The Offer Tested
The offer I tested is called LEBVZ1000 1024MB OVZ Plan, and the price is only USD 1.90 per month. OVZ stands for OpenVZ, a virtualisation type that is not complete. Indeed, with OVZ, virtual machines share the same kernel. While this may provide performance enhancements, it can also come with security risks.
Moreover, being stuck on an old 2.6 GNU/Linux kernel prevents you from installing some modern packages, and it is incompatible with Docker.
Nevertheless, an OpenVZ VPS can be an affordable first upgrade from shared hosting, as you have unrestricted root access to a server. But not all VPS providers are created equal. How well does this budget offer fare?
The Promise
- 1 vCPU @ 2.66 GHz
- 1024MB RAM
- 1024MB vSwap
- 30GB Storage SAS Raid 10
- 1TB Transfer (1 Gbps)
- 1 IPv4
- IPv6 on request
- OpenVZ/Virtualizor
- OS: Centos, Debian, Scientific, Fedora, Ubuntu
The Reality
You may have noticed that no CPU model was specified in the ad.
This omission might be explained by the weak L-series Xeon CPU that comes with the offer. L5320 is a CPU that dates all the way back to 2007.
About the physical location of the server, the IP is in AS46664, which means the datacentre is VolumeDrive in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.
ServerScope benchmark
Test results for LEB1000OVZ at vpsRus
Server specs:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5320 @ 1.86GHz
1 GB RAM / 31 GB disk space
Centos 6.9 Final
Clarks Summit, United States
Benchmark results summary:
UnixBench - 634.4
Disk Read - 5 MB/s
Disk Write - 261 MB/s
Bandwidth - 152.39 MB/s
More: https://serverscope.io/trials/DzAW
Nench benchmark
-------------------------------------------------
nench.sh v2017.06.01 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
benchmark timestamp: 2018-02-14 11:16:14 UTC
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Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5320 @ 1.86GHz
CPU cores: 1
Frequency: 1866.587 MHz
RAM: 1.0G
Swap:
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-042stab126.1 x86_64
Disks:
ploop11136p1 30G HDD
CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
5.530 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
12.606 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
9.858 seconds
ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 206.4 us / 2.12 ms / 30.7 ms / 3.02 ms
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 3.42 k requests in 5.00 s, 856 MiB, 684 iops, 171.2 MiB/s
dd: sequential write speed
1st run: 399.59 MiB/s
2nd run: 423.43 MiB/s
3rd run: 382.42 MiB/s
average: 401.81 MiB/s
IPv4 speedtests
your IPv4: 142.0.39.xxxx
Cachefly CDN: 17.30 MiB/s
Leaseweb (NL): 3.36 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 4.29 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 2.08 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 7.92 MiB/s
No IPv6 connectivity detected
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Verdict
vpsRus's OVZ plan in the Pennsylvanian data centre is hard to beat cost-wise. Where else can you find a 1GB VPS for under two bucks a month?
The network is rather fast, as it consistently reaches a top speed over 100 Mbit/s.
But the most prominent corner they had to cut is without a doubt the CPU. On the plus side, it doesn't seem too oversold, as the ancient CPU still does have a commendable 634 Unixbench score.
