[LightDestory]

So, I received VPS 14 likely 3-4 months ago, I couldn't review the VPS sooner due to my busy life. But here I am, ready to let you know about my experience with this amazing VPS sponsored by BladeNode (
@phoenixwolf)!

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Short introduction

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VPS 14 is a new VPS which entered Post4VPS family on October. This VPS is one of the most powerful available, it comes with no control panel so it is suggested to apply only to advanced user. It is located in Dallas, USA. I am from Italy and the latency has not affected me in any way. There isn't much to say with words... let's numbers speak!

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Review

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Let's start with the Specifications

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Disk Space: 200 GB HDD

RAM: 8 GB + (1GB of Swap)

vCores: [i]4 cores (3.50GHz)[/i]

IP Addresses: 1x IPv4

Virtualization: KVM

Monthly Traffic: 1 TB

Location: Dallas(US)

Control Panel: No CP for the Holder

Connection: 1Gbps

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Do you like benchmark? I do

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Unfortunately I couldn't use Post4VPS's benchmark script by @sohamb03 because it couldn't complete the test successfully. So this time I used an interesting script called "Yet-Another-Bench-Script" available on github.

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System Info

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Processor  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz
CPU cores  : 4 @ 3491.912 MHz
AES-NI     : Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : Disabled
RAM        : 7.8 GiB
Swap       : 1024.0 MiB
Disk       : 196.8 GiB
OS         : Debian 10

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Network speed (IPv4 only)

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Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed
                |                           |                 |
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 874 Mbits/sec   | 864 Mbits/sec
Online.net      | Paris, FR (10G)           | 866 Mbits/sec   | 863 Mbits/sec
WorldStream     | The Netherlands (10G)     | 845 Mbits/sec   | 867 Mbits/sec
Biznet          | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G)   | 573 Mbits/sec   | 365 Mbits/sec
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 928 Mbits/sec   | 926 Mbits/sec
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 888 Mbits/sec   | 909 Mbits/sec
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 924 Mbits/sec   | 929 Mbits/sec
Iveloz Telecom  | Sao Paulo, BR (2G)        | 823 Mbits/sec   | 828 Mbits/sec

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Disk Speed (I/O operations)

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fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 284.44 MB/s  (71.1k) | 2.88 GB/s    (45.0k)
Write      | 285.19 MB/s  (71.2k) | 2.90 GB/s    (45.3k)
Total      | 569.64 MB/s (142.4k) | 5.78 GB/s    (90.3k)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 1.83 GB/s     (3.5k) | 3.39 GB/s     (3.3k)
Write      | 1.93 GB/s     (3.7k) | 3.61 GB/s     (3.5k)
Total      | 3.76 GB/s     (7.3k) | 7.01 GB/s     (6.8k)

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GeekBenchmark

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Test            | Value
               |
Single Core     | 999
Multi Core      | 2667
Full benchmark here: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5383431

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My experience

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Due to my busy life I didn't have much time to play around with the VPS. I have manly deployed stuff using FTP and github. I have successfully setup a CI/CD pipeline from github to my vps. I didn't much stress test because... let's be clear: the specs are listed above, what you do except from them? Bottleneck? Don't joke. To give troubles to this machine you must do very very heavy workload. I have never experience a down time since October.
Some of my adventures are:

• Deploying web service stuff related to university projects;
  
• Run for a week or so a minecraft server;
  
• Setting up a sort of certificates vault
  

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Conclusion

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VPS 14, sponsored by Bladenode, is a very powerful and valuable VPS. Like my previous VPS, VPS 9 sponsored by VirMach, this VPS comes with no control panel, so if you don't want flood our poor @deanhills of support tickets you need to know how to use Unix-systems.
You can run almost everything on this VPS, just be a good user and respect Bladenode's ToS!

I want to end this review thanking:

• @Dynamo, as always, for creating Post4VPS community that allowed me to use this VPS;
  
• @deanhills, this time around I didn't open any support ticket but he is always there ready to reply;
  
• @Mashiro for his tutorials, I used some of them to set-up my environment;
  
• Bladenode (@phoenixwolf) for sponsoring this amazing VPS;
  

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[fChk]

I'm having a hard time conciliating between the fio bench test and the presumption that the disk storage is HDD-based!.. Something is most probably wrong here ?

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Disk Space: 200 GB HDD

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Disk Speed (I/O operations)

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fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
 ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 284.44 MB/s  (71.1k) | 2.88 GB/s    (45.0k)
Write      | 285.19 MB/s  (71.2k) | 2.90 GB/s    (45.3k)
Total      | 569.64 MB/s (142.4k) | 5.78 GB/s    (90.3k)
          |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
 ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 1.83 GB/s     (3.5k) | 3.39 GB/s     (3.3k)
Write      | 1.93 GB/s     (3.7k) | 3.61 GB/s     (3.5k)
Total      | 3.76 GB/s     (7.3k) | 7.01 GB/s     (6.8k)

I hope the next holder will give us more system information than there is in this review, especially disk I/O.

