[Pacific Spirit]

I think it is wonderful that the HDD from Manal gives such high performance, normally HDD has reasonable speeds but these speeds are indeed comparable with SSD for a 1gbps network uplink. Carry on @Manal!

[ikk157]

Excellent and highly detailed review! I really enjoyed reading through it. I can tell you put in so much effort into it.

And wow is VPS 4 such a beast!!! I never knew we had a 10GB RAM VPS over here... and the 300GB storage is just amazing!!! Not to mention how powerful the CPU is... brilliant!

[fChk]

Hello there!.. @rudra

Sorry for the late comment. I did saw this review back when it was posted, but given its richness information-wise, I just postponed this post to when I have other data to compare it with.

I noticed that most of your benchmarks were directed to testing the performance of your disk I/O, which is understandable, given that's where bottlenecks always are. The data you came up with also served me to try a comparison between VPS4 HDD, VPS16 SSD, @'Hidden Refuge' 's NanoKVM box's NVMe, my NanoKVM box SSD and my VPS9 SSD.

The idea was to make sense of how reliable those bench scores are in comparing disk I/O performance even in the limited way of sequential read/write--given that's all we have published here.

So, to complete the picture, I'm still missing few data-point from you :

> I've noticed that, in your dd-based disk seq. write test, you didn't use the standard values (ie the values used in Hidden's bench script) and the fdatasync flag. Running instead the following command:

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sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync

Which isn't the same as running:

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dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync;

So, can we please have the output of this command run 3 times (mimicking HR's I/O script.)

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dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync && rm -f test

When comparing data, we need to stick to the same script for the comparison to make any sense. Granted, that the test doesn't have much weight in itself, but it's just a data-point for comparison purposes.

> Also, I'm curious about your I/O controllers: storage and network. I'm expecting it to be of the Virtio type. So please give us a feedback on those 2 commands:

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lshw -class disk

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lshw -class network

Apart from the above, your review is EPIC, on par with Hidden's reviews of VPS-16 and his NanoBox. Kudos for both of you!

And +1Rep for this review.

[rudra]

thanks fChk for your appreciation !
I used that dd command cause to me that seemed to be closer to the real / available / usable performance. I agree that it is usually the speed of write to write cache. But that is what we experience in our normal use.

using conv fdatasync asks the os to write from write cache to physical disk before dd exits. so here all the writes are first done to the cache and then purged to the disk. i guess it has a component of write to the disk time. so may be that's why some consider it as the measure of disk performance in a system. but in today's computers of huge cache and parallel access requests, cache purging to the disk time may not be that noticeable in real usage, unless the system is bogged down by write requests to overflow the cache...lol

oflag direct or dsync etc flag is kinda the synchronous access speed ....one may say the real speed of the disk.

i will do what you have requested when i get time and post for you. thanks again !!

[humanpuff69]

I think it is wonderful that the HDD from Manal gives such high performance, normally HDD has reasonable speeds but these speeds are indeed comparable with SSD for a 1gbps network uplink. Carry on @Manal!

yeah i also use Manal / Shadow Hosting VPS . and the speed is great . it used to be handling my extremely spiking website fine with some tweak (i use ineffective mysql query . replacing that and the server worked great again) . the specs show that it use HDD

but for the SSD like speed it maybe use SSD caching or raiding many hdd (most server raid their HDD )

[fChk]

thanks fChk for your appreciation !
I used that dd command cause to me that seemed to be closer to the real / available / usable performance. I agree that it is usually the speed of write to write cache. But that is what we experience in our normal use.

using conv fdatasync asks the os to write from write cache to physical disk before dd exits. so here all the writes are first done to the cache and then purged to the disk. i guess it has a component of write to the disk time. so may be that's why some consider it as the measure of disk performance in a system. but in today's computers of huge cache and parallel access requests, cache purging to the disk time may not be that noticeable in real usage, unless the system is bogged down by write requests to overflow the cache...lol

oflag direct or dsync etc flag is kinda the synchronous access speed ....one may say the real speed of the disk.

Exactly!... I was convinced that you knew what you're doing!... But, disk performance tests should be about the disk not system caches; or at least showing both to get an idea of how the disk performs on its own and how much boost it gets when system caches enter the scene (as is the case in practice.)

Besides, presented as you did, people not paying much attention into those numbers meaning, get the wrong idea:

I think it is wonderful that the HDD from Manal gives such high performance, normally HDD has reasonable speeds but these speeds are indeed comparable with SSD for a 1gbps network uplink. Carry on @Manal!

i will do what you have requested when i get time and post for you. thanks again !!

No rush, take your time!

[rudra]

@fChk

Do you still need those information or have you dropped the project ? let me know when you are back.

Here I would like to add two further geekbench results

one for a VPS 9
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3360403

one for VPS 4 with geekbench5 running only on one core..
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3360404

What I would like to mention that I checked and found VPS 4 is using seabios version 1.11

(the current latest is 1. 14 and the version in ubuntu 20.04 lts repo is 1.13 and in ubuntu 14.04 lts repo is showing 1.7.4)

whereas VPS18 , VPS 9 etc are using seabios 0.5.1 which has multiple issues with device and system support that got fixed in later versions ...

Many many thanks to Manal for his consistent efforts to keep their systems updated and stable and secure. That guy is awesome !!

I highly recommend Shadow Hosting servers !

Thank you @Manal

[OldMeister]

well written review great job mate! also i thought vps 4 was being used for game servers or something like that. and also im suprised that the vps has 300gb hhd instead of ssd

[rudra]

Thanks @OldMeister

But sadly i got banned for trying to download a tv show torrent with very low seeder count [old unpopular one. not downloading in india].

So everyone looking for VPS from shadow hosting, remember that they actively monitor and ban you for using torrent to download copyrighted material or tv shows, i.e. they don't practice 'looking the other way' like many other providers out there. So very good vps for other uses. But certainly not for torrent use, not even occasionally... not even once..

[deanhills]

Thanks @OldMeister

But sadly i got banned for trying to download a tv show torrent with very low seeder count [old unpopular one. not downloading in india].

So everyone looking for VPS from shadow hosting, remember that they actively monitor and ban you for using torrent to download copyrighted material or tv shows, i.e. they don't practice 'looking the other way' like many other providers out there. So very good vps for other uses. But certainly not for torrent use, not even occasionally... not even once..

@rudra  This is not correct - please don't misrepresent the facts.  You haven't been banned.  @Dynamoave you a 70% warning for 4 months.  If you had been banned you wouldn't have been able to write the above post and there would have been a strike through your name.  Where did you get the idea from that you have been banned?  Surely not from me.  Nor from Dynamo.

And PLEASE get the facts correct.  The complaints came because of a main stream copyrighted movie that you downloaded to VPS 4. Which every one knows is illegal to do.  The movie that you downloaded had a company that was able to track your IP when you downloaded the torrents. The Shadow Hosting TOS says not to download illegal materials with torrents.  Focus is on illegal materials that have been downloaded. Torrents the logical tool of choice. Torrents seem to be synonymous with people downloading materials illegally that are licensed or copyrighted. There is a link between the two.  

Not only Shadow Hosting says downloads of copyrighted material are not allowed.  It's common sense and a universal rule that the downloading of copyrighted material is against the law. As far as I know most sponsors have it written in their TOS. Not only Shadow Hosting. Not all of the sponsors however mention torrents explicitly, but again torrents seem to be the logical tool of preference that is used to download copyrighted videos or music or licensed software illegally. They seem to go together.

Since we no longer have VPS 4 I am closing this review.