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My First Month with Vultr - What Are People's Experiences with Vultr?
| Posted by Jazee, 08-24-2016, 03:09 PM |
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I just moved to Vultr about a month ago after very careful research and benchmarking. Been hosting sites for 15+ years.
I've gone from the expensive Cadillac (Rackspace) to ...
ServInt (a cheaper Rackspace with not quite the fanatical support), to ...
AIT (enormous value for the money, rock solid, and about the same support as Servint but not the great panel like DO and Vultr to instantly spin up/destroy a VPS)
After a good AIT experience I decided I wanted less network latency to maximize the performance of a few web apps with large page size (even though performance was acceptable) as being in Seattle I was looking at about 110ms average latency. So I wanted a West Coast Data Center, perferably where I'm at (and my customers) in Seattle.
Enter Vultr. On paper AIT looked like the better value for their VPS packages but after running UNIX Bench, Vultr was better. A 12 core, 6GB AIT SSD VPS Extreme ran about 1,800 on AIT and a 4 core, 4GB came up with 3,300 score. Obviously what type of CPU the "core" is from makes a difference and I'm guessing Vultr is just running on newer/faster servers. Plus I went from 110ms to 11ms latency which was the point of moving in the first place.
I can tell you right now, other than Rackspace, no one responds as quickly (consitently) as Vultr. At first I was concerned they had no phone support which seemed sort of "fly by night" ish. But their online/email support is so fast it doesn't matter.
Pricing by the hour and I love their control panel, simple, easy to user, all the critical info, and you can spin up an instance in about 2 or 3 minutes optionally with a variety or pre-installed apps such as WHM/Cpanel, Webmin, etc. (I think they sort of modeled their system after DigitalOcean.)
So what's not to like?
Well, on Rackspace, ServInt, and AIT, data center or physical node issues were so infrequent I can't even remember if and when they happened in the years I was with them.
My first month at Vultr? Week 2 I get a message that my node was being rebooted to address an issue. Details of the issue were not disclosed.
Today, my server is unreachable. They resolved it in about 20 minutes from putting in the ticket. They said it was a "network routing issue" (this node was in the Seattle Data Center). It was not a fun 20 minutes though as customers started to call me asking why their site/email was down.
So seeing these two occurrences just in the first month isn't giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about Vultr. But to be honest, my gut is saying (hoping) these were flukes and they DID resolve the issue pretty fast.
I'd be interested to hear anyone else's recent experiences, especially those who have experience with their competitors (DO, Linode, etc.)
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| Posted by Spectraip, 08-24-2016, 03:12 PM |
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I used a Vultr VPS in Amsterdam for a couple of time, no problems.
I think Vultr is ideal for development purposes.
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| Posted by Jazee, 08-25-2016, 07:52 PM |
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Just to add to my experience... today, day later after the routing issue in Seattle, my Los Angeles storage server was unreachable. Contacted support, got a response in 2 min.
"This VPS instance's host node required emergency maintenance."
Ugh. I'm not getting any better feeling about these guys. Too bad too because their support is lightning fast and I've asked them quite a few questions. Their pricing is great and their VPS are FAST.
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| Posted by (Stephen), 08-25-2016, 08:00 PM |
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I've got some offsite services as Vultr and DigitalOCean, I've had one planned maintenance reboot that was about 2 minutes down with Vultr. Great performance across the board with them. I've read about some network/ddos issues but in the Silicon Valley, Chicago, Frankfurt facilities I can't say that I've had an issues at all.
DO I was using in Singapore and it had several DDOS cases where I got knocked offline, I've still got that but working to move off of it completely. DO support is OK but not nearly as responsive as Vultr.
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| Posted by pacificvps, 08-25-2016, 09:31 PM |
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I used Vultr, for a few months in their Sydney, Australia location. We never really had an issue we did have planned reboots, which they gave us 24 hour notice for which is totally acceptable. Some locations don't have DDoS protection, so if you're running a game server or anything that is vulnerable to DDoS attacks, you might need to consider another provider.
