Nowadays, there are so many different Virtual Private Servers, or VPS providers that it can be quite overwhelming to choose one for your projects. In this post I will review a VPS from a British hosting company called Host1Plus.
Right now I am using a VPS Gold localized in Chicago, IL.
- CPU 2 Cores
- RAM 2048 MB
- HDD+SSD 40 GB
- Bandwidth 2000 GB
The server prices are really good if you compare it with other providers. In the image below you can see the difference between Digital Ocean and Host1Plus. For the same US$5/month you get an extra 256MB of RAM and 10GB of SSD Drive, kudos for Host1Plus!
Below you can see some pictures of the control panel:
Server Tests
Whenever you do a server test, it is important to have something to compare it to. In this review I will be comparing the Gold Plan with it’s similar server from Digital Ocean, the $20/month plan with Ubuntu 14.04 x64 hosted in New York.
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $20/month | $15/month |
| RAM | 2GB | 2GB |
| CPU | 2 core | 2 core |
| SSD Storage | 40GB | 40GB |
| Included Bandwidth | 3TB | 2TB |
| Network In | 1Gbit | 50Mbit |
| Network Out | 1Gbit (shared) | 50Mbit |
After having two identical setups up and running, I installed sysbench and mysql-server:
sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install sysbench mysql-server
CPU test
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Events | 10000 | 10000 |
| Execution Time | 12.9384s | 14.2474s |
| Min. Request | 1.23ms | 0.97ms |
| Avg. Request | 1.29ms | 1.42ms |
| Max. Request | 5.00ms | 4.36ms |
Using sysbench I’ve run a CPU test with 10 thousand events and the results you can check above. With DigitalOcean being a bit faster then Host1Plus.
Memory read test
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Events | 104857600 | 104857600 |
| Execution Time | 82.2573s | 104.6202s |
| Min. Request | 0.00ms | 0.00ms |
| Avg. Request | 0.00ms | 0.00ms |
| Max. Request | 4.21ms | 9.64ms |
| MB/sec | 1244.88 MB/sec | 978.78 MB/sec |
Memory Write
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Events | 104857600 | 104857600 |
| Execution Time | 84.0349s | 105.7245s |
| Min. Request | 0.00ms | 0.00ms |
| Avg. Request | 0.00ms | 0.00ms |
| Max. Request | 2.49ms | 10.20ms |
| MB/sec | 1218.54 MB/sec | 968.55 MB/sec |
File I/O Test
sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=4G prepare
sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=4G --file-test-mode=rndrw run
sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=4G cleanup
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Events | 10000 | 10000 |
| Execution Time | 2.3878s | 2.6533s |
| Min. Request | 0.01ms | 0.00ms |
| Avg. Request | 0.09ms | 0.02ms |
| Max. Request | 6.25ms | 1.03ms |
| Requests/sec | 4188.03 | 3768.92 |
MySQL Test
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-db=test --mysql-user=root --mysql-password=password prepare
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-db=test --mysql-user=root --mysql-password=password run
sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-db=test --mysql-user=root --mysql-password=password cleanup
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Events | 10000 | 10000 |
| Execution Time | 37.9982s | 93.1184s |
| Min. Request | 2.20ms | 5.28ms |
| Avg. Request | 3.79ms | 9.30ms |
| Max. Request | 60.33ms | 259.52ms |
| Read/write Requests/sec | 5000.24 | 2040.41 |
Bandwidth Test
To test the server download / upload speed, I am using https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli, which is a terminal client for the famous speedtest.net
.
| DigitalOcean | HOST1Plus | |
|---|---|---|
| Download Speed | 573.94 Mbit/s | 50.15 Mbit/s |
| Upload Speed | 225.60 Mbit/s | 45.28 Mbit/s |
Final Thoughts
Both of the servers tested were pretty similar, with DigitalOcean being slightly faster than Host1Plust. You can’t forget that Host1Plus is 25% cheaper than DigitalOcean, so if you are happy with the performance differences, and don’t need a fast internet speed and want to save some cash, go with Host1Plus! I have been using H1P for a few projects and besides the download/upload speed (which I really can’t understand why it’s being capped at such a slow speed) I am pretty happy with them.
PS: This review was made in request of Host1Plus.