VPS Comparison between Slicehost and Prgmr: is an $8 instance as good as a $20 one?

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-and-prgmr

by uggedal • 17 years ago

128 69 17 years ago

journal.uggedal.com

barredo• 17 years ago

Useful comparison

jordanlev• 17 years ago

I am a slicehost customer, and a programmer without much sysadmin experience. To me, the documentation and support community at slicehost is invaluable - something this article touches on but doesn't put as much importance into as raw performance. Of course, depending on your level of Linux admin experience, saving $12/mo. may be worth it to you.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

Its always worth it to pay more for quality. Especially when the difference is only $12.

uggedal3• 17 years ago

The difference is $12 for a 256MB slice. What if you start to grow and need 5 1GB slices? That is a $250/month difference.

jm4• 17 years ago

It might only be $12 but it's also a 150% increase. I think when you're comparing apples and apples (as in two products that have roughly the same features-- not a Rolls Royce and moped even though they share a basic function) there are going to be very few situations where a 150% increase is justified.

davidw3• 17 years ago

How are you measuring quality? I can think of:

* Memory

* CPU

* Storage

* Bandwidth

* Service - which is hard to measure, but also a very important metric.

lsc21• 17 years ago

right now, my system is not designed to be easy for people who don't have *NIX experience. (I do have some neat features for those who do, like pvgrub and console access)

I'm working on it, but yeah, if you need a easy control panel to quickly re-image your system or things like that, I don't yet have those things, and yeah, for some people, getting those things is unquestionably worth the price difference between my competitors and I.

But for people who do have more UNIX/Linux experience, I think my system has some advantages that I will be careful to keep as I try to make easier interfaces. I give you a rescue disk that lets you boot your vps even if you break your boot config. I give you a ssh public-key based out of band console and rebooter. I let you run whatever kernel you want (I have a few customers running NetBSD, and I have some experimental OpenSolaris domains)

davidw3• 17 years ago

This is worth noting:

> Much of what’s automated over at Slicehost (like provisioning a new instance) is handled manually at Prgmr.

(Which is also true for Linode). That might potentially be a big difference - I found it very quick to bring up new Linodes or Slices, and it's nice to know that that's a quick and easy possibility if you start generating more traffic.

Also... Calexico? Seems an odd place to be running a hosting business. It appears their actual servers are in San Jose... so where did he get Calexico from?

http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.co...

(Which is what their 'about' link takes you to) Looks like a smaller operation than Linode or Slicehost, too.

uggedal3• 17 years ago

I found the location by using a Geo IP lookup. It could therefore be inaccurate.

davidw3• 17 years ago

You should mention that in the article, then.

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

It is inaccurate. The servers are located at the svtix data center [1] in San Jose, CA [2]. That seems like a perfectly sensible place to operate a business to me.

[1] http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html [2] http://www.svtix.com/locationmap.html

lsc21• 17 years ago

you have a good point about provisioning. my automation needs a lot of work, and that's a big weakness for me right now. I'm working on it, but I'm not anywhere near done. If you are built in to 'the cloud' and provision more nodes in the day than at night, yeah, my competitors are probably better for you. But if you leave your server on all the time, then I think I do offer some significant value.

I am much smaller than linode or slicehost... It's two SysAdmins, with some support from others. I have been around for a while, though. I've been selling VPSs with xen since 2005.

our old location is in he.net Fremont, our new location is in svitx in san jose. I'm looking at a rack in market post tower, but I'm told they've had power problems lately, while svtix has been pretty solid.

datums• 17 years ago

I don't think it's a fair comparison. Slicehost grew very quickly then got acquired. Prgmr seems to be the smaller guy growing slowly, getting rack space http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation-in-s... and trying to grow to a full rack. The automation is a huge plus especially if you are in the hosting business. The pricing model and the added features are what sets the competition apart from EC2. I think many of these VPS providers have to catch up and come up with some of their own "Why choose me" features, services if competing with EC2 is their focus.

