Evorack Xen VPS review

In December 2011, I purchased a virtual private server (VPS) from the UK company Evorack. It's a NetBSD 5.1 system running on a Xen-based virtual machine, one of several running on a single actual hardware server. VPSes are great because you get complete root access to the machine, just like a dedicated server, but they're also very cheap because the provider can run several per piece of actual hardware, just like a shared hosting account. It's the best of both worlds. Since March of 2012, that VPS has been handling the mail and web services for the maurits.id.au domain. Since before then it's been serving as an SVN server for my hobby programming and for my university research.

In some sense, me buying a server in the UK makes very little sense. It's moderately distant from the SF bay area where I live now, requiring crossing the US and then hopping over the Atlantic, and once I move back to Australia it will be about as far away as an internet host can reasonably be, requiring either a jump across the Pacific to the US West coast and then a US crossing and over the Atlantic, or a jump to China via Japan or Singapore and then a crossing of Eurasia. To be honest, at the time I signed up I wasn't thinking about this much, and I probably shouldn't be even now. After all, for the longest time all maurits.id.au services were hosted from my home through a domestic DSL connection, which can't have been especially fast from anywhere. The main reason I chose Evorack were that they offered NetBSD as an OS choice for their VPSes, which is relatively rare, and because they offered IPV6, which is not as rare as NetBSD, but still isn't something everyone offers.

After a really slow FTP transfer of some backup tarballs to Australia (which I now suspect were probably due more to a very narrow pipe to that Australian machine than the distance involved), I started looking into VPS options on the West coast of the US, which is really the optimal location for me: extremely close to SF for now, and about as close as an international server can get to Australia (unless you're in Perth, then your international connection is via Singapore). I've done quite a bit of research and I feel like I have a decent handle on the budget VPS market. For my purposes, "budget" is about US$10 per month or less - this is basically what I pay Evorack, at the current exchange rate between GBP and USD. It took quite a bit of deliberation, and I guess I'm still not certain, but for now I think I'm actually going to stick with Evorack - despite their less than ideal location and despite the fact that there are a lot of deals which are quite a bit cheaper. I'll outline why here.

Before I go any further, I guess I should be clearer about what I get from Evorack: for $10 a month I get a Xen VPS with 128 MB of RAM, 20 GB of disk space, 200 GB of bandwidth, 1 IPV4 address and a 64 bit IPV6 subnet (which is way, way more IPV6 IPs than I can foresee myself needing for years to come). The Xen thing is probably important to notice. A lot of cheap VPS providers use OpenVZ virtualisation technology. This is a Linux-only approach which, rather than actually simulating a full-blown hardware machine which can run whatever you like, just creates a number of separate "containers", which have their own filesystems etc. but share a single running Kernel instance. It's kind of like a shared server but with much stronger separation between users than simple account-based security. It's fast and cheap, but compared to full virtualisation like Xen it doesn't provide quite as good separation between VPSes. If one VPS on an OpenVZ host does something to cause a kernel panic, all the VPSes on that host go down because they share that kernel. Xen VPSes are basically unable to impact one another.

Most of what I know about the budget VPS market I've got from two sites, Low End Box, which lists cheap VPS deals, and the accompanying Low End Talk, which is a discussion board for people using budget VPSes. LET features lots of discussion about budget VPS providers, with quarterly votes on best provider, people posting benchmark results, etc. A lot of people who work for or run providers hang out there too. It's a fairly small, tightly knit community where everybody seems to know everybody else, and it looks like a fairly fun place to hangout, if you're really into cheap virtual servers. Some of the US-based providers which are popular and well-regarded on LEB/LET are BuyVM, Hostigation, RAM Host, and Secure Dragon.

Providers normally offer a range of VPS classes based on RAM, so for comparison to Evorack we should be looking at 128 MB non-OpenVZ offerings from these places. Some of them offer Xen, but others offer KVM, which is comparable to Xen (and can run any OS you like). The 128 MB offerings from the places above cost about US $2 (BuyVM), $2.50 (Hostigation), $5.00 (for 256 MB from RAM Host, who don't have a 128 MB offering) and $4 (SecureDragon) per month. So between one fifth and one half of what I pay Evorack. It's very easy to get the impression here that I'm getting ripped off, and this was my concern too at first. It should be noted here that all UK providers are a bit more expensive than US providers, and everybody knows this. I assume this boils down to a whole bunch of stuff that is totally beyond the UK provider's control, to do with international differences in demand, infrastructure, taxation, regulations, etc. Of course, if you don't need a UK-based provider it still makes no sense to accept this small increase. But let's ignore that factor for now and look at other differences in the offerings.

One thing to note quickly and straightforwardly is that Evorack are very generous with disk space. Their 128 MB plan comes with 20 GB. Compare that to 15 GB from BuyVM, 10 GB from Hostigation, 7 GB from Ram Host and 7 GB from SecureDragon. In order to get 20 GB out of the other providers you need to step up to a 256 or even 512 MB of RAM plan, which is totally overkill for my purposes. To some extent, the price differences mitigate this - you could split your services over multiple servers or just fork out for the 512 MB plan from most of these US providers and still come out cheaper than or on par with one Evorack server. But I do appreciate the convenience of just having one big disk.

