I have used VPS and shared hosting from different providers over the last couple of years. Most of them I have come across through the popular blog. – Lowendbox. I had heard a lot about BuyVM in webhosting forums and Subreddits. So, I thought why not try it? The problem was, they are always out of stock! Finally, after a long wait, I was able to grab one of the slices (this is what they call their VPS!) in Luxemburg! This is concise review of the BuyVM services after using it for a while.
What is LowEndBox (LEB)?
As I had mentioned earlier, LEB is a blog where providers or the hosting companies can promote their services. You will notice that there are lot of different offers present across. Shared, Reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting, around the globe. You can find some surprisingly good deals there, which otherwise are costly. However, with cheap price there are lots of risks involved. For instance, a lot of new providers can be dead pooled or run out of business anytime.
So, I prefer to go with companies which have been around for at least a couple of years for hosting important stuff. No doubt, the newer ones can also be good, but who knows which ones will be around? I use VPS from recent companies for less important stuff which is not critical. It is highly recommended to take complete backups, no matter which hosting company you go with. This is just to have peace of mind, in case if they go out of business. Another thing that I recommend is, go with monthly/ quarterly payment cycle unless there is huge discount for yearly payments. So, keep all these things in mind while you are out hunting for new provider on LEB!
BuyVM review 2022 – Introduction
Like I said previously, I had heard lot about them on different forums. They were constantly out of stock, I thought this is a sign that they have superior product that they are constantly out of stock. I had to wait for couple of weeks before I could get my hands on with their VPS.
Locations offered
As of now, they offer 3 distinct locations within the US – Miami, Las Vegas, and New York and one in the EU – Luxemburg. In all their locations, they offer Ryzen 3900X based host nodes, with max 128 GB of RAM. This is the maximum memory limit imposed by the processor itself.
KVM slices
There are variety of VPS slices available, starting from 512 MB RAM and 10 GB storage at $2 per month. The next plan includes 1 GB RAM and 20 GB storage for $3.5 per month. From here onwards, the resources get doubled along with the prices. The pricing structure is simple and straight forward. For every instance/ VPS with 4GB of RAM, you get dedicated CPU thread.
The Ryzen 3900 has 16 cores and 32 threads, so if you grab an instance with 8 GB RAM, you will get entire Ryzen core, which is dedicated to you. On plans from 512 MB to 2GB, you get entire thread, but fair usage policy applies. For 512 MB plan, you have 1/8th or 12.5% of CPU dedicated, rest is shared and can be used in bursts. Similarly, for 1GB and 2GB plans, you have 1/4th and 1/2 CPU dedicated to you. All these plans include dedicated IPv4 address and unmetered bandwidth. Head over to BuyVM and grab a slice for yourself!
Note on bandwidth: Although bandwidth is unlimited, make sure not to abuse it. Ideally, you can use bandwidth of 100 Mbit per 4GB slice 24 x 7, and even the entire port size in small bursts. Just make sure not to be a noisy neighbor! You can refer the following graphics to know more about the exact limits. These have been pulled from their discord server.
- 512MB = 12.5Mbps
- 1GB = 25Mbps
- 2GB = 50Mbps
- 4GB = 100Mbps
- 8GB = 200Mbps
- 12GB = 300Mbps
- 16GB = 400Mbps
- 20GB = 500Mbps
- 24GB = 600Mbps
- 28GB = 700Mbps
- 32GB = 800Mbps
You can even use one of this VPS for hosting your VPN, checkout our guide to know more.
About their control panel – Stallion
BuyVM has lot of functionality under their belt which I have not seen from other providers. One of them is their control panel – Stallion which is built completely in-house. I found it fast, responsive, and minimalistic. Some of the features offered include:
- You can start, stop, and reboot your VM using the panel, which is common function offered by everyone.
- There are even resource usage stats displayed in the Stallion, which shows basic CPU, Disk IO, and network usage. These stats are enough for most users. For more advanced stats, you can install monitoring tool like Nagios.
- It provides you with VNC access, which is accessible from the Stallion panel itself. This is a good security feature.
- You can upload your own custom ISO to install any operating system. They do have OS templates for popular OS like Debian, BSD, Ubuntu to name a few.
- It even provides you the option to set Anycast/ Failover IP, IPv6 and even reverse DNS entries.
- Most importantly, you have the option to take snapshots and restore from snapshots, which I did not found with many providers.
Stallion Backups
With every VPS, BuyVM offers an add-on for taking daily backups. This is particularly important and useful; it takes nightly backups and stores them for up to 7 days. You can restore these using the Stallion control panel. The price for backups add-on is just 10% of the price of VPS and will be $0.50 in case of 512 MB and 1GB plans. Also, please note that the 512MB plan has been discontinued. So, you will have to buy the next available plan, i.e., KVM 1GB.
What are the freebies offered? (Yes, you get lot of them at BuyVM!)
