Hi everyone,
I've been a fan of Low End Boxes and Low End Talk for a while, but this is my first post, and it's a review! I've used lots of different hosting solutions in the past and a few weeks ago I decided to try Green Value Host. I've seen a bit of negative chatter about them and I wanted to give an honest review of how they've been for me so far.
Generally speaking, I'm quite happy with Green Value Host, however the one problem I have is that the response times of the server vary wildly, and sometimes goes down for a few minutes.
I'm currently running a web server for a single website using Apache and Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit. I live in Australia.
Order
From GVH, I ordered:
15GB RAID-10 SSD Accelerated Disk Space
8TB PREMIUM Bandwidth, 1Gbps Port
1 IPv4 Addresses
32 IPv6 Addresses
768MB Guaranteed RAM
Hosted in Los Angeles, California.
Setup
After ordering I was sent an email with my VPS' connection information 8 hours later. I tried to connect to my server through SSH and it did not work.
I sent a message to customer service through the ticketing system provided in their email:
"I recently purchased a VPS from you, and I've received the connection information, however when I login to the SolusVM page with my username: xxxxxx the server is listed as OFFLINE. I've tried rebooting it and it still says OFFLINE.
Can you please help to turn it on?"
and I received this reply:
Please login to your account.
Kind Regards,
Initially, this direct reply gave me a bad impression. But I understood the problem, the ticket link they'd provided had taken me to their non-client page and I had sent a request not from my account. I opened a new ticket after going to their site and logging in, and they fixed the server later that day.
Next, I tried to login again but still couldn't login. I tried a few more times but it wasn't working. I finally ended up changing the root password via the client backend and then I was able to login to the box - and no I didn't get the password wrong - it still wouldn't work when I tried to change it back to what it was originally.
A bit of a hiccup, but not a big problem. I don't mind having to wait a day or two to get a server up and running.
The VPS
From here on, I've been pretty happy with the VPS. It's been able to do everything I want it to do and it's just worked as you would expect... apart from one problem described below.
Currently I am hosting one website on the box with a domain I bought from another supplier. I am using Ubuntu 12 and the standard Apache setup that comes with that. The webpage is a static site.
Speeds
> wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
> CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz
> Number of cores : 1
> CPU frequency : 2401.000 MHz
> Total amount of ram : 768 MB
> Total amount of swap : 0 MB
> System uptime : 15 days, 7:25,
> Download speed from CacheFly: 90.4MB/s
> Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 16.1MB/s
> Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 49.4MB/s
> Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 5.08MB/s
> Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 7.96MB/s
> Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 17.8MB/s
> Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 9.24MB/s
> Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 20.3MB/s
> Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 55.9MB/s
> Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 1.43MB/s
> I/O speed : 30.9 MB/s
Downtime
The biggest and really only problem I've experienced so far is downtime. The response times to the server vary wildly and the server goes down for periods of about 5 minutes. Sometimes the response time is about 1 minute. During these times I also can't SSH into the machine, and I've verified with people in other countries (e.g. the US) that the website is also down.
Here are stats from Uptime Robot for the past day:
You can see the downtime of a few minutes here, but the response times minute to minute is more problematic. They jump around. Here are some consecutive response times (in ms):
243,234,431,425,106,1351,338,83,78,78,62
That's over the span of about 2 hours and continues throughout the day.
Comparably, my website on Bluehost (shared hosting) has a consistent response time of 200ms.
As I mentioned, my setup is a simple static website on Apache, and the CPU is usually <1% in use, and the RAM is about 600MB free (out of 768MB). So I don't believe it's my configuration.
This downtime factor is stopping me from purchasing another VPS from Green Value Host. I am curious to know how their other main location, Dallas is doing as I read in some other posts on these forums that those might be better.
I'd love to get a reply from one of the GVH representatives here to see if anything can be done about the downtime.
Overall
Overall I like the machine and the general appearance of GVH. All the things I require from a VPS are there, however I cannot recommend them fully until they've handled their downtime issues which are frequent and daily. Once they clear this up then I'll definitely be buying another.