Introduction
We will go over the Best Dedicated Hosting Provider: Vultr, AWS, Oneprovider, OVH and Serverpronto.
Did you know it’s not about the speed but also the support that makes a good hosting provider?
We will review these hosting providers in the following attributes:
- Network speed
- Hardware quality
- Support
- Pricing
- Ease of use
I have used all of these providers in various projects over the last few years and know the ins and outs of each of them. Hoping that my knowledge here will help you decide with actual numbers and experience who is the best. I have to note here that I’m not sponsored by anyone and have paid for the services of each of them and have used them on my own accord.
This post is not affiliated and does not promote or favor any of the above in unethical ways. My view is completely unbiased and it is based on numbers and facts which I will happily present in this article.
We will go point by point to help you understand and decide which hosting provider is a better fit for you based on your budget and needs.
When it comes to measuring network speed the following tools were leveraged here:
- Speedtest: Command line which you can find online for your repository
- Fast: Command line provided by netflix
- Iperf3: The ipref3 server/client setup
With those in place I was able to do end-to-end testing with popular servers and routes along with testing with public servers. All tests were conducted in the US region I tested both East and West Coast. This way I was able to get a full picture on how the hosting providers perform in the US. If you reside in Europe I did a few more tests there and the results were similar.
At some point I will write an article on how to install the above apps and deploy them in your servers to do the testing but for now lets get into the verdict.
Overall I was heavily disappointed by both one provider and ovh as soon as the server was provisioned on the advertised speed of 1gbps they were both capped at 100mbit. After opening support tickets, ovh refused to update the speed and just kept it slow which was very disappointing however one provider did do the correction but it took them over 2 weeks of back and forth. More on their support later though.
As usual AWS does go after what they advertise however their costs are prohibiting I’ll talk more about that later the surprise here and the value for money was Vultr. Vultr was by far the fastest ones for US links and connectivity. Upon testing it with various servers using all the the tools above their network speed was in the 3-5gbs advertised speed. And to show you a quick example of this here’s what you’d see.
$ speedtest Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from Choopa, LLC (XXXXX)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Comcast (Chicago, IL) [31.77 km]: 2.899 ms Testing download speed................................................................................ Download: 3760.18 Mbit/s Testing upload speed...................................................................................................... Upload: 4861.61 Mbit/s
As you can see speedtest is showing a very fast network speed for both upload and download. The results speak for themselves. I do have to mention that their network speed degrades a bit over time.
Within their network you will be seeing close to 10gbps and to test this I used iperf3 as shown below.
$ iperf3 -c XXXXXXX Connecting to host XXXXX, port 5201 [ 5] local XXXX port 44690 connected to XXXX port 5201 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr Cwnd .... [ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 1.08 GBytes 9.29 Gbits/sec 0 1.05 MBytes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr [ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 10.8 GBytes 9.28 Gbits/sec 0 sender [ 5] 0.00-10.01 sec 10.8 GBytes 9.26 Gbits/sec receiver iperf Done.
The speed above demonstrates that the inter communication is 9.2GBPs which is very close to 10GBPs.
Winner: Vultr
Disappointing: OVH
$ sudo hdparm -t -T /dev/md0 /dev/md0: Timing cached reads: 39130 MB in 1.99 seconds = 19705.56 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 798 MB in 3.00 seconds = 265.69 MB/sec
The test above runs it for cached and buffered disk reads. The more important part off course is the buffered disk reads. For cached ones sometimes the OS gets in place and pulls results from memory so I don’t fully trust it.
My point here is that one provider did very well as they advertised NVME disks, for Vultr since I had the cheaper instance which was SSD I still ended up getting similar results moreover. If you have the money definitely go with NVME but if not don’t sweat it too much.
The disappointing one here was AWS with very poor results in various instance sizes that I tested. Offcourse I tried to keep the level of money spent more over the same so I was comparing apples to apples when it comes to your expenditure.
Winner: Oneprovider
Disappointing: AWS
So now you have made your decision to go with one of the hosting providers but some issue may happen or you may want to do something simple as cancelling your service. For support my experience with all of them was not that great with the exception of AWS and to some extent Vultr.
Let me start by saying that I have used all services for a long time and have opened a lot of tickets with every single one. The most disappointing part to me is the time you wait until you get an answer to something urgent such as your server needing a reboot or being inaccessible due to a network issue. The ones that were super slow and sometimes cost me a lot of money (luckily due to redundancy) I was able to save the day were server pronto and one provider.
I wish my list was smaller but those two even with high tickets did not respond on time to my issues. Furthermore OVH despite being slow they also refused to issue a refund initially and I had to open a dispute. The reason I opened a cancellation request was that they weren’t providing the network speed they were advertising in their page.
I gave them evidence with various tools and showed them that the network speed was capped and despite that initially they said it was against their policy. Once I opened a PayPal dispute they were forced to issue the refund but if I did not pay them via PayPal I would have had to go through my credit card which is a much more lengthy process. In my opinion steer away from OVH, Oneprovider and Serverpronto if you want good support.
Vultr and AWS on the other hand are very fast to answer and usually resolve your issues. One thing I do not like about Vultr is that even though I had a dedicated server they limited the number of IPs I was able to get. This is really bad if you just billed yourself for a massive server and want to host multiple services that require different IP addressing. I opened a ticket to raise the limit as it was recommended by their own staff and still got rejected! This to me is bad customer service because there’s a miscommunication between their teams.
AWS shines here with their support despite being a bit slower than I would have wanted resolved my issues in a good and extensive way.
Winner: AWS
Disappointing: OVH, Oneprovider
And now I’m sure most of you have already came to this article for the pricing or money for value as I would say. When I’m talking about pricing I’m talking about what kind of services you get for the same amount across the board between servers.
Let me start by stating the obvious that most of you already know, AWS is very expensive if you want to have a dedicated instance running in a competitive setup in terms of memory and CPU. Having said that it’s expected because they compensate in other factors by giving you a very rich environment with many features however if you do not need those they are not good value for money especially for someone that’s highly technical and can get his way around things.
The surprise to me here was Oneprovider. That little hosting service offers really good deals on their infrastructure servers in terms of hardware and decent networking speed. Offcourse I have to stress out that this is where things stop. If you expect support and management forget it. You need to be very competitive as their infrastructure is very hands off to the owner of the server. You will be basically responsible for figuring out things and be willing to wait prolonged periods of times if something goes wrong.
Another worthwhile mention here is OVH. It is very similar to one provider on you pay for what you get but if purely pricing is your main concern you get good deals on the hardware and the setup that they offer. Despite the fact that they are cheap if things go well and your server is functioning you’d be lucky as you will have a very cheap host for good hardware. Another caveat here is that most of their fast network links are in Europe and not the US, so if you need to use it mainly in mainland America you should look into another hosting service.
Vultr is kind of somewhere in the middle for pricing I think they are more on the expensive side but it may be worth it so value wise I’d also say they are somewhere in between all of them.
Winner: Oneprovider
Disappointing: AWS
I also have some similar articles which you can find below: