Review of BuyVM.net
I've been a customer of BuyVM.net since 1st January 2015, and I have 3 of their 256MB VPS's, one in each location, as well as a DDoS protected anycast IP.
Pricing and features
First of all, I have to say that I love the Stallion control panel. It's beautifully designed, and incredibly easy to use. I love the little features that really show the attention to detail, such as the pop-up that says "I come to serve." when you boot a server.
The pricing might seem a little expensive at first, but when you take into account the great uptime, support, and bonus features like anycast and failover IP addresses, it certainly seems good value.
Benchmarks
All these benchmarks are taken while running my semi-production application, so they are most likely a little bit lower than they would be. However, they're still fantastic.
The low uptime figure is my fault, I've rebooted them manually for updates.
OpenVZ, New Jersey
# wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L 0 @ 2.00GHz
Number of cores : 2
CPU frequency : 2000.042 MHz
Total amount of ram : 256 MB
Total amount of swap : 256 MB
System uptime : 3 min,
Download speed from CacheFly: 79.5MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 49.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 32.6MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 5.30MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 10.7MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 43.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 6.87MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 23.1MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 21.6MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 12.1MB/s
I/O speed : 250 MB/s
OpenVZ, Luxembourg
wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz
Number of cores : 2
CPU frequency : 1999.999 MHz
Total amount of ram : 256 MB
Total amount of swap : 256 MB
System uptime : 1 day, 18:05,
Download speed from CacheFly: 59.1MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 15.3MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 15.9MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 4.04MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 14.6MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 6.81MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 5.70MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 11.5MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 12.3MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 15.9MB/s
I/O speed : 109 MB/s
KVM, Las Vegas (with KVM networking config changes)
wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5639 @ 2.13GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2133.408 MHz
Total amount of ram : 238 MB
Total amount of swap : 511 MB
System uptime : 1 day, 19:16,
Download speed from CacheFly: 22.8MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 848KB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 5.83MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 2.77MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 1.04MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 11.1MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 2.61MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 7.96MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 17.4MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 4.42MB/s
I/O speed : 139 MB/s
Uptime
I haven't had uptime monitoring on these servers, however, I've not noticed any downtime, nor have any of the people using them.
There was some minor downtime recently for SSD upgrades in New Jersey. This was communicated well in advance, and now seems to be complete. I suppose I would have liked a more specific ETA, but that's the only criticism I can find.
Communication & Tickets
I have submitted 3 tickets since getting the services. None of them were for issues like a server being down, they were simply questions.
My first ticket was answered in 22 minutes for the first reply, the other replies took around that time, although slightly less. Support staff were very helpful and efficient in all of the tickets, even though some of them were tickets that other providers would have turned down for being rather silly questions (such as querying whether the setup for adding an anycast IP to the VPS was the same as the unicast IP's).
Overall
I'm incredibly happy, and the helpful attitude of support has meant that I intend to stay with BuyVM for the forseeable future. They have a huge feature range that is simply unparalleled in the Low End market, although I suppose their prices are a tiny bit higher to reflect the work that that must involve.
Proof of services
I manually removed the invoice numbers, but here are the first invoices I received.
