12:26   0:00 logger -p daemo

debian64:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        262144      61008     201136          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      61008     201136
Swap:            0          0          0

Memory Usage: 59.6MB

Debian 5 32bit

debian32:~# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.1   1980   688 ?        Ss   23:34   0:00 init [2]
root     14064  0.0  0.1   1704   512 ?        S    23:52   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bi
mysql    14119  0.0  1.7  20056  6968 ?        Sl   23:52   0:00 /usr/sbin/mysql
root     14120  0.0  0.1   1628   536 ?        S    23:52   0:00 logger -p daemo
www-data 15968  0.0  1.2  16352  4996 ?        Ss   23:53   0:00 /usr/bin/php-cg
www-data 15971  0.5  4.7  29436 18576 ?        S    23:53   0:01 /usr/bin/php-cg
root     16040  0.0  0.3   2700  1464 ?        Rs   23:53   0:00 dropbear -i
root     16119  0.0  0.1   1880   684 ?        S    23:44   0:00 /usr/sbin/syslo
root     16133  0.0  0.3   2780  1536 pts/0    Ss   23:54   0:00 -bash
root     17728  0.0  0.2   2352   896 ?        Ss   23:45   0:00 /usr/sbin/xinet
www-data 17758  0.0  0.3   5004  1488 ?        S    23:54   0:00 nginx: worker p
root     27834  0.0  0.3   4548  1236 ?        Ss   23:47   0:00 nginx: master p
root     28146  0.0  0.2   2296   896 pts/0    R+   23:57   0:00 ps aux
102      32065  0.0  0.2   6104   900 ?        Ss   23:49   0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4

debian32:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        262144      44272     217872          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      44272     217872
Swap:            0          0          0

Memory Usage: 43.2MB

So to put that in summary form

• Ubuntu 10.04 uses significantly more memory than Debian 5 (PHP5.3/MySQL5.1 vs. PHP5.2/MySQL5.0). So pick your distro wisely and maybe you don’t need the latest and greatest if your application does not need it.
• 32bit also uses quite a bit less than 64bit, running exactly the same version of stack. That pretty much confirms what I posted before.

And hopefully the above script is useful for your next WordPress splog farm :P

• 128MB guaranteed/256MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 100GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ

Servers are in Frankfurt, Germany.

• 256MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
• 25GB storage
• 1000GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/HyperVM

DMEHosting does offer many location choices though, which you can pick and choose when you are in the ordering page. These are

• Seattle WA (with spectrumnet.us)
• Denver CO (with fdcservers.net)
• Chicago IL (with fdcservers.net)
• Scranton PA (with hostnoc.net)
• Roubaix France (with OVH)

DMEHosting has been in business for quite a few years and have been offering low end packages that were featured here since at least Feb 2009 — so I presume they know what they are doing to make it a profitable business. Don’t forget the promo code 50OFFVPS to get 50% off in your first month.

And here is a question that I am thinking of throwing here for a while. I have been collecting and tracking hosting companies that provide “cheap roots” below a price point. We are getting providers from all over the place — some good, some bad. Some are still going, some have raised price, and some have since fallen into the dead pool. So next time when I have a small project that requires a new low end box — which provider from the ever growing list should I choose?

Here is an idea. Maybe we should have a list of “projects” — web sites, online stores, blogs, whatever that are actually hosted on low end providers, what their statistics is (amount of traffic, how busy the sites are, so no just-another-personal blog should apply), who they are currently hosting with and how long have they been with this low end provider. This is your show off time — tell us how 1337 you are with your memory optimization skillz, and stories on how your cheap VPS coped with being dugg/slashdotted.

I am making a start.

• LowEndBox.com — hosted on QuickWeb.co.nz‘s 80MB Xen VPS in Softlayer/Dallas since a month ago (it’s a courtesy testing VPS so free for me, thanks to Joe @ QuickWeb)
• 27k visitors/month and 92k page views/month according to Google Analytics
• Only use ~1GB of disk space & 20GB/month of data.

Never been dugg/slashdotted although I dare to try that :)

Now, your turn, and I am heading back to work.

• 256MB memory
• 30GB storage
• 1000GB/month data transfer
• VMWare — any operating system

Servers are in Chincago with DFT CH1. Seems to be quite cheap if you are looking at a VMWare-based solution. Unfortunately I am unable to find any review about this company.