For the CPU, we now know that VPS-14 has 4 vCPUs (aka vCores in some quarters) which makes it the Best VPS in the P4V pool--provided that the storage is SSD-based as I tend to suspect from the provided benchmark.

[phoenixwolf]

I'm having a hard time conciliating between the fio bench test and the presumption that the disk storage is HDD-based!.. Something is most probably wrong here ?


I hope the next holder will give us more system information than there is in this review, especially disk I/O.

For the CPU, we now know that VPS-14 has 4 vCPUs (aka vCores in some quarters) which makes it the Best VPS in the P4V pool--provided that the storage is SSD-based as I tend to suspect from the provided benchmark.

The storage of this VPS is HDD based. The speeds you are seeing are because of raid 5 storage. Where you get speed and redundancy.

[fChk]

The storage of this VPS is HDD based. The speeds you are seeing are because of raid 5 storage. Where you get speed and redundancy.

Okay thanks!.. I must say that even in RAID-5 array config., those speeds are impressive for HDD storage in random read/write tests!.. Must be RAID-side caching that made the difference! Kudos then for that server setup. Unfortunately, I won't apply for it this time around as I'm just midway in setting up my project on VirMach's VPS-9.

Again, to the next BladeNode's VPS-14 holder, please be more thorough in your benchmark tests; it's the only opportunity we have to see what lies behind the label. There is a set of good VPS reviews that you can use as a blueprint and if you need help, just ask!

[tiwil]

Connection speed looks very awesome. It almost reaches the maximum level which is 1Gbps. I rarely saw VPS with such high speed. Sometimes I only get ~250Mbps while the speed promoted is 1Gbps. The specs overall have show that Bladenode's VPS is awesome.

Well, overall it's a great review!

[rudra]

I very much like the format of this review and how you finished it with sincere thanks to the cool folks here. Just that i would have liked some more tests and benchmarks and may be some at different times during a day.

Thank you for this good review !

[fChk]

I did forget to comment on this part of the OP:

Unfortunately I couldn't use Post4VPS's benchmark script by @sohamb03 because it couldn't complete the test successfully. (....)

That's because the Australia end-point is dead, just comment it out in the script to skip it, as shown below:

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    # Australia Speed Test
#    slmel=$( wget -4 -O /dev/null http://speedtest.mel01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip 2>&1 | awk '/\/dev\/null/ {speed=$3 $4} END {gsub(/\(|\)/,"",speed); print speed}' )
#    echo "Melbourne, AU        Softlayer    $slmel " | tee -a $HOME/bench.log

@sohamb03 needs to look into this, as his end-point too is dead for awhile (even before the VPS loss.) which brings me to suggest for adding a timeout into the script which prevents this kind of recurring issues when any end-point is offline for whatever reason.

[Sn1F3rt]

Yes my node is down since a while, actually since the last reinstall when I forgot to put it back up. As soon as my VPS is back with me, I'll bring it up.

@fChk ... Thanks for the suggestion, timeouts and tries have been implemented. Also, the dead Australian node has been replaced :- https://github.com/sohamb03/bench-sh/com...306056bcb9

[Honey]

Wow those specs look really good, I really enjoyed reading your review

The geekbench5 score is pretty good too, the single core performance is that of a 10th gen intel i3!

I noticed you mentioned Minecraft, were you running a vanilla server or a modded minecraft server? If Vanilla, I'd recommend you try spinning up a modded minecraft server, would be interesting to see how the server handles that

[LightDestory]

Wow those specs look really good, I really enjoyed reading your review

The geekbench5 score is pretty  good too, the single core performance is that of a 10th gen intel i3!

I noticed you mentioned Minecraft, were you running a vanilla server or a modded minecraft server? If Vanilla, I'd recommend you try spinning up a modded minecraft server, would be interesting to see how the server handles that

As I wrote on the review, I ran a vanilla Minecraft server for likely a week or so. The performance was great, the server was maxed at 5 slots and with 5 players there wasn't much lag, everything was fine. When I start a minecraft server I use a script to generate large portion of the map so during gameplay there isn't much of world generation.

Regarding your idea about modded version... it is a nice idea but I think that performance can only get worse. The Minecraft server is developed in a single-thread mode, I mean, the process doesn't use the multi-thread capabilities. So 2 vCore or 4vCore doesn't matter... what makes the difference is the raw strength of the single core.

I will give a try on modded server when I have time