[Mashiro]

Hello Post4VPS Community

A few weeks ago but also very recently I have been asked multiple times to write reviews for VPSs or for help with how to write a review. Unfortunately I don't really have time to write reviews or test servers. Some of you may have noticed that the last time I have published a review was more than several years ago.

I decided to write up a little collection of resources that help to write reviews, test your servers and gather data that you can present in reviews. I hope this will help a little to answer the question "How do I write a review and what do I need for a review?". Let's start!


What do we need to measure the performance of our server? Basically we need benchmarking software or benchmarking scripts. The following benchmarking software will allow you to test your CPU and RAM performance.

Geekbench - https://www.geekbench.com/
Installation & Usage Guide: https://mangolassi.it/post/418821

Byte Unixbench - https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench
Installation & Usage Guide: https://www.ostechnix.com/unixbench-benc...e-systems/

The next tools that we need are also either scripts or a program to test the network speed and latency of our server. Below is a little list of tools for this purpose.

Speedtest-CLI - https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
Installation & Usage Guide: https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli#j...used-to-be

wget or curl:
Simply look for speed test files which you can download via wget or curl and record the results of the download together with the location of the test server of the speed test file.

To gather general information about your server such as the exact amount of RAM + Swap, the CPU used in the host node and other information there are a couple of scripts. Most of the scripts will also provide a network speed test and a speed test for the disk of the VPS.

You can find them here: https://github.com/haydenjames/bench-scr.../README.md

You can also test the performance of the storage disk of your VPS with several other tools. Most scripts from above actually use a Linux inbuilt tool called "dd" to test the speed of the disk.

Another software to test the disk speed is "hdparm". hdparm can do much more than just speed testing though.

More information about disk speed testing: https://www.shellhacks.com/disk-speed-te...nce-linux/


About writing the review there are only a few simple things I can say. Be honest. Don't hide the bad things - this doesn't represent a good review. Don't just post the benchmarks without comments. Write about your personal experience about the VPS and its performance. How does it feel to use it? Did you encounter any issues so far? Comment on the benchmarks if you can. All those things are important. Just the bare benchmarks are not a review!

Take other reviews and their structure as a role model or help if you think they're written well and look good. Using some of the elements from good reviews can help building your own. I don't mean copying and pasting though!

I hope this is useful information for you.

[LightDestory]

Really nice thread, it will be useful for a lot of people. 
For example I didn't know where to get these particular scripts, luckily reading this review I found some links.

Why didn't you list your script? I used it and it worked for system info and disk speed test. I tried once the IPv4 network speed but I couldn't wait it to end (Washington was SO SLOW!).

I am a bit curious regarding the usage of these script, can these script infringe the AUP of VPS provider? 

[Mashiro]

Sorry for the very late reply @LightDestory.

I don't list my own bench.sh 2 script because it is outdated and I can't even maintain it anymore due to loss of access to my GitHub account. A VERY HUGE thanks for enabling 2FA without even asking me or telling me... clever idea GitHub/Microsoft. The reason for the script to take long and fail at Washington is very simple. The Softlayer server for that location is down. wget/curl will be trying to access the server over and over again until it gives up and sadly it seems like the script doesn't continue after that (depending on which option you executed).

Anyway. No one ever really bothered to help out with the script and request merges with fixes and improvements. Mostly people forked it to make their own version with different format, servers and etc. No issue with that.

I doubt that the usage of such scripts is against the AUP or ToS of a VPS or hosting provider. You're running some simple tests over a short period of time. If a bit of benchmarking is a violation of AUP/ToS I would advise you to cancel the service and run away from such a provider. Never look back...