The-REV's Blog

Note: To enlarge the VZPP photo at left click the right button of your mouse on the image and select "open image"[/align] updated on November 16st, 2007 After 26 VPS providers evaluated through four years in order to found the "perfect VPS" I finally found it: KnownHost (knownhost.com). This provider, according we verified, is the only in 27 evaluated that have a perfect Virtuozzo setup. Greatest environment, physical monster dedi never oversold, clean IPs, excellent bandwidth, fine support and much more. For example: incredible, but it's just the truth - 2,600,00 disk inodes allowed for 30GB disk space (note that the common default for an average on all another Virtuozzo providers evaluated are 500,000 disk inodes for that virtual HDD space! These KH guys really know what they are doing in VPS world, unlike a lot of jokers that are unfortunately offering crappy VPS on the Net... I ordered the KnownHost top VPS - TripleX - on a Saturday, using a promo code found in Web Hosting Talk and in just few minutes I received my login with yum (I requested it). KnownHost technicians makes VPS secure and hardening with firewall and alternate SSH port (but not inform the customer how exactly is the command line for SSH the VPS, then if a newbie in Linux has been ordered this product he will be forced to request info from KH Support). KnownHost Support is the firstly I've seen, rather than the famous JaguarPC support replay time and the guys are polish and professional, but not informal. The two first questions we posted in order to test KH Support have not satisfactory replies, but at the third one the supporter has solved in minutes a "mysterious" bug we have invented to confuse these guys...

My VPS is hosted on Dual Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2214 HE machine with 8 GB of physical RAM and SATA-2 hdds in RAID-10 array.

I've installed Webmin & Usermin in few seconds and also installed rkhunter and scanned fine the VPS.

Operating System: CentOS 5x 64 bits.

I choose Direct Admin instead Plesk and DA shows this System VPS (RAM available for the VPS:

Processor Name Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2214 HE
Vendor ID AuthenticAMD
Processor Speed (MHz) 2200.725
Processor Name Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2214 HE
Vendor ID AuthenticAMD
Processor Speed (MHz) 2200.725
Processor Name Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2214 HE
Vendor ID AuthenticAMD
Processor Speed (MHz) 2200.725
Processor Name Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2214 HE
Vendor ID AuthenticAMD
Processor Speed (MHz) 2200.725
Total Memory 524288 kB
Free Memory 496148 kB
Total Swap Memory 0 kB
Free Swap Memory 0 kB
System Uptime 0 Days, 1 Hours and 2 Minutes
Apache 1.3.39 Running
DirectAdmin 1.31.0 Running
Exim 4.67 Running
MySQL 5.0.37 Running
Named 9.3.3rc2 Running
ProFTPd 1.3.0a Running
sshd Running
vm-Pop3d 1.1.7f-DA-2 Running


Memory shown at shell:
[root@host ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 512 51 460 0 0 0
-/+ buffers/cache: 51 460
Swap: 0 0 0
[root@host ~]#


Running WHT Unixbench on my TripleX KH VPS the test have run fast, with this output (fabulous for a VPS):

BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.1)
System -- Linux host.macarlohost.net 2.6.9-023stab044.11-entnosplit #1 SMP Sun Sep 30 12:28:38 MSD 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
/dev/vzfs 31457280 839684 30617596 3% /

Start Benchmark Run: Sun Nov 4 15:12:46 EST 2007
15:12:46 up 1:44, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00

End Benchmark Run: Sun Nov 4 15:22:54 EST 2007
15:22:54 up 1:55, 1 user, load average: 14.66, 6.23, 2.69


INDEX VALUES
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 24556650.6 651.7
Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1767.8 212.7
Execl Throughput 188.3 4283.6 227.5
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 96499.0 361.1
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 29074.0 270.0
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 774911.0 503.8
Pipe Throughput 111814.6 2408769.5 215.4
Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 451673.0 292.4
Process Creation 569.3 11756.1 206.5
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 1138.6 254.2
System Call Overhead 114433.5 3544292.1 309.7
=========
FINAL SCORE 297.0
[root@host unixbench-4.1.0-wht-1]#

# top output with 16 websites running on my KH VPS:




Scan output for this KH VPS:

Interesting ports on 72.249.86.116:
(The 3129 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
21/tcp open ftp
25/tcp open smtp
53/tcp open domain
53/udp open|filtered domain
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop3
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
587/tcp open submission
3306/tcp open mysql
6667/tcp filtered irc
10000/tcp open snet-sensor-mgmt

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1530.940 seconds
[root@localhost @macarlo]#


After data migration from another provider in order to test the KH product I did a VZPP snapshot and this backup has been released easy and quickly. After some days I verified that peace in mind appears as the trade mark of Known Host: this provider does automatic backups of entire VPS (snapshot) at each two days of use!! (photo at left shows VZPP Maintenance with the automatic backups released). Performing a rsync /home backup to our external backup server provider (the highly recommended Remote Backup @ BQ Internet) we found a good score, considering the localization of KH NOC and follows a comparison with the fast #1 for this rsync to BQ, SolarVPS:

Monday November 05 7:39 PM New York Time

SolarVPS rsync speed (from New Jersey to New York):
sent 1919974 bytes received 73398 bytes 13245.00 bytes/sec
total size is 2363744837 speedup is 1185.80
[root@server1 ~]#

KnownHost rsync speed (from Texas to New York):
sent 1293649 bytes received 77912 bytes 23445.49 bytes/sec
total size is 1283004338 speedup is 935.43
[root@host /]# top

But at Tuesday November 06 1:45 PM New York Time...KH shows to be the #1

KnownHost rsync speed (from Texas to New York):
sent 1494890 bytes received 79348 bytes 69966.13 bytes/sec
total size is 1283050525 speedup is 815.03
[root@host ~]#

SolarVPS rsync speed (from New Jersey to New York):
sent 3004678 bytes received 94728 bytes 41602.77 bytes/sec
total size is 2363937161 speedup is 762.71
[root@server1 ~]#


After the few days I are running in KH with the main domain name macarlohost.net (verify, please) I decided reformat my personal 10 Top VPS List and now it is as follows:

# 1 - KnownHost

# 2 - SolarVPS

# 3 - Myriad Network

# 4 - Servint

# 5 - VPSLink

# 6 - Amerihosting

# 7 - Zone.Net

# 8 - JaguarPC

# 9 - Spry

# 10 - A lot of VPS providers

Another websites running in KnownHost for testing: macarlo.com, macarlo.net, macarloname.com and another 12 more. For loading evaluation I'm using three monster webpages, extra-heavy and very complicated, plenty of links to banners, images, Flash and more...:
http://macarlohost.net/index.htm
http://macarlohost.net/index.html
http://macarlo.com/index.html
http://macarlo.com/default.htm

Note: these webpages are extra-heavy with design not optimized just for evaluations purposes and only physical dedicated servers can load them fast due 100% CPU availability.[/COLOR]