2 min read

ServerCheap Pure SSD KVM VPS (2GB) Mini-Review

I recently decided to move most of my personal/non-production sites and services to ServerCheap due to their very competitive pricing - $3.60/month (after applying their 20% off coupon) for their entry-level KVM 1 VPS, which comes with the following specs:

  • 2 "Xeon E5" CPU cores
  • 2GB RAM
  • 30GB SSD disk
  • unmetered bandwidth

Needless to say, the specifications offered are well above average at this price point. $4-5 a month at most VPS providers will only get you a single CPU core, 1GB RAM, and certainly not unmetered bandwidth.

ServerCheap's network infrastructure is provided by tzulo, which is respectively based out of the CoreSite datacenter in Chicago. At least from a networking standpoint, I have no doubt that their connectivity is very robust.

-------------------------------------------------
 nench.sh v2018.04.14 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
 benchmark timestamp:    2018-11-20 01:42:57 UTC
-------------------------------------------------

Processor:    QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
CPU cores:    2
Frequency:    2399.998 MHz
RAM:          1.9G
Swap:         2.0G
Kernel:       Linux 4.15.0-39-generic x86_64

Disks:
loop0   86.6M  HDD
loop1   87.9M  HDD
vda     30G  HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    3.988 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    7.432 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    4.665 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 79.2 us / 173.2 us / 35.2 ms / 283.9 us
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 15.5 k requests in 5.00 s, 3.78 GiB, 3.10 k iops, 774.2 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    806.81 MiB/s
    2nd run:    775.34 MiB/s
    3rd run:    771.52 MiB/s
    average:    784.56 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:    107.152.xxx.xxx

    Cachefly CDN:         91.41 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        10.56 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   0.00 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      13.79 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         36.87 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
    your IPv6:    2607:9000:0:xxxx

    Leaseweb (NL):        7.28 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   0.00 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      15.03 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         32.94 MiB/s
-------------------------------------------------

CPU performance is solid and is consistent with a Xeon E5-class CPU, although since the CPUID bits are masked we do not know the exact generation. I/O performance is average but is consistent with SSD-backed storage and should be more than fine for most workloads. For some reason the network speedtests were pretty mediocre, especially for a supposedly gigabit connection. However, Speedtest.net results were excellent.

Conclusion
While the performance figures are overall average, ServerCheap really lives up to its name. There is simply no other VPS provider I know of that provides 2 CPU cores, 2GB RAM, and unmetered bandwidth for $3.60/month (and possibly <$5/month). Highly recommended.