Discussion about VPS and performance.

peopleinside

Hi, I was curious to check what info about the Contabo provider, can find in the Flarum community and found this discussion.

I'm a Contabo customer since more than a year and I'm feel very happy with a VPS M SSD 8.99 EUR / month*.
Happy because the different application i use: Flarum, OsTicket, Invoice Ninja, Wordpress, Live helper chat, Webuzo panel, etc works great. I also have a very good uptime and a good experience with the support who reply fast and professionally by email usually before 24 hours in just some hours.

In the previous Flarum discussion mentioned i read about resource overselled here from @matteocontrini and i read about bad experience (from what I can understand) here from @[deleted] .

I'm curious to ask to @[deleted] and maybe also to matteo how can a VPS be tested for understand if is good or not.

@[deleted] what was wrong in your testing experience, can you remember?
Before Contabo i was a customer of an Italian hosting and the service was not better.

Maybe my need is different and Contabo VPS and price are the best solution to me and I'm also happy of the customer service but as I think to be a web passionate I feel really curios about any trip to understand if a VPS server is good or not.

Phenomlab you said a calculator has a better performance... can you remember how this performance was tested? Was about website load time or something of different?

Thanks for suggesting other hosting provider, is interesting maybe for the future as for now I'm very happy with Contabo.

[deleted]

peopleinside what was wrong in your testing experience, can you remember?

That's easy. The overall slowness, lack of response - no "snappy feeling" as there should be with any VPS. The service was clearly oversold and in terms of performance, way under what I would even consider as an acceptable level. For example, compare a Contabo VPS with IONOS and see the immediate difference.

peopleinside Phenomlab you said a calculator has a better performance... can you remember how this performance was tested? Was about website load time or something of different?

What I was referring to was mean time to load - TTFB for example. It seemed that the instance would simply pause for up to 2 seconds before it did anything.

peopleinside Thanks for suggesting other hosting provider, is interesting maybe for the future as for now I'm very happy with Contabo.

I strongly recommend you try IONOS. I've taken one of their VPS servers for almost a year now with ZERO issues and 100% performance way above what my forum needs.

peopleinside

[deleted] Thanks for this informations 😃

matteocontrini

Some tests that you can run are these:

https://github.com/n-st/nench

https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script

https://bench.monster/

Cheap things are cheap for a reason. For example, if they give you 4 vCPU at the cost of 1, it's not that their CPUs are cheaper. They're probably giving you 1/4 of the CPU time that you would get with another provider. It's not the number that makes the quality. It might satisfy most of the people, but there's no way you can get the same high quality as other cloud providers with those prices, there's no way they can do it.

I would definitely recommend other providers with a better reputation, like DigitalOcean or Hetzner Cloud. They really are at the top of the benchmarks in the market of small VMs with shared resources. If you want dedicated resources, don't expect anything less than 20 € per core.

[deleted]

matteocontrini I would definitely recommend other providers with a better reputation, like DigitalOcean or Hetzner Cloud. They really are at the top of the benchmarks in the market of small VMs with shared resources. If you want dedicated resources, don't expect anything less than 20 € per core.

I pay £30 per month for 4 cores 🙂 100% real as well - not fake. In addition, IONOS have a deal currently for £1 per month where you can take a 4 core VPS with 8Gb RAM. If you don't like it after 6 months, cancel the contract. Simple, fair, and undeniably a decent deal. Customer support is fantastic also.

peopleinside

matteocontrini Thank you 😃 I'm learning something of new.
Matteo when I decide to use an hosting provider and I'm not into business... I may have more legal issue by choosing a provider that is not European?

Should choose a server located in Germany? Should care about the contract to understand if the refer is to European legislation or not? This is my fault since i leaved an Italian hosting company i was very scared to buy the hosting plan in Contabo (that is European but not Italian) so if I would try other hosting I'm curios if for an Italian can exist some more issue in buying a service out of the Europe.

peopleinside

[deleted] I like the idea they give also Plesk for free.

matteocontrini

[deleted] I usually think about high-end CPUs (Gold/Platinum) when referring to dedicated resources, but yeah, that depens on the provider... Ionos uses the Xeon E series which costs less. It's middle way, let's say 🙂 it would be interesting to compare performance with other more popular cloud providers.

peopleinside honestly I don't think I'm the right person to answer this, but there are plenty of providers in Europe, so it might just be easier to pick one of them. You would surely get better network performance from Italy, since going for example in the USA would increase the latency a lot

peopleinside

[deleted] this is not correct.
If you choose the offer for have the VPS at £1 you can cancel but will be cancelled after 12 month.
Just to inform about the wrong information. Is written in the website and also support confirmed that 🙂

[deleted]

peopleinside I like the idea they give also Plesk for free.

They don't - you have to pay for it

peopleinside

matteocontrini Umh i asked to you because I see you are Italian and you are a webmaster so maybe you can know something more. Thanks. I noted all the suggestions on this discussion, very helpful thanks.

peopleinside

[deleted] It's included if a new plan is activated now, i asked to the support and also checked on the order page.

I suppose you are not using Plesk... I'm asking if Plesk Obsidian support TLS 1.3 and Let's Encrypt 😃

[deleted]

peopleinside I am using plesk. As far as I am aware TLS 1.3 is supported. Let's Encrypt is for certain.

