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        <title>review — LowEndSpirit</title>
        <link>https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/</link>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
        <language>en</language>
            <description>review — LowEndSpirit</description>
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    <item>
        <title>MaxKVM is superb and I like it, but..</title>
        <link>https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/discussion/2695/maxkvm-is-superb-and-i-like-it-but</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:22:57 +0000</pubDate>
        <category>Reviews</category>
        <dc:creator>dinoudon</dc:creator>
        <guid isPermaLink="false">2695@/index.php?p=/discussions</guid>
        <description><![CDATA[<p>First of all, I am a university student and i see MaxKVM have promotion code for my student mail which is a huge offer for me. I tried the SKVM-4G ones in singapore, pretty far so good, experimenting things and setting up some projects for my group and startup. The connections superb, I can't asked for more.</p>

<p>As the time passes, I need to order another servers in Singapore for my own project but i can't find one. So I asked the support about that. The reply is crystal clear, but the next lines is somewhat unnecessary. I am still in learning phase, but this one, I would never forget. Ever.</p>

<p>Sorry for my awful english.</p>

<p><img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/oa/mzza6p6fhw5v.png" alt="" title="" /><br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/r0/abdqsgtfg8h6.png" alt="" title="" /></p>
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    <item>
        <title>A month with SmallWeb</title>
        <link>https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/discussion/2484/a-month-with-smallweb</link>
        <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2021 16:10:19 +0000</pubDate>
        <category>Reviews</category>
        <dc:creator>kind</dc:creator>
        <guid isPermaLink="false">2484@/index.php?p=/discussions</guid>
        <description><![CDATA[<p>Hi there!<br />
Im here to leave my first review of services, wich at the time isn't good at all, and possible after writing this it could possibly go to worse.</p>

<p>On december 7 I hired a small budged webhosting from them, to have as backup/emergency host (all data would be replicated in case of downtime of my main host ( <a href="https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/profile/Abdullah" rel="nofollow">@Abdullah</a> ).<br />
Payment was delivered the same day, instantly after the purchase, and at the third day of no news, I send a ticket to see whats was happening with no service activation. They answered sorry for the delay and that will be moving to automatic provisioning soon. The service was activated (don't have proof, usually don't take pictures of my services and at the time no email was received).<br />
Today I find myself in the search of reseller, and remembered that SmallWeb has some nice offers (wich probably gonna be idling as the other shared). So I login on the site to put an order, I find myself with no service at all, and again on pending.<br />
Immediately after this I send a ticket demanding an explanaition, their answer was "your service was never active and you didn't claim it again with us after your first ticket a month ago, <strong>either way we setup the service with a extension date</strong> "<br />
So... not only they don't recognize that the service has been active previously and deactivated for some reason, they also blame you for not having claiming the activation at least twice, and also you have to be grateful because they put "a new expiration date" on the service.</p>

<p>Obviously im not gonna hire the reseller there, and expect to be able to test the service and revert this review, but, at the current time, I wouldn't recommend noone to hire a service there, at least not if you expect to be delivered on time.</p>

<p>PD: At least the ticket response was quickly.<br />
PD2: Sorry for the bad english.</p>

<p>Some pictures:<br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/ao/av8nwjdl3kcz.png" alt="" title="" /><br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/bf/vvcjj2pkwv1h.png" alt="" title="" /><br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/4j/639p47hfybon.png" alt="" title="" /><br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/7q/atm3wf9hfjuc.png" alt="" title="" /><br />
<img src="http://talk.lowendspirit.com/uploads/editor/dg/xnmk4sj84qgr.png" alt="" title="" /></p>
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    <item>
        <title>My review of BuyVM VPS and service</title>
        <link>https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/discussion/1798/my-review-of-buyvm-vps-and-service</link>
        <pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2020 16:57:40 +0000</pubDate>
        <category>Reviews</category>
        <dc:creator>sgheghele</dc:creator>
        <guid isPermaLink="false">1798@/index.php?p=/discussions</guid>
        <description><![CDATA[<p>Even though <a rel="nofollow" href="https://buyvm.net" title="BuyVM">BuyVM</a> is well known in the LE communities, new users join on a daily basis, and they might not be aware of them. People often take the time to write a review when they are pissed off, while positive experiences are underreported. I think it is time for a review, so here it comes.</p>

<p>Full disclosure: my review is spontaneous, unsolicited, and there is  (AFAIK) no rewarding systems at BuyVM for writing a review. In case there are, <a href="https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/profile/Francisco" rel="nofollow">@Francisco</a>, I accept cash only ;-)</p>

<p>I have had a few Slices (BuyVM name for VPS with dedicated virtual cores, or CPU threads) over the last 2 years or so. These are the major operating periods I have had most recently:</p>