lsc21• 17 years ago

I think comparing me to slicehost or linode is completely fair... they are my direct competition. I think ec2 is in a different market. there is some overlap, but really if you want to leave your instance on all the time, a vps such as I sell (or linode or slicehost) is vastly superior to the instance with unmirrored disk ec2 provides you.

the opposite is true as well; if you need instant provisioning... if you need 50 servers during the day and 20 at night, I simply can't do that for you. (I hope to be able to at some point, but I can't yet.) Ec2 has been doing that for some time, and I think slicehost and linode both have similar functionality.

asb4• 17 years ago

Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple locations. A $20 Linode for instance gives you 360mb of of RAM, 16gb storage and 200gb transfer. They also use more powerful CPUs than the Athlon's listed for Slicehost/prgmr - my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon L5420 (2.5ghz, 6mb cache).

Just guessing, but I'd expect disk access is a bigger bottleneck on highly loaded VPS servers than the CPU, so the worst and average case disk performance are probably what would concern me the most. I think prgmr is a fantastic deal - I certainly haven't seen anybody else offering so much RAM at that price point. I'd be a customer if they were located on the east coast.

Finally, for those who don't know, prgmr is owned and run by lsc who's a member here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc

buugs• 17 years ago

The cool thing about linode is that they hand out free upgrades often, usually ram and storage. I think the storage was 12gb before march for a 20 dollar linode and it got upped and if you look at their blog you'll see a large history of this usually about every six months.

Slicehost does however have very nice and useful articles and it is nice to support them if you use those.

m0shen• 17 years ago

http://www.fsckvps.com/ has similar pricing for OpenVZ based virtual servers.

lsc21• 17 years ago

If you like OpenVZ, I would recommend

http://www.johncompanies.com/

Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I tried them, were excellent.

lsc21• 17 years ago

I agree about the disk access. Disk is by far the weakest part of my system. I do provide you mirrored disk, putting me ahead of the low-end ec2 stuff, but you are sharing that mirror with a lot of people.

Fortunately, more ram can usually make up for slow disk.

I am working on a zfs based network storage system that just might solve the problem and then some, but it's not anywhere near ready yet.

phoxix22• 17 years ago

Two things to consider:

A) Slicehost isn't an overnite operation. Not saying I don't wish Prgmr all the luck in the world, but still ...

B) vCPUs don't matter as much as the guest/host contention ratio does. If I gave you 4 VCPU's and stuck you on a host with 128 other VMs .... you performance is going to suck no matter what. The fewer the number of guests, the better the performance of the guests.

Now only if Slicehost would stop sending me email I've got credit with them even if I have used 'em for over a year ...

lsc21• 17 years ago

heh. I've been selling Xen VPSs since 2005, and I sold FreeBSD jail based VPSs for a while before that. you can call me small, understaffed and cheap, but I've been in the market for longer than many of my competitors.

phoxix22• 17 years ago

I used Caker's Linode back when he was a startup with only 4 nodes circa: 2002 :)

Good luck to you!

lsc21• 17 years ago

contention is... more complex than that. are you dedicating a core to the dom0? (it helps network performance rather a lot) the fewer VCPUs you have per DomU, the more DomUs can run at once. (on an 8 core box, with one cpu pinned to the dom0, I can run 7 1vcpu DomUs and one dom0 (for network/disk io) at one time. Alternately, I can run 1 4vcpu DomU and one Dom0)

On the other hand, if nobody else is trying to do anything, the box with 4 VCPUs has 4 times the resources that the box with 1VCPUs has.

alex_c• 17 years ago

Thanks, I was keeping an eye out for a way to cut costs for some non-mission-critical stuff - this looks very interesting (that's a BIG price difference for the larger plans). Will give it a try.

lsc21• 17 years ago

Yeah. Ram, disk and CPU are cheap. Now, dealing with abuse, etc... is expensive, but most of the per-customer costs are the same no matter how much ram they order, so I think it makes sense to drop the cost per gigabyte as you order more ram.

the formula I use to calculate the 1 month pricing is this: $1 for every 64M ram plus $4 per account. I think it works out reasonable; I was figuring $512/month for each 32GB / 8 core hardware, which is maybe a little high, but it is within reason.

s3graham• 17 years ago

I do feel like slicehost "must" be overpriced these days, just based on the fact that their prices haven't decreased that I can remember. (At least ~2 years, maybe more?)

