BuyVM Las Vegas Ryzen KVM VPS Mini-Review

With the annual contract about to expire on a VPS on the East Coast that I was using as a personal VPN node, I decided to shake things up and see what else was out there in terms of hosting options. BuyVM always seems to come highly recommended on the LowEndTalk forums, and with a starting price of $2/month for their KVM VPSes, why not? In February, they upgraded their Las Vegas-based KVM nodes to Ryzen 3900X running on ASRock Rack X470D4U boards with NVMe-based storage. Needless to say, these offerings seem to be a hot commodity, and it was only until late April that I had a chance to snag the $2/month package, which offers the following:

• 1x Ryzen 3900X CPU core
• 512 MB RAM
• 10GB NVMe storage
• 1Gbps unmetered bandwidth
• 1x IPv4, IPv6 /64

Here's the output from nench.sh and Speedtest.net on a fresh install of Debian 10 "Buster":

-------------------------------------------------
 nench.sh v2019.07.20 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
 benchmark timestamp:    2020-04-30 03:51:29 UTC
-------------------------------------------------

Processor:    AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU cores:    1
Frequency:    3792.870 MHz
RAM:          483Mi
Swap:         509Mi
Kernel:       Linux 4.19.0-8-amd64 x86_64

Disks:
vda     10G  HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    2.323 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    4.207 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    0.931 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 76.9 us / 151.9 us / 72.1 ms / 1.18 ms
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 7.96 k requests in 5.00 s, 1.94 GiB, 1.59 k iops, 397.8 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    1144.41 MiB/s
    2nd run:    1049.04 MiB/s
    3rd run:    1144.41 MiB/s
    average:    1112.62 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:    redacted

    Cachefly CDN:         78.43 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        9.20 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   36.48 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      7.79 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         16.51 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
    your IPv6:    redacted

    Leaseweb (NL):        4.39 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   6.95 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      9.26 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         17.90 MiB/s
-------------------------------------------------

CPU performance is top-notch and certainly consistent with what would be expected from a 3rd-generation Ryzen CPU. Disk performance is also excellent and on par for SSD-backed storage. Network performance is also excellent, with the upload speeds more or less maxing out the gigabit link.

Conclusion
Starting at only $2/month, BuyVM's Las Vegas KVM platform offers great specs, performance, and value.