<ul>
<li>1x 8GB/$30 Slice in LV (Las Vegas) [Ryzen 3900X].</li>
<li>1x 512MB/$2.50 Slice in LV, [Ryzen 3900X].</li>
<li>3x 1GB/$3.00 Slice (LV [Ryzen 3900X], NY (New York) [Xeon E3-1241 v3], LU (Luxembourg) [Xeon E3-1241 v3] with Anycast.</li>
<li>The above 3x 1GB/$3.00 Slices plus 1x 8GB/$30 Slice in LV (Ryzen 3900X)</li>
<li>1x 8GB/$30 in NY (Ryzen 3900X).</li>
</ul>

<p>I currently am with the 8GB/$30 one in NY, to which I came back once I let the 8GB/$30 one in LV go. <br />
My reason for letting it go was that LV is too far away from me, geographically, and both NY and LU did not have Ryzen or Slabs (what they call their mountable block storage) at the time. <br />
When I cancelled, I promised that I would come back the moment either LU or NY would get Ryzen and Slabs. So I did when NY got them. I plan to do the same when LU receives Ryzen and Slabs, with one caveat: better peering is needed (see below).</p>

<p>Overall, I am very satisfied with the service. The VPSs perform greatly. They are snappy for my usage, even the $3.00 ones and even those with the older Xeon CPUs. I host websites, "cloud" sync services, automation services, git, wikis, adblocker, seatable, and so on. I have never had any significant downtime, although some users do complain about downtimes on Discord, so I might just have been lucky (see <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blamefran.com" title="blamefran.com">blamefran.com</a>). Even when I see this happening, Francisco is extremely receptive and quick to find out solutions.</p>

<p>The offered I/O, both for the NVMe and the Slab, is excellent. This is the NVMe at the root partition:</p>

<pre><code>curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -ig
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 279.43 MB/s  (69.8k) | 2.32 GB/s    (36.3k)
Write      | 280.17 MB/s  (70.0k) | 2.33 GB/s    (36.5k)
Total      | 559.61 MB/s (139.9k) | 4.66 GB/s    (72.8k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 2.46 GB/s     (4.8k) | 2.43 GB/s     (2.3k)
Write      | 2.59 GB/s     (5.0k) | 2.60 GB/s     (2.5k)
Total      | 5.05 GB/s     (9.8k) | 5.04 GB/s     (4.9k)
</code></pre>

<p>Slabs are also cheap, at $1.25/month for 250GB. I wish I could share I/O tests of the plain disk, but I have my Slab fully encrypted (LUKS) so the numbers are lower than they are supposed to be. IMHO, they are very good anyway!</p>

<pre><code>curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -ig
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 43.79 MB/s   (10.9k) | 74.73 MB/s    (1.1k)
Write      | 43.86 MB/s   (10.9k) | 75.12 MB/s    (1.1k)
Total      | 87.65 MB/s   (21.9k) | 149.86 MB/s   (2.3k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 183.94 MB/s    (359) | 219.69 MB/s    (214)
Write      | 193.71 MB/s    (378) | 234.32 MB/s    (228)
Total      | 377.66 MB/s    (737) | 454.02 MB/s    (442)
</code></pre>

<p>If you need sequential read/write "dd" tests of the Slab, please let me know. I won't run further benchmarks on the Slice, though, because I do not want to stop my services unless it is necessary. You can find several of them on LET, though.</p>

<p>Their bandwidth is unmetered, yet you can not use their 1gbit/s uplink all the time. Rule of thumb (as far as I remember. I do not use a lot of bandwidth) is 100mbit/s 24/7 for the 4GB/$15 Slice, and you halve/double it going down/up in their pricing. I find it fair, and it exceeds my needs anyway.</p>

<p>On their support mechanisms. This is where BuyVM shines. First, their official ticket support system is useful and rather quick to fix issues. I received twice an IP with bad reputation, and they swapped them within minutes.</p>

<p>Then there is Discord. Despite their fair warning that <a rel="nofollow" href="https://buyvm.net/beware-the-moshbear/">Discord can cause cancer</a>, as long as you stay away from the "misc" channels (or don't. Who am I to judge), people in there are supportive and non-judgmental. This includes both users and staff. Francisco hangs in there quite often and pretty much answers any inquiry, from issue reports, to feature suggestions and chitchats. You can pretty much see that, beyond the memes, he takes a lot of pride in his products and wants them to just perform the best. He also often asks users for what might be the next best thing to add to BuyVM.</p>

<p>Speaking of which, I find their pace of innovation to be schizophrenic and, at the same time, fair for the price. Latest additions in the last months include Cloudflare magic transit for their DDOS protected IPs, which costs a lot of money but is offered at $3.00 per IP, 5 free snapshots of any Slice and scheduled backups for ridiculously cheap pricing, custom ISOs for installing, copy/paste in the Web console (which is WAY more useful than it sounds), and BGP sessions to announce own networks.</p>

<p>No review should omit points for improvement. And there are, plenty of them. Some of them are my humble opinion and might not apply to most users. In no particular order:</p>

