# TortoiseLabs/Centarra VPS Review



## fisle (Mar 12, 2014)

Decided to brush up my writing skills for vpsBoard contest, so here goes!

I've had a 512M Xen box at their *London* location for around 9 months now. The specs to prices ratio was so good I could not pass it.

I pay $6.75 a month (there was a -30% coupon IIRC) and I get the following:

- 512MB of RAM

- 8 Xeon E3-1240 v2 cores @ 3.40GHz

- 30GB SSD Cached disk

- 20mbps guaranteed on gbit link

- 1 IPv4

- 32 IPv6

And now recently they have added a free Anti-DDOS service. Awesome!

The VPS itself has been performing great and I only remember one issue when it was down for about 6 hours, when the law enforcement needed the host node down for one customer or something like that. One downtime in 9 months is not that bad, don't you think?

I use my box as a host for fisle.eu (static site generated) and as a frontend proxy with varnish for my projects. (overkill though lol)

Also runs couple Python (flask) sites, mysql server, redis server, munin host and prosody (xmpp) server. All without a hitch.

The customer panel is simply the best I've seen in VPS world. Simple, goodlooking flat-design and everything bundled into one. Billing, support, server management can all be found in same panel. Also provides nice graphs telling network usage, cpu usage and I/O usage. There's also inhouse monitoring which can alert you if it goes down.

I've needed to turn into support only a couple of times, with only one actual problem when first installing my OS, it got stuck. This was resolved in a timely manner with short but nice info about what was happening. Not just "it has been fixed", but actual what was broken reply. Nice!

Kaniini itself has been replying to my smallish problems (not with the VPS, but the billing issues (stupid paypal and scandic letters)) in IRC which I find great.

What I would like to see more from them: more news at what is happening. One day I logged into panel and found there was a new Firewall option. Maybe some emails to customers about new features or something like that.

TL;DR:

Great service with good features, anti-ddos, all-in-one panel and very professional people. Would highly recommend++


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## DomainBop (Mar 12, 2014)

> at their *London* location


Telehouse Docklands?


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## fisle (Mar 12, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> Telehouse Docklands?



Yup, London, England - Telehouse East (LHR0)


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## fisle (Mar 12, 2014)

Here's some benchmarks:


CPU model :  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz
Number of cores : 8
CPU frequency :  3392.360 MHz
Total amount of ram : 495 MB
Total amount of swap : 511 MB
System uptime :   72 days, 57 min,       
Download speed from CacheFly: 37.5MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 2.45MB/s 
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 1.84MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 303KB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 7.95MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 4.16MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 877KB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 1.60MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 1.43MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 2.64MB/s
I/O speed :  53.6 MB/s

As you can see network speeds could use improving. I'm not sure how good DD is for testing I/O speed. In real work usage I have found no issues related to disk speeds.


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## HostUS-Alexander (Mar 12, 2014)

Nice review @fisle


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## kaniini (Mar 12, 2014)

Just for the record, the anti-ddos is only available in our actual datacenter facility (in Dallas).  London isn't DDoS protected at the moment, as that would require doing a GRE tunnel and other sillyness.


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