# SecureDragon VPS 1+ Year Review



## dave (Feb 7, 2014)

I’ve used SecureDragon for over a year now (since November 2012), and I wanted to give them credit for providing a great service. I’ve used many different services, and I think this is one of the best.

SecureDragon became popular for providing small VPS’s with even less than 128MB RAM, and my first one was a 64MB OpenVZ VPS at their Florida location. After they began offering service in Denver, I picked up another 64MB OpenVZ VPS in Denver. I’ve used both of these mostly as VPNs.

The network quality for VPN use out of their Denver location (at Handy Networks) is the best I’ve ever used. Of course this can change over time, but so far so good.

The test for a VPN isn’t just connectivity from you to the VPN, but also from the VPN to various CDNs. The speed test from your VPN server may be great, but trying to stream over it may be a challenge if the network quality is poor. If you want a VPS for VPN use, my advice is to get a Dragon in Denver.

I recently picked up a new 1GB OpenVZ VPS with SecureDragon in Denver to try to use for web hosting, and a second one in Los Angeles for monitoring, DNS, and backups.

I usually prefer to use 512MB Xen or KVM VPS’s for web hosting. I last tried OpenVZ many years ago for web hosting and found it using way more RAM than it did on my Xen server, and I’ve avoided it since then. But a good deal on the SecureDragon VPS came up (tweet), and with the memory management changes and introduction of VSWAP for OpenVZ, I thought I’d give it another try.

I’m finding that a similar setup on OpenVZ is using a bit more than twice as much RAM as on Xen or KVM. Whereas I’m using around 250MB RAM on Xen or KVM, OpenVZ is consuming around 530MB. Everything is nice and snappy so far, though, so I’ll continue to use it. It’s a good thing it’s 1GB for OpenVZ instead of 512MB!

I’ve only had to contact support once, for a simple matter, but the response was very quick and polite. Everything else just works.

They also offer KVM VPS’s, DDOS protected OpenVZ VPS’s, backup servers, and CPanel hosting, though I haven’t used their other services.

They just sent out an email announcing that they’ll be adding four new locations: Atlanta GA, Dallas TX, Phoenix AZ, and Weehawken NJ to add to their five existing locations (Tampa FL, Denver CO, Los Angeles CA, Chicago IL, and Portland OR). I wish them lots of success–they deserve it.


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## shinehost (Feb 7, 2014)

nice review


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## GIANT_CRAB (Feb 7, 2014)

shinehost said:


> nice review


The real question is: What is your budget?


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## KuJoe (Feb 7, 2014)

Thanks dave!

Living in Colorado myself, I'm a bit biased when it comes to my favorite location and network (I'm connected to my VPN in Denver all of the time and Amazon VOD, Xfinity VOD, and Netflix are indeed smoother than when I was in FL). I'm glad others are getting to enjoy it as much as I do.

Those 1GB plans were selling fast and were mostly bought by current clients who had a <128MB VPS with us originally so I'm sure a lot of people are in the same boat as you so I'm very happy to hear you're expanding to hosting other services with us.

In addition to the locations you mentioned we're hoping to add an Oregon and Ohio location this month also (we were hoping talks would go better with a Virginia data center but at the moment it's not looking so good).

Thanks again for taking the time to write such a detailed review about us.


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## HalfEatenPie (Feb 7, 2014)

As a SD customer myself (Since June 2012), I agree with you. I absolutely love their service and the way Joe runs things. It's great!


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## MannDude (Feb 7, 2014)

Yep, Joe runs a tight ship. Good service.


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## mikho (Feb 7, 2014)

I've sent in a few tickets and every time I've been surprised by the fast and accurate response that I received.


Every time there was a helpful tone and a will to solve the problem, even in the cases where it was my fault and I shouldn't contact the support.


Currently using one as vpn and the other as a cPanel dns-only.


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## texteditor (Feb 7, 2014)

KuJoe said:


> In addition to the locations you mentioned we're hoping to add an Oregon and Ohio location this month also (we were hoping talks would go better with a Virginia data center but at the moment it's not looking so good).
> 
> Thanks again for taking the time to write such a detailed review about us.


Kinda curious to see how the Ohio location works out, last time I tested my latency from southern Indiana was better to my Tampa ovz than Denver, but that probably has something to do with E-Solution's DC now being owned by my ISP

Are you shipping single servers to E-sol in Ohio and the other new DCs?


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## KuJoe (Feb 7, 2014)

texteditor said:


> Kinda curious to see how the Ohio location works out, last time I tested my latency from southern Indiana was better to my Tampa ovz than Denver, but that probably has something to do with E-Solution's DC now being owned by my ISP
> 
> Are you shipping single servers to E-sol in Ohio and the other new DCs?


The Ohio location is still up in the air. We got a quote and are still in talks to see what we can and can't do.

All new locations are getting a single OpenVZ node for now. We've decided to move away from getting cabinets since they are not cost effective for us (the shared bandwidth in particular doesn't meet our needs).


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## texteditor (Feb 7, 2014)

KuJoe said:


> (the shared bandwidth in particular doesn't meet our needs).