This is something I liked the most in BuyVM. Every customer is entitled to receive the following freebies:
Free Windows Server 2008
The windows server is usually not free; you must pay for the license based on the usage. BuyVM provides it for free, you can select the Windows Server during installing your OS on your VPS.
Snapshots
Yes, you heard it right. Although backup is paid feature, but the ability to take snapshots is free. You can take up to 5 free snapshots and use them restore whenever required. I consider this to be very generous of them, since most of the providers charge for the snapshots or backup feature. The snapshot feature is super fast as well, I was able to create one within matter of minutes. I even tried to restore it, and it worked pretty well without any hitch.
Blesta Software
Blesta is powerful software which provides billing, support and automation features which saves you the headache of providing invoices, provision VPS and answering your customer queries! It includes all the features that are offered by WHMCS, which is quite popular in the hosting industry. You can easily sign-up new clients and create custom order forms, even accept payments with the provider of your choice. It supports PayPal, Stripe, BrainTree along with CoinPayments for crypto currency. If you were to buy it for yourself, it would have cost you $300 for lifetime license, and an additional $39 per year for supports and updates. For lifetime support and updates, the one-time fee is $750, which might be too much for startups.
DirectAdmin
I am sure many of you might be aware of Direct Admin. I mean who does not know about them? DirectAdmin or DA is one of the most popular and intuitive web-based website control panel. You can use it for managing your customer accounts, database, email server, email configuration, setting DNS, checking resource usage and many more tasks, with UI based web panel. It makes managing server simple and straightforward for the folks who do not want to use the terminal. The DA license included is standard one, which does not have any limit on the number of users or domains you can have.
Softaculous
Softaculous is popular addon which is provided by many cPanel/ DA based hosting providers. It provides you one-click installation scripts for 450+ applications, including the popular CMS – WordPress. This comes in handy if you want to setup different applications and do not want to install each of them individually. The Softaculous license costs around $12 per year for the VPS license but is provided completely free for BuyVM customers. There is also free version offered by Softaculous, which has support for 50+ single click installers.
Ipv6 support, Internal networks, and Any Cast Ips.
They do have support for Ipv6, which is lacking with many popular providers. They are not interested in migrating over to IPv6, given the global shortage of IPv4 space. Moreover, they do have Anycast IP as well, where you can configure your fail-over IP. You can take advantage of the internal networking if you have multiple VPS in the same location. This can be helpful if you are running separate instance for Database or RabbitMQ broker. It is worth mentioning that the internal bandwidth is free. You can find your internal IP address withing the Stallion control panel.
DDoS Protection
BuyVM does offer DDOS protection to their customers, in association with Path.net. The DDoS protected IP address costs about $3 per month and can be attached to your VPS. This should be useful to protect your application from Layer 4 to Layer 7 DDoS attacks. They claim to have 3.5 TB/s of bandwidth which should be enough to handle DDoS attacks of large scale easily. You can read more about it here.
BuyVM Slabs!
What are slabs? Slabs are block storage options that BuyVM offers for their customers. The pricing for them is insane, just $1.25/ 256 GB slab! Nevertheless, do not get fooled by their prices, their performance is outstanding. I was able to see speeds of more than 600 Mbps on their slabs. For redundancy, these slabs are connected in RAID-10. However, it is always recommended to keep your backups at remote machines. Head over to BuyVM and get yours now!
Features of BuyVM slabs
- Affordable pricing of $1.25/ 256 GB or $5/ 1 TB, available in all locations.
- You need to have an active slice or VPS for attaching these slabs.
- These slabs can be attached to the VPS without any reboot required.
- You can attach maximum of 8 slabs per instance.
- You can move this block from instance to other as well, although both instances should be in the same location.
- The maximum size of block storage is 10 TB, so you can have 80 TB storage per instance.
- You can upgrade block storage if required, however downgrade is not possible. You will have to create new block and migrate the data, and then remove the older slab.
- These make use of RAID-10 for redundancy.
After sales support – The most important thing
This is the most important thing for most end users. If you are stuck in a problem, then you can rely on your hosts to solve it for you. Most of the users are not tech savvy so there are certain things that you must rely on them. In my experience, I had surprisingly pleasant experience in this department with BuyVM, I was pleased! Do not believe me, just checkout the screenshots below:
You can see that I had got reply within couple of hours. I had created 2 support tickets for my service, and the reply was within couple of hours. Given the pricing, this is good turnaround time, and you can expect the same. However, keep in mind that this is unmanaged service, so do not expect hand holding in simple problems. I normally try to exhaust all options before creating a ticket, which should be the case. And I always make sure that the ticket is low priority, in case if it is not blocking me at all. Also, do note that all mail ports are blocked by default, you need to create support ticket to open it.
Managed support
This is one of the good things that I learned about them recently. Normally, managed VPS are costly since they include licenses and system admin support. Everything is managed by them, so that you can just concentrate on your development and growth.