Another quick and easy win for Evorack is with IPV6 addresses. They give you a ridiculous number of them at no extra charge. Many of the US providers above give you 16, but the majority of places give you none. I appreciate IPV6 connectivity. Admittedly, there's not much difference in utility to me between 16 and several million, but Evorack do still technically give you more for your money.

Evorack are also the only place I know that offer NetBSD out of the box: they initialise your VPS with a very lean install of 5.1.0 (arguably too lean, and you know it's lean when a staunch minimalist like me says that - there are no man pages!). Everywhere else offering Xen or KVM would require you to do the installation yourself. I could handle this easily enough, of course, but it's nice not to have to. It is clear that the admins at Evorack aren't super familiar with NetBSD, and when I first signed up their NetBSD image was configured in such a way that you lost network connectivity after a reboot, although that has been fixed now. However, for the most part it's not their job to be, since these are "unmanaged" plans meaning it's up to you to administer everything.

However, the one thing that really makes me reluctant to leave Evorack are two simple facts: it's easy for me to believe Evorack will still be around 5 years from now, and I trust that my VPS will be up and working for the vast majority of those five years.

One thing that's become very clear from lurking on LEB and LET is that the budget VPS market is very volatile. New providers crop up all the time, and providers disappear all the time as well. A lot of providers are very small shoestring like operations, run by between one to three people - bordering on a hobby. Many of them actually have a really hard time getting supply to match demand. This is especially true of BuyVM, who are basically never in stock for any of their offerings, and make occasional new releases (the timing of which is closely tracked) which sell out in under an hour. Of course, when you're paying $2 a month, you can't really expect much more. I do actually believe that one to three person teams can do a decent job of running a budget VPS provider, but compared to a "real company" you just can't expect quite the same longevity or quality of service. Another thing to note is that the really cheap VPS providers seem to have regular problems with DDoS attacks, to the point that some of them offer automatic DDoS protection services for an extra monthly fee. Of course it's not the providers themselves who are to blame for this, but I get the feeling that maybe because they're so cheap they attract a kind of clientele whose servers are more likely to be the target of attacks.

I don't know how many people work at Evorack, because unlike many of the really cheap providers their entire staff don't seem to hang out on LEB/LET every day (although their support guy Jonny does post from time to time), but I do get more of a "real company" vibe from them. More importantly, their uptime seems to be among the best out there. I rebooted my VPS the other day (to enable WAPBL), and when I did so it had an uptime of 97 days. The only reason it didn't have a higher uptime is that I had to reboot after upgrading to 5.1.2. I've seen people with Evorack post uptimes of 200 days plus at LET. This may not sound like anything too special, but I think it's actually a lot better than you can count on from the smaller, cheaper operations. One of the great things about these smaller places is that they are very open and transparent about the issues their services face. You can see all of Hostigation's announcements about their outages (there are a lot), and SecureDragon have their server uptimes on their website (right now most things are at around one week - this is largely due to a recent scheduled reboot to enable IPV6, but one node has already gone down since then). BuyVM's uptimes are monitored by a third party site, whose accuracy I've seen a BuyVM admin endorse on LET, and very few of their nodes have been up more than a week or two. People on LET often seem to consider uptimes of a month or two as being very good, and worth recommending a provider over. And, again, for $2 a month, it is really good. But I do feel like I want something a bit more for a server that handles the mail for my primary address, where my publications are hosted, etc., and Evorack definitely provide that.

In short, I feel like Evorack hit a nice sweet spot in terms of price vs service. You can easily get comparable VPSes (in terms of RAM etc.) for a lot less, but I do feel like you will get a lot less uptime in return, and be more likely to deal with DDoS attacks, power outages, data losses (BuyVM had quite a bad case of this recently), and even providers going out of business or running away with your money (which definitely does happen with these budget providers, which is one of the reason sites like LEB and LET are so popular: they enable the good budget providers to build up a reputation and rapport, and let people share their experiences with dishonest providers). At the same time, Evorack are definitely cheaper than some of the really big name "real business" VPS providers (like Linode or 6sync), while still offering what is a perfectly acceptable standard of service, at least for my purposes. Another thing to note is that Evorack often have specials where you can get GBP3.50 a month off your bill for the life of the VPS. With one of those deals you're paying about US$4 a month for a 128 MB server, and at that price you're getting what I think is one of the very best value low end VPS deals out there.

Just to be clear: I don't mean to rag too much on the really cheap places like BuyVM, Hostigation, SecureDragon, etc. I actually think they're really cool places, the prices they offer are amazing, and the folks running them seem like good people. I don't doubt that they all do the best they can to offer their customers the best service they can manage, and I really respect how transparent they are about their problems. If you just need a non-critical VPS to play around with (say, for setting up your first web or mail server to learn the ropes of system administration), I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for a second. They also all offer good value backup plans (where you get a VPS with minimal CPU/RAM but lots of disk space and bandwidth and agree not to use it for anything other than backing up data), and I'll probably buy one of those soon to back up the contents of my Evorack server. Honestly, VPSes are super, super cool. It's amazing just how affordable they make it for enthusiasts to have root access to several machines, all over the world, connected to the internet 24/7. I couldn't have conceived of something like that when I first discovered unix in high school.