Not sure if prgmr is where I'd end up, but can't be all bad when "figlet prgmr.com" was all the time they spent on logo design. ;)

mtw• 17 years ago

yeah, actually planning to move in a couple of months if they don't adjust their prices to the market. there's linode and now this.

asb4• 17 years ago

In that time, Linode have consistently increased their offerings at the same price-point and they deploy newer hardware. It seems a little odd to me that Slicehost seem to get so much more love in the hacker community and Linode remains the underdog. Perhaps Slicehost tends to attract more passionate users who market it more effectively to others? If Linode would get their backup service out of beta and clone the Slicehost API I would see little reason to prefer Slicehost.

FooBarWidget• 17 years ago

I'm a long-time Linode customer, and I recently had to make the choice between Linode and Slicehost. I was extremely unimpressed by Slicehost's offerings compared to Linode - with Linode you get so much more bang for the buck, and they even upgraded harddisk space 3 weeks after I signed up for a new server. I can absolutely not understand why Slicehost gets more buzz than Linode.

cstejerean• 17 years ago

I think Linode really needs to make their website more appealing. I know it shouldn't really matter, since as a customer I would use their slices not their web design skills, but it does. Their site has been getting better, but it still seems like they don't have someone there that gets how to tune a website to increase conversion.

https://www.linode.com/signup/ https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new

As a comparison take a look at their signup pages. Which one of those pages would you rather fill out?

Another area where I like the Slicehost approach better is the way the prices are displayed. $20 for Slicehost vs $19.95 for Linode.

melvinram2• 17 years ago

I've moved to their sister product/company Mosso by Rackspace. It's about half the price & billed per hour... but bandwidth is not included. Bandwidth is billed based on usage ... and for low-traffic/new apps, that's a better deal.

rms• 17 years ago

I just wish that there was an easy way to switch... are there any tools to help automate the process?

asb4• 17 years ago

This depends on the availability of a suitable API. Unfortunately, providers haven't decided on a common one yet. Sun were working on one (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud), although perhaps other providers will end up just cloning Amazon or Slicehost's.

Check out Cloudkick (A YC company) for migration between Amazon and Slicehost.

lsc21• 17 years ago

I think something that is more simple than the ec2 api and the sun api will win. Yeah, I think cloudkick has some good ideas.

lsc21• 17 years ago

I'm working on it. I'm trying to talk the cloudkick people into helping me out; they look like they have an awesome system.

miracle2• 17 years ago

Why not compare slicehost with a real provider?

Take the servers at hetzner.de, they don't charge much more than a VPS but you et much more power. The only real advantage of a VPS when you grow is when they offer you tools to automatically deploy new instances (like amazon ec2). Otherwise you should be switching to dedicated servers.

asb4• 17 years ago

If you're spending less than $150-200 it seems to be hard to beat a VPS. Certainly there are cheap dedicated servers to be had, but I don't believe you'll get such a high quality network and standard of support as with Linode/Slicehost. $150-200 seems enough to get a decent dedicated server with a respected host such as Softlayer, or 10tb.com who resell Softlayer servers at crazy prices. That said, I have heard a number of people recommend Hetzner.

miracle2• 17 years ago

I can only recommend hetzner. We got > 10 servers there and are very happy. In June, they will have their new datacenter ready with new server offers. If all goes well, I will order another > 30 servers for our data processing.

lsc21• 17 years ago

If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a month.

leej• 17 years ago

so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated servers are very high.

lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be true comparing to others. is there any drawback?

callmeed• 17 years ago

FTA: "Community ... If you want to use Prgmr you are pretty much on your own."

