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Reading between the lines of VPS provider network claims

VPS Hosting by Carl 9 replies 1.2K views
Carl

Member OP

Rack & Stack

#1

Been racking servers since Nehalem was new. Marketing departments got worse, hardware got better. Here's how to decode the fluff.

"Premium bandwidth"
No transit list? Then it's Cogent + some local blend. Demand the actual ASN mix. Contabo posts theirs in the footer, most don't. If you see "premium" without specifics, assume they're buying commit at 95th percentile and praying.

"DDoS protection"
"Always-on" often means 3Gbps scrubbing in one POP. Ask about saturation behavior. Real protection shows you attack graphs. OVHcloud's is decent, Vultr's crumbled in March when they got hit with 800Gbps reflective.

"NVMe storage"
Shared RAID-10 NVMe versus dedicated block is night and day. Check if they mention QoS or IOPS guarantees. Hetzner's "NVMe" is actually LSI RAID cards with SATA SSDs behind them, learned that the hard way.

"99.99% uptime SLA"
Read the credit terms. 99.99% with 10% monthly credit is worthless. 99.9% with 100% credit means they actually care.

Will expand as I find more. Add your own.

visit twice: install and decom
TA

Member

#2

Tipo "premium" = mas NVMe shared é não

admin

Administrator

Administrator

#3

Good writeup. We'd prefer if you didn't name specific providers in examples without evidence, but the framework itself is solid. Our own transit mix is published at interserver.net/network for what it's worth.

One correction: Vultr's March incident was 680Gbps, not 800. Still a failure on their part.

— Admin

sudo make me a sandwich
minhdock

Member

9 #4

Carl very good guide I have some addition:
1. "unmetered" mean 10tb on 1gbps then throttle to 100mbps very much
2. "bgp optimized" mean they have route object only no actual tuning very much
3. "asia optimized" mean singapore pop exist, nothing else very much
4. Always ask for looking glass before buy very much

haroldgsm

Member

Grumpy Old Sysadmin

#5

The NVMe shell game is the worst—20 years in this business and I've watched "SSD" become "SATA SSD" become "SAS behind expander" become "NVMe" with the same garbage controllers. Mark my words, next year they'll sell "CXL memory" that's DDR4 with a fancy bridge chip. The only number that matters is sustained 4K write IOPS, and nobody publishes that because it would embarrass them.

IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
TA

Member

#6

The real trick is iperf3 to their own speedtest server then iperf3 to a real box on the same switch and compare the loss

pavel_train

Member

#7

Carl | grep "SLA" | the credit game is worse than you think | cat interserver.net/tos | grep "credit" | sort -u | wc -l | zero results means zero enforcement | sed 's/trust/verify/g'

AB

Member

#8

Demand the mix or walk

svendeal

Member

Deal Sniper

#9

Contabo posts theirs but most still hide

world record: 4min Arch install
Rangga

Member

#10

95th percentile commit and praying is too real, been there

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