Isn't this exactly what you get with shared colocation thought,, shared bandwidth from their BGP blend?


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## KuJoe (Feb 7, 2014)

texteditor said:


> Isn't this exactly what you get with shared colocation thought,, shared bandwidth from their BGP blend?


I mean us having multiple servers sharing the same bandwidth pool. We like having the ability to adjust bandwidth commits on a per server basis.


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## thekreek (Feb 8, 2014)

From my experience SD has always provided stable servers (the vps was from a friend).

And just one complain, damint I couldn't get the promo, it was a very nice offer.

Keep it up KuJoe.


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## KuJoe (Feb 12, 2014)

Just wanted to update those who were interested in our Ohio location. We've negotiated a better price and hope to have an OpenVZ node online by the end of the month. 

Additionally the nodes have arrived in New Jersey and Georgia already and we're just waiting for our new IPs from ARIN to get these rolling. The nodes for Arizona and Texas should be shipping out soon also.


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## dave (Apr 24, 2014)

Hulu started blocking all 4 of my securedragon IP addresses today (2 in Denver, plus Los Angeles and Florida) -- both the older 198.57. addresses and the newer 162.211. addresses.

So that's kind of sad.  The servers themselves are still running well, though.


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## KuJoe (Apr 24, 2014)

That sucks. I just tried to watch Hulu with some of my VPNs (Secure Dragon IPs and one of my dedicated servers with another provider) and they're blocked also. I guess Hulu started cracking down or updated a database recently since they even have our new IPs blocked also.


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## KuJoe (Apr 24, 2014)

dave said:


> Hulu started blocking all 4 of my securedragon IP addresses today (2 in Denver, plus Los Angeles and Florida) -- both the older 198.57. addresses and the newer 162.211. addresses.
> 
> So that's kind of sad.  The servers themselves are still running well, though.


We've found a workaround for this and will be implementing it shortly. It won't be ideal for everybody but it's better than nothing.


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## dave (Apr 24, 2014)

KuJoe said:


> We've found a workaround for this and will be implementing it shortly. It won't be ideal for everybody but it's better than nothing.


That's good news.  Does it involve making some changes to the vps, or should it just start working?


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## KuJoe (Apr 24, 2014)

We're still looking into how to implement the workaround. I have a few ideas but I won't be able to test them until tonight or tomorrow. One will require some modification while the other should be seemless.


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## rds100 (Apr 24, 2014)

I don't understand why Hulu would bother to block the IPs. Don't you need to pay hulu subscription to watch it? So they want to have less subscriptions?


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## KuJoe (Apr 24, 2014)

I don't have a paid Hulu account so I only tested their free version. I wonder if the IPs are blocked for Hulu Plus. Either way, we're getting IPs from a residential ISPs for our clients to use for Hulu and other sites that block "anonymous" IPs. I'm a bit medicated at the moment so I'll have more details later.


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## iWF-Jacob (Apr 24, 2014)

rds100 said:


> I don't understand why Hulu would bother to block the IPs. Don't you need to pay hulu subscription to watch it? So they want to have less subscriptions?


No, Hulu has a free version. You can upgrade to Hulu Plus though.


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## dave (Apr 29, 2014)

KuJoe said:


> I don't have a paid Hulu account so I only tested their free version. I wonder if the IPs are blocked for Hulu Plus. Either way, we're getting IPs from a residential ISPs for our clients to use for Hulu and other sites that block "anonymous" IPs. I'm a bit medicated at the moment so I'll have more details later.


Any news on the new IPs for Hulu?


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## KuJoe (Apr 30, 2014)

Once we finish the move of our fl1ovz01 node tonight we'll get started on the workaround. We're not sure how many IPs to order but we should have this ready by this weekend depending on the turnaround time for the ISP.


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## agsware (May 14, 2014)

Stay away from this company
they have terminated my services after approximately 2 years (2 VPS) without warning
I opened a ticket and they told me that I run bitcoin miner
I've never done this type of service, and personally I do not know what it is. I do not believe in a violation of the password because I use denyhosts set to ALL and without recovery and i do not run any service no http or mail or ftp only pptp. I asked to reinstall the VPS but they refused.

They do not resolve your issue but they cut off your services.


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## KuJoe (May 14, 2014)

agsware said:


> Stay away from this company
> they have terminated my services after approximately 2 years (2 VPS) without warning
> 
> 
> ...


Not only were you running a bitcoin miner, but you took the time to rename the process in an attempt to avoid our monitoring.

Regardless if you personally installed it and ran it yourself, you are responsible for what happens on your VPS and due to the severity of the violation (it took us 30 minutes to be able to kill your VPS because it was impacting the whole node) your VPSs were terminated. We normally give warnings for such violations, but this was a case where you were impacting other clients for such a long period of time which is not fair to our clients. The fact that the process was also renamed shows us that the person running it knew it was not allowed on our servers.

At the end of the day, we cannot allow somebody to impact other clients on our busiest VPS node and jeopardize our business.


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