Where's the Hostigation review? Right here! :)

[KuJoe]

Being an owner of a VPS provider, I don't keep many VPSs these days. When I first found LowEndBox.com I was a VPS collector, at one point having more VPSs than I had pair of socks. Now I've kept my number of VPSs more manageable and limited to a few companies that have proven themselves time and time again. I have 4 VPSs in total from 3 other companies and 2 of the companies have already been posted on here with reviews that mirror my own feelings with them, but one has not and I feel it's a crime that this company has not been posted here yet.

So here's my quick, yet detailed review of my oldest VPS from a popular provider called Hostigation!

Originally I contacted Tim when I was a young newb on LEB.com asking for a custom plan, I was looking for a small KVM to play with and use for a project I had been working on. I received a happy little 128MB KVM VPS in their Rock Hill, SC. location on 05/29/2011 and made good use of it. They moved to their current location (Charlotte, NC.) in January of 2012 and I'm still happy with the service. I've seen they have had some issues with their CA location in the past so I dare not let my   NC VPS expire since stock there is usually rare when I visit their site.

Stability/Uptime has been great. A few hiccups here and there but much better than a lot of other providers I've been with. Current uptime is 21 days because I rebuilt the OS last month to clear out some old data and get a fresh start. This VPS usually has the highest uptime of all of my VPSs so bravo to them for that. I have a single external monitor that does a simple ping every 60 seconds to it and I can't recall ever seeing an alert for it this year.

Network has been great also. Never any slowness or packet loss when I'm using it. At one point I did have this VPS in a webserver cluster with failover DNS with DNSMadeEasy and they would always report the IP as down but they did the same for my BuyVM VPSs so I believe it was an issue on their end. I used to run a network test on this VPS to our own VPS nodes to check latency and it was always impressive for our FL nodes which tend to have higher latency once you get past Atlanta.

Performance has been good, I want to say great but I honestly have never used it for anything demanding enough to test the performance. It's good enough for my needs and responds very well for the scripts I threw at it. I don't think I've ever run a DD or any other benchmark on it. I should do that now...

Disk IO:


root@nc:~# ioping -c4 /
4096 bytes from / (ext4 /dev/disk/): request=1 time=0.1 ms
4096 bytes from / (ext4 /dev/disk/): request=2 time=0.2 ms
4096 bytes from / (ext4 /dev/disk/): request=3 time=0.1 ms
4096 bytes from / (ext4 /dev/disk/): request=4 time=0.1 ms

--- / (ext4 /dev/disk/) ioping statistics ---
4 requests completed in 3001.0 ms, 7782 iops, 30.4 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.1/0.1/0.2/0.1 ms

root@nc:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync;rm test
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.11414 s, 210 MB/s

Network:


Cachefly (who cares?) - 6.88 MB/s
Tampa - 25.0 MB/s
Denver - 16.8 MB/s
Portland - 4.66 MB/s
Chicago - 28.5 MB/s
Specs:


processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 3392.292
cache size : 4096 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 4
wp : yes
flags : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm up rep_good pni cx16 hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips : 6784.58
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           118         41         77          0          5          9
-/+ buffers/cache:         26         92
Swap:          487          1        486

Disk /dev/vda: 10.7 GB, 10737418240 bytes

I'm running Debian 6 64bit with virtio drivers for disk and network.

I hope that covers everything. 

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Being an owner of a VPS provider, I don't keep many VPSs these days. When I first found LowEndBox.com I was a VPS collector, at one point having more VPSs than I had pair of socks.

You don't know how true this is.  Even if you count each individual sock (instead of counting pairs) my VPS collection is still larger than my sock collection...  

Regardless, exactly my own opinions of Hostigation!  Great Review KuJoe! 

 

[drmike]

I am trying to limit my purchases and prune idle accounts.   I just can't keep up with the emails, invoices, etc. all the time on monthly plans.  Drives me nuts and confuses the other people involved on my team.

Hostigation is a provider I think real highly of, but hadn't seen much 'credible' reviewing of.

Thanks for this @KuJoe.  Added them to my way short list.

 

[jarland]

hadn't seen much 'credible' reviewing of

 

It's hilarious that I'm going to say this, and I know Tim will get a good laugh out of it.

I think the biggest thing going against Hostigation is that the operation is too perfect. There's no "Hey I'm rebooting because I want to tweak this." When you're with Hostigation you're darn near likely to forget who the host is. Aside from the invoice, don't expect much communication. Don't expect much need for communication. It works, it works well, and there's nothing to say about it. Among all the providers that I respect, Tim has to be running the single most professional operation around here. I'm including myself.