# CatalystHost 2GB Trenta KVM VPS Review



## wdq (May 27, 2013)

I ordered my first VPS from CatalystHost about six and a half months ago when they ran one of their $7/month for a 2GB VPS promos.

Back in March I wrote a review of CatalystHost on LowEndTalk where I explained how much I have enjoyed having several VPS's with the company. They have really fast performance, very little downtime, and most importantly a really great team of people that are really devoted to the company and their clients. For example recently they had some issues with their old VPS panel called VirtPanel being down. Within a day they let all of their clients know in a very up front email, and while they were sending out that email they were hard at work migrating everything back over to SolusVM. 

The New KVM Node

So from my experiences CatalystHost has been a company that really works to make the experiences of their clients great. Earlier this May I was talking with Jarland about their shared hosting service and we ended up talking about what's to come over this next year at CatalystHost. I then learned that they were launching a new KVM node with these pretty impressive specs that really make their OpenVZ nodes "look like trash."


2x Intel E5-2620

128GB ECC RAM
6x 2TB SATA hard drives in RAID10
2x 256GB Samsung SSD's in RAID1 for cache
A really nice RAID controller

ServerBear Benchmarks

Last Wednesday I was invited to test out the new KVM node. I got essentially a Trenta VPS powered by KVM. It has 2GB of RAM, 120GB of hard drive space, and 1.2TB of bandwidth. I have benchmarked the VPS several times throughout my time I have had with it. Once when I first got it, once this past Saturday, and once this past Sunday. Additionally I have this benchmark from CatalystHost which is from the node itself. Essentially you can see that they worked to optimize things like the SSD caching over the time I have spent testing the node. 

FTB/Java Testing

Other than benchmarking the node I was also encouraged to run some of the more demanding applications that can be put onto a VPS. In this case I installed a fresh copy of Feed the Beast Ultimate, and Java 7. After configuring FTB to use up all of the VPS's RAM I went ahead and asked a few friends if they'd like to see if they could crash the game server. 

From my testing with a few friends I was able to crash the FTB game server only after quite a bit of effort by blowing things up, and teleporting to random areas to force new chunks to be generated. Doing either one of those tasks individually didn't really cause any issues. Even when the game server did crash it didn't take the whole VPS down with it like what happens on some VPS's. 

Conclusion

So from my short half a week of testing out this VPS I really wasn't surprised to see how well it performed. CatalystHost has great OpenVZ nodes, and now they have a great KVM node. 

I'd like to thank @RyanArp, @Jarland, and @HalfEatenPie for letting me test out their new KVM node, and also continuing to provide such great services. 

If you are interested in taking a look at the KVM offerings of CatalystHost you can check out their website, or their post on vpsBoard. I personally will be ordering either a 256MB or 512MB KVM VPS from CatalystHost to use as a personal VPN and maybe another web server to add to my collection. 

As I wrap up this review I'd like to let you know that CatalystHost states in their TOS that they don't allow customers to run game servers on their VPS unless they have already had it approved. They simply want the best performance possible, and if everyone goes and sets up a game server on their VPS performance will suffer.


----------



## jarland (May 27, 2013)

You, sir, are awesome. Thanks for the kind words and for writing up a review of the KVM test. Also now Ryan is hooked on FTB.


----------



## wdq (May 27, 2013)

jarland said:


> You, sir, are awesome. Thanks for the kind words and for writing up a review of the KVM test. Also now Ryan is hooked on FTB.


Haha. Well if support is ever slow I'll know why.


----------



## HalfEatenPie (May 27, 2013)

Haha well thanks wdq!  Glad you enjoy Taylor Swift!


----------



## ryanarp (May 27, 2013)

Just don't let Jarland on your FTB Server with any ability to be in creative mode. He will fill your house with those villagers. Those things are so annoying when there are say like 300 running around.


----------



## jarland (May 27, 2013)

ryanarp said:


> Just don't let Jarland on your FTB Server with any ability to be in creative mode. He will fill your house with those villagers. Those things are so annoying when there are say like 300 running around.


Bahahahaha and then crash his own game client with the little turrets.

I lined my house with nukes and dared Ryan to blow it up. Guess he didn't know how well they work...


----------



## wdq (May 27, 2013)

ryanarp said:


> Just don't let Jarland on your FTB Server with any ability to be in creative mode. He will fill your house with those villagers. Those things are so annoying when there are say like 300 running around.


I know what you mean. If they are in a down they'll breed and within a few days there'll be several times as many as there were before.


----------



## ryanarp (May 27, 2013)

We now we have a grand canyon just down the road.


----------



## HalfEatenPie (May 27, 2013)

Erm...  Well, today I learned.  Don't let Jarland on your servers!  He's the definition of Mutually Assured Destruction.


----------



## jarland (May 27, 2013)

HalfEatenPie said:


> Erm...  Well, today I learned.  Don't let Jarland on your servers!  He's the definition of Mutually Assured Destruction.


"Frylock, please. That was a computer simulation program. And it proved to me that you don't know what I like and what I like to do. And that is to tell you what to do. And you need to listen to what I say 'cause I'm gonna eat your brains!" -Meatwad


----------



## notFound (May 28, 2013)

I got one too, has been awesome so far. Lovin' the SSD cacheing and shear speed. Good job guys.


----------



## jarland (May 29, 2013)

notFound said:


> I got one too, has been awesome so far. Lovin' the SSD cacheing and shear speed. Good job guys.


Glad you're enjoying it 

Nothing I love more than when things just work. We put a lot of work into it, but I won't lie...the real hours went to Ryan and Gordon (Incero). The two of them logged some serious hours getting that controller to push everything it could.


----------



## ryanarp (May 29, 2013)

jarland said:


> Glad you're enjoying it
> 
> 
> Nothing I love more than when things just work. We put a lot of work into it, but I won't lie...the real hours went to Ryan and Gordon (Incero). The two of them logged some serious hours getting that controller to push everything it could.


Our buddy Don put in a lot of work downloading ISO and putting awesome descriptions with all of them. Team work makes a pretty awesome product


----------



## HalfEatenPie (May 29, 2013)

ryanarp said:


> Our buddy Don put in a lot of work downloading ISO and putting awesome descriptions with all of them. Team work makes a pretty awesome product


 

Hahahaha... No.  I hear this Don guy is a total jerk.


----------



## SeriesN (May 29, 2013)

jarland said:


> Glad you're enjoying it
> 
> 
> Nothing I love more than when things just work. We put a lot of work into it, but I won't lie...the real hours went to Ryan and Gordon (Incero). The two of them logged some serious hours getting that controller to push everything it could.


That explains why  I never heard back from you .

Great job though guys! Keep up the good works


----------