<p>Pricing does not scale up a lot, meaning that the least you pay, the higher is the value, IMHO. Everyone has their breaking point, but to me, the price/performance ratio of their first 3 Slices ($2.00, $3.50, $7.00) is way higher than the one of the three successive Slices ($15.00, $30.00, $45.00). Reason is that, especially after the $30.00/month mark, you start finding dedicated servers with perhaps older CPUs and lower characteristics (e.g., a single SSD). On the other hand, many features are included for zero price increase (e.g., snapshots, anycast) or with really low pricing (e.g., backups, DDOS protected IPs., Slabs). Another issue for some users is that pricing is non-flexible for Slices. For example, you can't have a 8GB ram Slice for less than $30/month if you needed, say, less storage.</p>

<p>Peering and transit could be improved, and it is not balanced between datacenters. LV is nicely connected (but too far away from where I am), followed by NY and then LU. The latter seems to be using Cogent only, which does not work very well in Europe. I was getting better transfer speeds from LV to Europe than from LU to..Europe. And I do not even live that far away from Luxembourg.<br />
Speaking of LU, I feel that the datacenter is a bit of a second class citizen. This even taking into account the corona issues (right now, it is <em>completely</em> understandable that there is little going on there, as BuyVM people are not located in Europe). I am dying to have my data in LU, but this will only happen when LU receives Ryzen (and I heard that this might be coming by the end of the year), NVMe, Slabs, and better connectivity.</p>

<p><em>Edit: As a side note, NY also seems to use Cogent for Europe, but for some reason, it performs well, whereas LU does not. Maybe it is a matter of congestion at peak times.</em></p>

<p>The "single core" speed of Ryzen is good, but underwhelming on benchmarks (I see scores around 800-900 for Geekbench 5, whereas it is more typical to see scores around 1200-1300). Of course I brought this to the attention of Francisco, who transparently told me that he disabled most of AMD 4ghz+ turbo burst mode (sorry, I have no idea how AMD calls it) because of thermal throttling issues. On the one hand, this looks underwhelming, especially seeing bench results shared on LET/LES. On the other hand, two things: first, the VPS has <em>never</em> let me down. It just flies. I would have not noticed underwhelming CPU performance if I did not run benchmarks. Second, I do not know to which extent the turbo mode actively works for "normal" usage (normal as opposed to benchmarking stuff), so I do not know if and how other hosts that show higher single thread scores actually provide that performance on a daily basis. It might be better to have predictable good performance  rather than mediocre performance with spikes of excellent performance. Nevertheless, Francisco promised me he would look at it and consider tweaking some settings.</p>

<p>Final one, and I will just say it: I find their overall ordering process lacking in many ways, potentially irritating for current customers, too. Having to wait for the 1st or the 7th of the month to snatch a VPS sucks, especially when there is a need to scale or offload. To be fair, this issue is almost non-existent <em>currently</em> for NY, because of the new nodes. Related to this issue is when their anti-fraud system kicks in. I completely understand their needs to protect themselves, but it is infuriating to wait weeks before finding the Slice you really needed, purchasing it, and find out that the order got rejected, even if you are a current customer who pays their bills, just because you forgot to disable your VPN, or whatever. Even if you open a ticket immediately after the issue shows up, their response will be that you need to order from scratch. And this might mean that you need to wait weeks. Again. <br />
I think that existing customers should somehow get whitelisted.</p>

<p>Overall, I highly recommend the service and to at least try out their $3.00/month Slice and a Slab. They might do wonders. I also recommend trying out BuyVM for their exceptional support and their community. I am fairly sure that when Francisco reads this, the pride he takes in his service will result in some improvement one day or another.</p>

<p>Feel free to ask further questions about my experience!</p>
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    <item>
        <title>VirMach</title>
        <link>https://staging.lowendspirit.com/index.php?p=/discussion/226/virmach</link>
        <pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2019 01:29:55 +0000</pubDate>
        <category>Reviews</category>
        <dc:creator>uptime</dc:creator>
        <guid isPermaLink="false">226@/index.php?p=/discussions</guid>
        <description><![CDATA[<p>I think there may be enough to say about virmach to warrant a thread unto itself - so may as well start this one right here right now <img src="https://staging.lowendspirit.com/plugins/emojiextender/emoji/twitter/smile.png" title=":)" alt=":)" height="18" /></p>

<p>(Following some recent discussion in another thread <a rel="nofollow" href="https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/6364/#Comment_6364">here</a>)</p>

<p>For now I'll just summarize my assessment from last couple years in a few of their USA locations: solid systems, great uptime, modest specs, okay-ish network (depending on what you need it for - it is colocrossing after all) ... Also reasonable to deal with in terms of support.</p>

<p>So all things considered I've been pleasantly surprised.  I'm guessing that the CPU limits (etc) are actually fine for some medium-load webserver duty (such as this forum)  - but probably less so for more sustained usage patterns such as transcoding.</p>

<p>tl;dr:  could be a good option for many but not all lowend applications - and proven to be worthy of consideration (in my own limited experience at least).</p>

<p>Questions, suggestions, critical comments, horror stories, and/or kudos and benchmarks welcome.</p>

<p>Also feel free to mention any good alternatives in the general price range</p>
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