[fitkoh]

I recently was awarded a free VPS for 1 year from a recent promotion by https://racknerd.com

I've been a client at racknerd since august, and have had a positive experience thus far, so I was very happy to win this prize.  My first service is a 3vcpu 4gb ram vps with 45gb ssd. It has great networking, the cpu load almost never goes over 50%, and no noticeable downtime. A fine vps: my only comment would be that the disc speed could be improved. Here's the YABS of my old Racknerd vps:

Wed 25 Nov 2020 04:20:28 PM GMT

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor  : Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2690 0 @ 2.90GHz
CPU cores  : 3 @ 2899.998 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 3.8 GiB
Swap       : 3.7 GiB
Disk       : 44.0 GiB

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 2.05 MB/s      (514) | 30.37 MB/s     (474)
Write      | 2.07 MB/s      (519) | 30.79 MB/s     (481)
Total      | 4.13 MB/s     (1.0k) | 61.17 MB/s     (955)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 99.85 MB/s     (195) | 96.22 MB/s      (93)
Write      | 105.16 MB/s    (205) | 102.63 MB/s    (100)
Total      | 205.01 MB/s    (400) | 198.86 MB/s    (193)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed     
                |                           |                 |                
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 511 Mbits/sec   | 327 Mbits/sec  
Online.net      | Paris, FR (10G)           | 109 Mbits/sec   | 155 Mbits/sec  
WorldStream     | The Netherlands (10G)     | 235 Mbits/sec   | 105 Mbits/sec  
Biznet          | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G)   | 240 Mbits/sec   | 118 Mbits/sec  
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 636 Mbits/sec   | 548 Mbits/sec  
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 627 Mbits/sec   | 421 Mbits/sec  
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 691 Mbits/sec   | 691 Mbits/sec  


This cost me 77$USD over 2 years. At less than 40$ a year, I'm very satisfied.

Then there's my new racknerd promo. It's a smaller package; only .5gb ram and 15gb of disk, and 1vcpu. I like that it comes provisioned with swap (some providers don't). I find it curious that nested virt is enabled... does it have much use with half a gig of ram? doubtful....

At first glance, you might not think it worth the 27$ a year they ask for it. But the YABS tell a different tale:
Wed 25 Nov 2020 09:45:08 PM GMT

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor  : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU cores  : 1 @ 3792.870 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM        : 478.0 MiB
Swap       : 512.0 MiB
Disk       : 15.7 GiB

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 398.70 MB/s  (99.6k) | 1.58 GB/s    (24.8k)
Write      | 399.75 MB/s  (99.9k) | 1.59 GB/s    (24.9k)
Total      | 798.45 MB/s (199.6k) | 3.18 GB/s    (49.7k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 1.76 GB/s     (3.4k) | 1.86 GB/s     (1.8k)
Write      | 1.86 GB/s     (3.6k) | 1.98 GB/s     (1.9k)
Total      | 3.63 GB/s     (7.0k) | 3.84 GB/s     (3.7k)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed     
                |                           |                 |                
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 628 Mbits/sec   | 271 Mbits/sec  
Online.net      | Paris, FR (10G)           | 102 Mbits/sec   | 140 Mbits/sec  
WorldStream     | The Netherlands (10G)     | 218 Mbits/sec   | 243 Mbits/sec  
Biznet          | Jakarta, Indonesia (1G)   | 249 Mbits/sec   | 44.6 Mbits/sec
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 758 Mbits/sec   | 638 Mbits/sec  
Velocity Online | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 763 Mbits/sec   | 577 Mbits/sec  
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 793 Mbits/sec   | 794 Mbits/sec  


The Ryzen processor and NVME disk make a huge difference in the promo VPS. I'm very impressed by performance with such small specs. While I am (only slightly) sad that my older vps seems overpriced and underpowered now, grats to RN for making huge strides in improving the performance of their service, and for allowing me to participate in this promotion.

[tryp4vps]

I heard about Racknerd before but it is the first time I see a VPS review from this provider. Thanks for sharing the benchmarks here.

Could you also tell a bit more how you are using the small promo VPS?

Although it has only 512 MB RAM and one vCPU core, the overall performance of this promo VPS still looks quite good.

[fitkoh]

I heard about Racknerd before but it is the first time I see a VPS review from this provider. Thanks for sharing the benchmarks here.

Could you also tell a bit more how you are using the small promo VPS?

Although it has only 512 MB RAM and one vCPU core, the overall performance of this promo VPS still looks quite good.

Good question.

It's currently running a developmental nodejs server which I'm using as a database front end for a web app I'm working on (porting from php to js). I don't think I want to form any long term plans with it. It's free, but only for a year, so if it doesn't generate revenue within that year I'll probably drop it - but it's convenient to have another testing platform at the ready

If it were yours, what would you do with it?

[tryp4vps]

...... If it were yours, what would you do with it?

Hmm... I think I would use it to develop and test some applications that need to run with large databases.

This is to, of course, try to make a good use of the NVME disk.

But then I would worry about the memory usage, because after all, it only has 512 MB RAM.

[Sn1F3rt]

Hey,

Great to know you could get yourself a free VPS, and IMO your thread title is right, although not always but sometimes things that give you true happiness are free.

Coming to the VPS, it's a little rocket that is quite evident from it's benchmarks and overall performance analysis. However, the RAM would mostly limit you from hosting production applications on the VPS, even if it was 1GB, I could have moved a couple of my production APIs to that VPS, in case I was the owner.

But anyway it's a good machine for testing purposes, and I'm sure you'll make the best use of it.

Good luck!

[fitkoh]

Hey,

Great to know you could get yourself a free VPS, and IMO your thread title is right, although not always but sometimes things that give you true happiness are free.

Coming to the VPS, it's a little rocket that is quite evident from it's benchmarks and overall performance analysis. However, the RAM would mostly limit you from hosting production applications on the VPS, even if it was 1GB, I could have moved a couple of my production APIs to that VPS, in case I was the owner.

But anyway it's a good machine for testing purposes, and I'm sure you'll make the best use of it.

Good luck!

A local expression: "When it rains, it pours."

I might have done a little too well with the RackNerd Black Friday/Cyber Monday celebration. It isn't over yet, and I'm up to 3 wins. In addition to the little Ryzen Rocket(love this term lol) in LA, I won another one in LA, this one with 1GB, and another .5GB mini, this one on the East Coast, which is super close to me 

I told the giveaway admins that I didn't need them all, and was happy to give back to the winners pool so they could go to someone else, but got no reply... I think the poor souls are just too darn busy with Black Friday business to deal with it... so for now I'm stuck with all these servers and no idea what to do with them all. I'm re-examining my panel decisions: with now 6 vps to manage I might need to opt for a panel that has functional clustering so I can manage them concurrently... either that or power them down until I find a use for them. Three VPS in the same datacenter seems to be an opportunity... for something... just not sure what yet : Maybe set up database/slave replication with load balancing? It could be a fun project, and since such a set up is for redundancy, if I don't decide to renew the vps I won't lose anything I wasn't dependent on.

I had a thought to ask RackNerd if I could donate some of my wins to the P4V community; but I don't know how much  work is involved from their end or our end to add a new offering... but I think someone in the community would like to experience the Ryzen + NVME combo that they're putting out now. It's a vast improvement over their prior service, and I just hate to see anything go to waste. If anyone has a good idea of what to do with a couple of these tight little boxes feel free to share