• 384MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 5Mbps unmetered bandwidth
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

No word on where the servers are located. Since their website has a HostNOC address I assume they buy their servers from HostNOC/BurstNet in Scranton. A very new service (registered Jun 30 this year) although they were trading under “HostingVillage” before, which was registered last year. I do need to raise the under age alert though — we seem to get a lot of those from UK. And I’m trying very hard not to make any joke about the rubber duckling :)

All the best Daniel with your new startup.

• 256MB guaranteed/384MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 2TB/month outbound data transfer + Unmetered inbound
• Free SSL certificate
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Another low end provider selling their cheap VPS with terabytes of monthly data transfer (while I am still struggling to push more than 20GB on this VPS hosting Low End Box). Spacerich has been around for quite a while with mixed reviews on WHT.

• 256MB guaranteed/512MB burstable memory
• 10GB storage
• 50GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ

On the website it says the Budget plans are based in US and UK. Their website is hosted in Chicago with Sharktech Internet Services so I assume it is with them as well. Domain has been registered for 3 years and currently to “OSHS Limited“, who as far as I know, runs by Suhali who also owns HighVPS (acquired from Jason Scale), VPSWow (also acquired from Jason), ConnectSwitch and HostGD that were featured on LowEndBox.

Does that make this reputable business? Hmm I guess so. The plans themselves are probably not that great though when you compare with some recent offers.

I was wonding what people would expect to see as the base specifictions as a low end VPS host box.

Having a look at some dedicated server deals it seems something like a 1x Intel Xeon x3460 at 2.8 GHz with 4 GB DDR3 ECC — would be the minimum to make this viable to sell 128mb VPS servers off at a lowend box rate.

So what I’m going to put out to the community is what do you expect to see as the hardware for the host node?

Okay. I have never been on the provider side of the table so I have no idea. However from what I can see here, it tends to go two extremes

• Cheap desktop Pentium box or 3-4 year-old old server hardware with small amount of RAM (4-8GB) and software RAID1 of SATA2 drives. Sell 10-15 VPS on it.
• Expensive dual quad core Xeon boxes and latest hardware, with 32GB+ memory and 6x SAS drives. Sell 50+ VPS on it.

Well the numbers are purely pulling out from nowhere so don’t be surprised that they are completely out of whack. Both are acceptable for slicing up to provide low end boxes I guess, and I guess the performance would be similar. You either get less contention on cheap box or more on high performance beast.

However at the sub-$7 end I am actually not “expecting” any kind of performance. I would actually much prefer stability and consistensy than being able to burst to 4x 2.8GHz one day, and complete unresponsive because of IO-wait on the other.

Anyway. Xeon X3460 is a good quad core CPU. Up the memory to 8GB so you can jam more virtual servers on it. Also don’t forget that RAID1 would be the bare minimum :)

As potential customers of a low end virtual server, what is your expectation?

• 128MB memory/256MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer
• Xen

Servers with Hetzner in Germany. Last time Alex claimed that they have been in business for 3.5 years and have 2 technical employees. .DE WHOIS does not show the creation date although DomainTools shows the earliest record at 4 years ago.

• 128MB guaranteed memory
• 15GB storage
• 200GB/month data transfer
• 2 IP addresses
• OpenVZ/HyperVM

Servers are with Netelligent in Montreal, Canada. You can also get 80% off 1st month using promo code LowEndFirstMonth, or 10% off yearly payment using promo code LowEndYear1. Media-Hosts.com itself has been registered since 2004 (and saying “since 2002″ on their website).

• 128MB guaranteed/256MB burstable memory
• 15GB storage
• 150Gb/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

After the discount it is just £6 per year (USD$9.17), or 50 pence per month. Cheaper and give more resource than my otherwise very stable 99 pence/month UK VPS from XenVZ. The discount also applies to other UK/FR OpenVZ packages when order yearly.

• 512MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
• 30GB storage
• 1000GB/month data transfer
• 2 IP addresses
• OpenVZ

These were $9.99/month just over a week ago.

• 512MB guaranteed/2048MB burstable memory
• 25GB storage
• 1500GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ

The package does look too much like Virpus’ package that has been on offer for the last 6 months. A reseller perhaps? However in the WHT forums when asked about the IP address, an IP address in Phoenix was given.

Domain was only created last week with WHOIS protection. The ToS page is missing. Just hope that it does not abduct the customers and their data :)