I purchased a couple of 1Tb storage boxes from this hostsolutions.ro during the easter sales. As it was mentioned as "preorder", the price is incredibly low and there were multiple promises about network upgrades and fixing performance issues i was very patient, but almost a mounth have passed since the date of purchase so here are my thoughts so far:
- "+" Low price
- "-" Old kernel, only old OS templates available.
- "-" Openvz, with all its regular drawbacks, and with very inconvinient default configuration. Even to use firewall properly you have to create support tickets. Also simfs is used.
- "-" At best mediocre network performance, even after all the upgrades mentioned. Never got more than ~50-70mbit, and i tried from few different locations/servers both in US and in europe.
- "-" Very, very low storage performance. Low to the point when reading / directory listing may take minutes. This may also affect my expirience with network speed as i did not try writing to /dev/null.
I tried to use this boxes for backups, uploading daily ~500M archives and weekly ~20Gb ones. This did not work at all. Uploading 500M often takes few hours, and uploading 20Gb usually fails since the script doing it assumes that it will be complete before next execution, which does not happen.
Then i tried using them to store things which do not change that often so that low performance is less of an issue, but it failed too, because it is literally impossible to upload ~100-200Gb pieces, upload was going for ~3 days and then the node was rebooted. Also with such speed i fear that if i need something stored there i will spend month trying to download it, which is unacceptable for me.
One more interesting thing i noticed - deleting files is incredibly slow and it seems like it causes issues for whole node. As both of my VM-s are on the same node i can clearly see it. Deleting ~20Gb file takes few minutes, and during this time both VM-s become completely unresponsive (and by unresponsive i mean that i cannot even get directory listing or process list).
Overall i'd say this boxes turnend out completely useless to me, i suppose that running seedbox will work to a certain degree, but i do not need that.
What made me post this? Today i got another message about failed backup, logged in to one of VM-s, and i am seeing this:
[root@vps8 ~]# time df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs 1.0T 21G 1004G 3% /
none 512M 4.0K 512M 1% /dev
none 512M 0 512M 0% /dev/shm
real 0m26.923s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.009s
[root@vps8 ~]# time ls
list
real 1m29.420s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.015s
At this point i am done with trying to use this VM-s, because i need working and reasonably fast backups, and here i cannot be sure that even if it is uploaded i can download it later in reasonable time if i need. Definitely not going to renew this ones, will just let them idle&expire, and would not advice buying them to anyone, just not worth the time, even with incredibly low price.
