What are signals of a low quality VPS?

I want to choose a new VPS but there are so many offers with good price and specs, I don't know what is low or high quality VPS between offers. Do you guys advise me what are signals of a low quality VPS offer I should avoid? low price with good specifications or I should avoid offers with the most lowest pricing that other providers could not offer?

Hi,
You should look into following points,
1) data-center facility
2) Network
3) server specifications
4) Provider
5) Terms
6) validation & reviews

Remember the golden rule. If it's too good to be true, it probably is!

Hosting companies have to make money. If their not making money, they tend to close down in the middle of the night.

Look for a VPS using KVM or XEN virtualization to decrease the chances of the server hardware being oversold.

Look for a provider that has been around a while, and have positive reviews.

When you have found a few your considering, let us know and we may be able to provide insight into the companies you are considering.

Best of luck in your search!

Just to add or stress on some of the points above.

Look for services such as KVM which offer dedicated RAM.

Look into the web hosting company by doing a quick google search.

Too cheap = bad service while affordable = There are only a few good ones.

I would always suggest going for SSD drives as it is a lot quicker for a couple of bucks more.

Lastly it is a good idea to pick a hosting provider from a community like froumweb.hosting as it really increases the chances of going with a reliable hosting provider.

Best Regards and Good luck

I will carefully check on offers that cheap pricing, especially on VPS or dedicated offers.
because you get what you will pay for, not easy to have a quality service if you pay less for it.

Well, for an objective metrics, benchmark is always a good way to know for sure.

For an all-rounder benchmark that tests I/O and connectivity to several areas, run this on command line:

wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash

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I'd say that if the IO you get is below 50MB/s, it's probably not a very good/oversold VPS. If you are promised 1gbps port, see if connectivity at least reach close to that point. For a more accurate benchmark of IO, you can use Bonnie++ as well.

For cpu benchmark, there are plethora of options but i usually use geekbench 4, of which there is a bunch of guide online on how to use, others use unixbench. CPU benchmark is used to see how much throttling is in place (if any).

EDIT: Forgot to add, for routing, you can utilized several looking glass from and to the VPS, to see what kind of routing is being used. I usually use BGP and MTR for this.

EDIT2: Whoops, i didn't realize OP was asking for a pre-order signal. Well, best way to know for sure is ask for a test IP/looking glass, and identify the ASN using IP to ASN converter to see who actually owns the IP space, check the routing, see if they have moneyback guarantee and use the benchmark option above. Hope that's useful!

In my opinion the biggest pre-order red flag from a provider is the client area without SSL encryption and ofcourse if the offer seems to good to be true, it probably is.

I guess you may need to try it before you know. Stability is the key point of the VPS .

FerdieQO said:

I want to choose a new VPS but there are so many offers with good price and specs, I don't know what is low or high quality VPS between offers. Do you guys advise me what are signals of a low quality VPS offer I should avoid? low price with good specifications or I should avoid offers with the most lowest pricing that other providers could not offer?

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I would select the vps that meets your technical requirements and remains within your budget, from a host that you've seen around. Here is a little tip that can save you some money while trying out hosts: VPS can be upgraded seamlessly without loss of data. Choose a cheap one from a host, and if you like it upgrade it to your specs.

I will recommend check following items:

Length of Business
Datacenter
VPS Uptime ( HA, Backup etc.)
Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Support Level
Of course your budget.

cloudean said:

Hi,
You should look into following points,
1) data-center facility
2) Network
3) server specifications
4) Provider
5) Terms
6) validation & reviews

Click to expand...

I don't understand these points, how can they afffect or they are signals of a low quality VPS? can you elaborate these?

Luxin Host said:

Just to add or stress on some of the points above.

Look for services such as KVM which offer dedicated RAM.

Look into the web hosting company by doing a quick google search.

Too cheap = bad service while affordable = There are only a few good ones.

I would always suggest going for SSD drives as it is a lot quicker for a couple of bucks more.

Lastly it is a good idea to pick a hosting provider from a community like forumweb.hosting as it really increases the chances of going with a reliable hosting provider.

Best Regards and Good luck

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Thanks for your reply, I have to agree that cheap VPS is always making me much doubt about its quality.

gigsgigs said:

I guess you may need to try it before you know. Stability is the key point of the VPS .

Click to expand...

How long do I need to use a VPS to know it is a quality VPS?

FerdieQO said:

I don't understand these points, how can they afffect or they are signals of a low quality VPS? can you elaborate these?

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If the provider hosts the servers in a decent datacenter facility there will be no power shortages and the provided network will have good global routing with low worldwide latencies.

A powerful server node on which the clients are hosted on means better performance for the clinets aswell, for example a SSD Raid 10 will improve the I/O speed. However powerful server nodes can also indicate that the providers are trying to crowd as many users possible per node, which over time causes service deteriration.

Before making a purchase its always good to check out the Provider and their Terms of Service for any small print just to be on the safe side.

FerdieQO said:

I have to agree that cheap VPS is always making me much doubt about its quality.

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Cheap and quality don't always go hand in hand, if you have high-end requirements cheap might not be for you. The general rule of thumb when it comes down to the hosting industry is that if the offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.

FerdieQO said:

How long do I need to use a VPS to know it is a quality VPS?

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It happens with some providers that the service deteriorates as time passes, a good example of this would be a decline of the I/O speed. This can be easly comperable from the first time you bought the VPS and repeating the test after several months.

HostBastic said:

Cheap and quality don't always go hand in hand, if you have high-end requirements cheap might not be for you. The general rule of thumb when it comes down to the hosting industry is that if the offer seems too good to be true, it probably is.

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Most people don't think that deeply when they are making a hosting purchase. All they tend to think about is the price that are or will pay.

HostBastic said:

a good example of this would be a decline of the I/O speed. This can be easly comperable from the first time you bought the VPS and repeating the test after several months.

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Why would that happen and would it happen if you have not changed added or removed anything from your VPS?

For better VPS performance, you need:
stable network speed backbone
SSD storage
well optmized server
Technical support

You really need to be careful about disk performance, some providers still use desktop grade sata disks and overload those drives with more clients, as you might know a HDD is a bottleneck of any system, you dont want to end up on a 7.2k RPM SATA Disk barely doing 10-30 MB/sec transfer speeds !...

FerdieQO said:

I want to choose a new VPS but there are so many offers with good price and specs, I don't know what is low or high quality VPS between offers. Do you guys advise me what are signals of a low quality VPS offer I should avoid? low price with good specifications or I should avoid offers with the most lowest pricing that other providers could not offer?

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It is just like unlimited shared hosting disk. Don't go for too cheap. Go for what is reasonable and not overcharge/undercharge.
What most important is the response time of the customer service and the quality of the uptime. This is the most important.

Happy Shopping!

Choose your virtualization wisely & of course the hardware of your server has to be made in the last 5 years at least

If my support tickets aren't answered within a day or two, and I see server slowness problems frequently, or even worse - downtime coming from the hosting company's side once or twice, then I would't think much and I would move away from them. There might be more issues, but these two are red flags and bad enough for me to make me go to a different company.

I would rather pay slightly more but get good service. On websites which have visitors or customers sitting on them all the time, then the downtime will cost you more in lost sales and image damage than the price that you pay for a better VPS company.

Get VPS IP. Check Network with ASN. Check if it's Single-homed or Multi. Then, check Network Speed with wget or Freevps bench script. Next check the Disk I/O, ioping. Check how fast the vps reacts in SSH login & updating OS.