[deleted]

peopleinside Sorry - I should have noted you can do this on a one-month rolling contract, so this is in fact correct. In this case,

Cancellation
1-month contacts: Cancel monthly

If you take a 12 month contract, then yes, of course, you are locking yourself in.

And you're also correct about Plesk being provided for free - I had to pay for mine 😠

fakruzaruret

I pay 2.5 euros for 1vCPU 20gb ssd 2GB ram and 20TB bandwith from Hetzner. I have no big communitty. an it is enoug for me.

peopleinside

Hi, I want keep the discussion updated.

DigitalOcean: i don't like the provider website and the prices. It's not clear if resources are dedicated or not.
website is not easy to navigate for me but this is my personal opinion.
Never be inspired to tested this but already heard about this provider.

Ionos is the first provider i tested with a VPS 4 core and 8 GB of RAM.
Was the best test ever and very amazing support.
Is the server that work most, very fast and powerful because of the dedicated resources.
The price is not bad considered you can have included also the Plesk Panel but actually for me this solution cost twice respect what I'm paying now.

Ionos IP was not listed in any blacklist. Great server, great fast support.
A very powerful firewall. For connect to the panel i tested I need open the port from the Ionos firewall; the support helped me for this but was very easy. Seems to have a very good security.

They refund all money as i tested the cloud server that now include 200 € of credit so i never paid nothing.

Hetzner system asked me to verify my account the locked 20 € from PayPal and at the moment still be locked.
I don't like this very much. Now my Hetzner account show a 20 € of credit.

The server tested was with 4 CPU and 8 GB of RAM. CPU not dedicated but optimized as dedicated cost too much.

The IP of the server was present in one blacklist (bad).

The performance was less than Ionos server as i tested the not dedicated resource solution because of the price.
Ionos is the only server i tested that did not give an error when i tried to import a big sql file from the phpmyadmin web interface by placing the big sql file in an upload folder set in the phpmyadmin configuration.

My current provider Contabo and Hetzner give the error so i needed to use the SSH command for import the database.

At the end Ionos look's like the better solution but cost to much for me also if the price is a very good price because of the quality of the server with dedicated resources and Plesk included. Also support 24/h / 24h

At the moment I think will stay on Contabo but i noticed every provider suggestions in this discussion.
Thanks @matteocontrini and thanks @[deleted]
🙂

datitisev

peopleinside s is the only server i tested that did not give an error when i tried to import a big sql file from the phpmyadmin web interface by placing the big sql file in an upload folder set in the phpmyadmin configuration.

What kind of error did it give? It may have just been the web server max upload setting being lower than the file size.

What blacklists are you talking about when you mention Ionos and Hetzner?

Myself, I've had no issues with Hetzner VPS.

[deleted]

peopleinside At the end Ionos look's like the better solution but cost to much for me also if the price is a very good price because of the quality of the server with dedicated resources and Plesk included. Also support 24/h / 24h

This is why I went with IONOS @peopleinside
Sure, not cheap, but a superb build in terms of vps.

MartinJD

Digital Ocean works great for me. The website is really well designed and easy to use. No complaints. The ability to snapshot your VM prior to upgrade is useful.

peopleinside

datitisev The error is a time expired error so maybe yes is a configuration issue that in Ionos has not been happen. Ionos never had his IP in any blacklist!

Just Hetzner.
FABELSOURCES blacklist.

[deleted] I agree. At the moment is all too expensive for me but the best try was for me Ionos.

datitisev

peopleinside Not sure exactly what you mean with "dedicated resources" as well. I see the IONOS page says that, but it's still virtual CPU cores (as it is a VPS). As far as I know, all VPS have their own dedicated virtual CPU cores, RAM, and storage (not hardware-wise, that's dedicated servers).

matteocontrini

peopleinside The error is a time expired error so maybe yes is a configuration issue that in Ionos has not been happen.

That's not really a reason to choose a provider over another though... A VPS is almost always unmanaged, so configuration is not something that concerns with the provider

peopleinside Ionos never had his IP in any blacklist!

Just Hetzner.
FABELSOURCES blacklist.

Blacklists have a meaning only if you have an SMTP server on your server, which is something that noone usually does.

You can anyway request the removal of the IP from the blacklist. It's something that can happen with any provider, depending on luck 🙂 https://www.spamsources.fabel.dk/delist

peopleinside The best result has been in Ionos where the CPU was used no more than 50% other provider reach the 100%

That doesn't say much though. Some benchmarks would be more useful 🙂

Ionos actually does not explicitly say that CPU cores are real cores dedicated to you, and I'm pretty sure they aren't. They in fact use the "vCore" term, which usually means that they give you the resources if they are available (as everyone else is doing: DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, etc.).

Dedicated CPUs are on another price range. For example, DigitalOcean, which has been from the beginning one of the cheapest providers (they basically invented the cheap cloud servers thing), starts from 40$ for 2 dedicated (not shared) computing threads.

MartinJD there is no need for "dedicated resources" when hosting a flarum site really. It's overkill. The vast majority of workloads running in public and private clouds will share underlying compute memory network and storage with all other instances running on the physical box. This is no big deal.

My forum has usually 100 online users and is hosted on a 2 vCPU cloud server from Hetzner. So yeah, it's not something to really worry about unless you explode...