In case of BuyVM, they also offer managed services if you opt for plan which is priced higher than $30. So, if you get VPS for $30, which includes 2 threads/ 1 dedicated core, 160 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and gigabit port, you will get free management. They will install all the required software’s like DirectAdmin for free and manage it for you. As I had mentioned earlier, you can use the gigabit port for short bursts, but not 24×7.
BuyVM Review – Benchmarks
What is review without benchmarks? In this section, we will include all the benchmarks that we have ran on this server. You can run the script on your server as well, checkout this link to know more.
YABS – Yet Another Bench Script
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2021-06-05 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Fri Jul 9 08:32:49 EDT 2021
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU cores : 1 @ 3792.874 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM : 981.2 MiB
Swap : 1024.0 MiB
Disk : 18.6 GiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 234.58 MB/s (58.6k) | 724.25 MB/s (11.3k)
Write | 235.20 MB/s (58.8k) | 728.06 MB/s (11.3k)
Total | 469.79 MB/s (117.4k) | 1.45 GB/s (22.6k)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 830.77 MB/s (1.6k) | 790.63 MB/s (772)
Write | 874.91 MB/s (1.7k) | 843.29 MB/s (823)
Total | 1.70 GB/s (3.3k) | 1.63 GB/s (1.5k)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed
| | |
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 1.12 Gbits/sec | 372 Mbits/sec
Online.net | Paris, FR (10G) | 1.12 Gbits/sec | 715 Mbits/sec
WorldStream | The Netherlands (10G) | 1.11 Gbits/sec | 590 Mbits/sec
Biznet | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G) | 906 Mbits/sec | 133 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 1.06 Gbits/sec | 119 Mbits/sec
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 1.02 Gbits/sec | 168 Mbits/sec
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 985 Mbits/sec | 85.8 Mbits/sec
Iveloz Telecom | Sao Paulo, BR (2G) | 446 Mbits/sec | 138 Mbits/sec
Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test | Value
|
Single Core | 895
Multi Core | 907
Full Test | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/8747371
As you can see, the disk speeds and the network are pretty good. The Geekbench score is also on par with what you’d expect from Ryzen 3900X.
YABS – Disk speed test on slabs
We had run YABS on storage or slab, since the root volume is NVME. The slabs are HDD’s with huge cache, and the performance is mind blowing. For $5/ TB, I bet you will find anything close to this.
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2021-06-05 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Fri Jul 9 09:29:32 EDT 2021
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU cores : 1 @ 3792.874 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM : 981.2 MiB
Swap : 1024.0 MiB
Disk : 269.6 GiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 242.00 KB/s (60) | 1.77 MB/s (27)
Write | 259.00 KB/s (64) | 1.94 MB/s (30)
Total | 501.00 KB/s (124) | 3.72 MB/s (57)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 5.22 MB/s (10) | 7.38 MB/s (7)
Write | 5.88 MB/s (11) | 8.32 MB/s (8)
Total | 11.11 MB/s (21) | 15.70 MB/s (15)
In the first test, the results were not that impressive. It could be due to the fact that people are backing up their server or running IO intensive tasks, or there might be RAID rebuild in place. So I ran YABS again on slab after couple of hours, and this time, the result was pretty good!
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2021-06-05 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Fri Jul 9 11:41:33 EDT 2021
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU cores : 1 @ 3792.874 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM : 981.2 MiB
Swap : 1024.0 MiB
Disk : 269.6 GiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 223.09 MB/s (55.7k) | 682.65 MB/s (10.6k)
Write | 223.68 MB/s (55.9k) | 686.24 MB/s (10.7k)
Total | 446.77 MB/s (111.6k) | 1.36 GB/s (21.3k)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 773.52 MB/s (1.5k) | 640.04 MB/s (625)
Write | 814.62 MB/s (1.5k) | 682.66 MB/s (666)
Total | 1.58 GB/s (3.1k) | 1.32 GB/s (1.2k)
Finally, some sequential disk tests, with 1G file and multiple files of 1k, equalling to 1G.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/testfile bs=1G count=1 oflag=direct
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 9.53902 s, 113 MB/s
# 512 bytes file * 1000
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/testfile bs=512 count=1000 oflag=direct
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
512000 bytes (512 kB, 500 KiB) copied, 0.0720574 s, 7.1 MB/s
Conclusion – Should you get an instance from BuyVM?
Hell yes, you will be getting good bang for buck. With Ryzen 3900 and SSD with unlimited bandwidth, starting at $20 per year, this is pretty insane deal. Also, bear in mind that these are unmanaged services unless you are planning to spend more than $30 per month which gets you managed service. Overall, they offer enjoyable experience, with latest hardware, unlimited bandwidth, and outstanding support. They do not have any sales or coupons like others do. Don’t overthink, just head over to BuyVM and grab a slice and slab, I am sure you won’t regret!
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