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Quade
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."
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.
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.