That alone is reason enough for me to stay with Slicehost.

This article is weighted towards performance aspects. When judging any service provider, I'd hope people here are wise enough to consider other factors as well.

I've heard great things about Linode and may try them if I ever get a chance–but between Slicehost and Prgmr, nothing I see would make me consider switching (I have 9 slices with SH).

I may be off base, but even though Slicehost is more expensive, that doesn't mean they aren't a better value.

1. Slicehost's support is great. Quick responses to tickets and very helpful people in the chatroom

2. Slicehost's articles–while free to anyone–make me want to support them for the willingness to contribute knowledge.

3. Their DNS tool is very handy

4. I'm sure the prgmr.com team is very competent and I hope they do well. But their site does little to instill confidence in me.

lsc21• 17 years ago

I agree that for some people, linode and slicehost are a better value. (btw, I've heard nothing but good things about either one, I mean, aside from the pricing. Both, as far as I can tell, provide excellent service, and both are easier to use for non-sysadmins than I am.)

My core audience is SysAdmins who need off-site servers and hobbyists, and I think I serve those markets better than my competitors. I am trying to build systems that will allow me to better serve people who are not as familiar with Linux (or bsd)

The website still needs a lot of work. But that is consistent with my goal of serving existing customers before new customers, if there is not enough time to do both.

aaronsw• 17 years ago

http://prgmr.com/status.html doesn't inspire confidence. Sample quote:

> The cutover from Cogent to Rippleweb was messy, and resulted in nearly a full day's down time This was completely my fault, (That is, Luke Crawford's) as I set the cut off date for the old service to early. Rippleweb moved quickly to help me recover; the rest of the down time was due to a faulty cross-connect. All customers get one month of credit for this, as this has been a rough month (and we are not entirely out of the woods yet.) On the upside, we have avoided renumbering. Neal has survived the baptism by fire, and we can expect prgmr.com services to improve in reliability now that I have help again.

lsc21• 17 years ago

that page was last updated in 2007. granted, we still have problems, but we are much better than we were.

http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/

is our current blog and the place we report mistakes and outages.

Andys• 17 years ago

It would be really nice if all ISPs were this open and forthcoming with technical detail.

jpcx01• 17 years ago

As a longtime slicehost customer, thank god for competition. Slice has been slightly overcharging for memory (my current bottleneck). I also don't use any of slicehost's (admittedly great) tools.

I'll probably think about reevaluating my server costs (about 300 mo) if slicehost doesn't boost their memory offering in the next few months. Especially using chef for scripted infrastructure, all I'd have to do is change my ip list and rerun.

mahmud• 17 years ago

VPSFarm, unlimited bandwidth and awesome staff. I called them from Cambodia and told them I wasn't be able to pay this month since Paypal locked me out of my account (I logged into paypal from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours, and they didn't like it.) I didn't get around to paying them for another month and a half. My service was never interrupted.

I love a business with a human face :-)

[Currently on linode, for the easier resource upgrades since I'm getting steady increase in users. Also amazing service.]

SingAlong2• 17 years ago

Do the prgmr.com guys support payment by Paypal?

deutronium• 17 years ago

Yes, looks like thats the main payment option

SingAlong2• 17 years ago

Ya. Just checked that. They support Paypal.

It's very nice to see one nice VPS host that supports Paypal and appreciated by HN. Slicehost and Linode don't support Paypal.

Coming from a geographical region where credit cards are rarely used, this matters too me.

@Isc: you should probably have an FAQ page about the payment methods and other common questions. People usually don't check the signup page to know the payment methods.

VPS Comparison between Slicehost and Prgmr: is an $8 instance as good as a $20 one?

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