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| Posted by kpmedia, 08-25-2016, 09:34 PM |
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Vultr is a cheap virtual server for development purposes only.
ServInt has gone down the toilet, many WHT threads about that -- search, read.
You should try LiquidWeb or EuroVPS, if you're looking for high-end hosting like this, from an excellent provider.
^ If you like fast support, try them!
I've disliked Rackspace since the 90s. Inflated pricing.
Never use AIT. If it was a good host, why did you move? That seems insane to me.
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| Posted by overclockedhosting, 08-27-2016, 12:55 PM |
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Here's a few observations I've made with Vultr VPS's:
-Very good burstable 1gbps connection, I have observed between 300-600mbps.
-Every deployment has a possibility of slightly different hardware and a CPU - for an equal price.
-Deploying a server is fast and very effective for easily specifying the operating systems. You get KVM through their website.
-Performance deteriorates over time, thus we can suspected oversold nodes.
-Inconsistent/choppy performance, not ideal for anything where spikes are noticeable.
-There's been quite a few instances of downtime.
-Monopolizing a CPU is not often tolerated, making a UnixBench difficult.
-Overall, it's a good price for the performance, perfect for deploying a website/database.
I hope this helps.
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| Posted by mainpipe, 08-27-2016, 06:18 PM |
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I'd agree with this assessment. To overcome the negatives listed above, simply pony up a little more money and get one of their dedicated instances (https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/). Assuming it's available in your geographic area.
Oops. Looks like they just offer the dedicated in the New York & Tokyo areas.
Last edited by mainpipe; 08-27-2016 at 06:24 PM.
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| Posted by Jazee, 08-29-2016, 07:05 PM |
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Yes, AIT is actually the oldest hosting company. Their support response was not nearly as fast as Vultr but they are what I would call 'semi-managed' in that they will look into things for you other than just network or node issues but that's why you don't get an almost instant response like Vultr I suppose.
Why did I switch? When I initially signed up with them I wasn't factoring how far the data center was from my (and my customers') location. I then decided I wanted minimal network latency between me and my host and I'm in Seattle, they were in North Carolina. Latency was about 110-130ms. Switch to Vultr's data center and it's 11ms. Makes page load times noticeable snappier in the browser and I do a lot of web based admin, and have a few customers that are doing lots of complex page loads for stuff like their CRM systems, etc. Not that the latency at AIT was a deal breaker, I just wanted to optimize to give my customers the best network performance possible.
UNIX Bench on Vultr for similar setup was much higher than AIT. But as someone else pointed out, that is sort of the luck of the draw on what else is going on, on your node and doesn't guarantee it will slow down in the future. Same more most companies I think.
I've found Cpanel's tech support to be quite good and fast so although I am comfortable with troubleshooting 90% of issues requiring some decent Linux Admin knowledge, typically if I determine it's something that I don't know right away the cause, usually the Cpanel guys help me figure it out. So the need to pay extra for a managed hosting service isn't really there for me. If I wasn't such a DIY cheapskate I'd probably just get Vultr through *********.
It's pretty telling that Vultr is one of only 4 hosting companies they will offer: Vultr, DigitalOcean, Amazon, and Google. The later two being a bit overkill on price for what I need.
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| Posted by Jazee, 08-29-2016, 07:08 PM |
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This is an EXCELLENT SUMMARY. As as someone else pointed out you can get a dedicated instance but unfortunately not at the data center near me. The other thing I am anxiously awaiting is offering block storage add-on for Seattle instead of just NY/NJ. Gives much more flexibility on your config if all you need is more storage and it doesn't need to be SSD. But their storage instances are so cheap, for backup I just buy one of those in NY/NJ.
I DID notice recently very inconsistent/choppy network performance on my storage instance when I was transferring (OUT) a 23GB file recently. I've never gotten more than about 50mbit/sec (7MB/sec) network performance on that instance. Not sure if it's the interface or if they just pack a lot of clients on one node to allow them to offer it for so cheap.
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