Budget VDS for training and development

Greetings, Habr!

Introduction

Many of us have come across, are facing or will be faced with choosing a VDS server on a cheap and cheerful basis. Why are such servers needed? Most likely, the greatest benefit will be for beginners, as you can "touch" different software, experiment with various configurations and recipes. Test your abilities and open new horizons. The freelancer will create the necessary environment for the next order and deploy there a development version of the project, access to which can be available always and everywhere to both the freelancer and the customer.

Yesterday I sharply needed such a VDS server. Because I am a long-time customer of EOMY, I found the so-called “secret VDS tariff”. It is not on their site, but it is available through a direct link.

The characteristics of the servers are as follows:

• RAM: 512 MB
• Swap: 128 MB
• SSD: 5 GB RAID-10
• Traffic: 100 GB
• Connection: 1000 MBit (1 GbE)
• CPU: 1 core Intel Xeon processor E5520
• 1 IP address
• OpenVPN Support
• Support for NFS (client and server) as well as ACL
• Virtualization Technology: OpenVZ + VSwap
• Up time: 99%

Of the minuses:

• Tariff cannot be changed
• Do not change configuration
• The location of the servers in the United States, Arizona, so that residents of the CIS need to prepare for ping 150-200, although someone location in the United States would be a plus.
• There is a possibility that the data will disappear partially or completely. In principle, such a probability exists on any server, it’s just slightly higher on these servers.
• Upon exceeding the traffic limit, VDS will be blocked until the next month
• CPU: by default, the full frequency of one core is available. If you often load the processor for a long time (for example, encoding a video stream), the system will automatically lower the speed to 400 MHz.

Server price: $ 9.99 per year (when paying immediately for a year)

What we get in practice:

(If you have already used servers from EOMY, you can scroll)
The server is activated almost immediately after payment.
All necessary data is sent to email.


Service management interfaces and server control panels are not full of excesses. In my opinion there is everything you need. In KiwiVM Control Panel, you can see the status of the server, stop, restart, see statistics, reset the root password, reinstall the software, there is a migration from other servers and the installation of OpenVPN, etc.

To install the software we provide a wide selection of operating systems and their versions:

Personal impressions were quite positive. The software is reinstalled very quickly, the server reboots quickly, test web applications work fine. Thanks SSD. The only minus for me is ping. I am in Belarus, the ByFly provider keeps ping at 160 ms, Business networks - 205 ms. For comparison, ping with European servers from EOMY is about 50-60 ms.

On a load test, Loadimpact server proved to be quite worthy:

Load Average: 4.2 2.18 1.08 - at peak load.
Testing was performed on a demo site on Magento with caching turned off in a bunch of nginx + php-fpm + percona.
Public link to test
Server did not miss a single request.

To summarize, I can say that the server is definitely worth the money. A suffering soul, desiring to gain new knowledge, will find here almost everything that is needed.

UPD:
A new secret tariff plan has appeared.
Specifications:

• RAM: 512 MB
• Swap: 128 MB
• SSD: 5 GB RAID-10
• Traffic: 200 GB
• Connection: 1000 MBit (1 GbE)
• CPU: 1 core Intel Xeon processor E5630
• 1 IP address
• OpenVPN Support
• Support for NFS (client and server) as well as ACL
• Virtualization Technology: OpenVZ + VSwap
• Up time: 99%

Price: $ 20 per year.

Unlike the first tariff plan, it has:

• faster processor
• location in the Netherlands is a correspondingly smaller ping in the CIS, Europe and Asia.
• 200 GB of traffic per month

The rest is the same.
In my opinion, not enough significant differences to increase the cost by 2 times. But, as they say, "to taste and color."

UPD2: Little
routing problems detected. So servers in Arizona may not be available from some points in the world. So far I have encountered 2 such cases. My server was not accessible from a server in Germany and several servers in Paris. The administration of the service is up to date and is working on solving problems.

Link to a secret tariff plan for $ 10 per year (USA)
Link to a secret tariff plan for $ 20 per year (Netherlands)
That's all. Experiment and grow.