LowEndBoxes Review (LEBRE) side project

poisson

@mfs said:
I do appreciate the effort in helping out other and giving them a somewhat sensible guideline in their purchases. Anyway, as willie noted, some people on LE* are very likely to flock on an unsustainable deal and, when deadpool comes, they will be self-indulging with their past bad choices (it happened even in the current deadpool, I spotted at least a couple of posts like this). The circle is doomed to be repeated. Other people, more experienced, like to play with tiny boxes and aren't worried about abstract references. Also,

poisson said: evaluate paper specs

I have a few issues with "paper specs". Two vCPUs can perform very differently depending on node density and allowed burst; the same disk space may perform very differently depending on architectural choices; the same price tag won't compare support, professionalism or location. Even formal passmark scores may be totally different depending on how many patches have been applied against spectre/meltdown... same goes for bw (multihoming and upstream providers come into play)... and so on

In my view there's no way out but offering some sort of critical guidance to people who are willing to learn from someone's experience and/or expertise. Like: be wary of companies with hidden whois no history no contacts suddenly proposing incredible deals, for starters. Or: if you're looking for storage, the fact that you'll have only 1/4 thread with minimal burst may be irrelevant for your case. Or: if you're trying to build your own VPN/wireguard, who cares about storage. And it's still really the tip of the iceberg.
It's way more difficult but it should be done, it's the only way out.
Critical Thinking is difficult sometimes and people tend to jump to a pre-defined solution. Also because a reasoned solution seems exhausting. There's also sometimes the desire to gamble a little bit
Sure a whitelist is better than a blacklist. Yet a reasoned collection of critical tools about how to properly evaluate a box for desired usage cases may turn out useful, along an illustration of specs and abstract ratios.
It's difficult to give a review after three or six months already, even with all sorts of benchmarks and recorded performance...
It's a difficult project to carry out to begin with, even more in someone' spare time.

All the best

TL;DR teach a man to fish...

I absolutely agree, but these will take time. Paper specification evaluation is helpful for making quick decisions on a limited time deal. Besides, I only feature whitelisted hosts, and these hosts are almost guaranteed to be managing the node density well enough such that actual performance based on paper specs should not be too far off most of the time. That I think is sufficient for now.

I am developing a standardised performance benchmarking indicator list called LEBRE-X (LEBRE Extended) where I will measure the following:

• CPU and Memory (Geekbench 5)
• Disk (fio random read-write)
• Network performance (iperf3 using my own private servers: Utah, Chicago, Warsaw, Germany, India (uncomfirmed but likely), Singapore, Perth, Sydney)

These will be much more indicative of actual performance because the tests will be run daily at random times for minimum of 2-3 weeks or more (ideally should be 4-6 weeks but I prefer to underpromise). Location wise I think I pretty much have covered most of the key geographical locations LES users come from with my private iperf servers.

Also, this is limited to servers I can get my hands on (either owned or if people on LES who have idling servers are willing to contribute them for testing purposes). LEBRE-X is in the pipeline but I currently have other things to see to, so once I clear them, there will be a bunch of longitudinal LEBRE-X review data to digest.

Give me some time and I will do my due contributions for the community!

poisson

@uptime Thanks for the input! I value your opinions

The list has been massively updated and any refugee from the recent mass shutdown have more choices to choose from.

ialexpw

Surprised to see that Ramnode are not in the whitelist either?

poisson

@ialexpw said:
Surprised to see that Ramnode are not in the whitelist either?

Thanks for another pair of eyes. Will put them up

ouvoun

I am developing a standardised performance benchmarking indicator list called LEBRE-X (LEBRE Extended) where I will measure the following:

• CPU and Memory (Geekbench 5)
• Disk (fio random read-write)
• Network performance (iperf3 using my own private servers: Utah, Chicago, Warsaw, Germany, India (uncomfirmed but likely), Singapore, Perth, Sydney)

+1 for these additional data points. While Geekbench isn’t always indicative of actual performance due to the inherent instability of shared hosts, I’ve still found it to be quite helpful for measuring average performance that more often than not ends up being relatively accurate.

Thank you for your valuable website! I’ve enjoyed reading your reviews.

poisson

@ouvoun said:

I am developing a standardised performance benchmarking indicator list called LEBRE-X (LEBRE Extended) where I will measure the following:

• CPU and Memory (Geekbench 5)
• Disk (fio random read-write)
• Network performance (iperf3 using my own private servers: Utah, Chicago, Warsaw, Germany, India (uncomfirmed but likely), Singapore, Perth, Sydney)

+1 for these additional data points. While Geekbench isn’t always indicative of actual performance due to the inherent instability of shared hosts, I’ve still found it to be quite helpful for measuring average performance that more often than not ends up being relatively accurate.

Thank you for your valuable website! I’ve enjoyed reading your reviews.

My day job is a researcher and we fight about methods all the time. I think all things considered, Geekbench is probably the best composite measure representing CPU and RAM capability. The rest are relatively deficient in one way or another. When a better method shows up, I will be happy to adjust!

Nick_A

@poisson said: Thanks for another pair of eyes. Will put them up

MikePT

Excellent work. Well done and thank you for this list. Its being spread around!

poisson

Quick question on Avoro. Looks like a solid German host worthy of whitelisting. Do share your experience if any.

poisson

Update

Too many flash deals, no time to review them all. Therefore, I am doing a Twitter and a Weibo account to quickly post latest deals from whitelisted providers so that that the LES community can be updated on latest offers even if they don't log in 20 times a day.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lowendboxesR
Weibo: https://weibo.com/u/7361143065

deepak_leb

Bro add nexusbytes @seriesn & @Delong on that reliable providers list. @poisson .

Ok it was already there ?. Sorry for not noticing it properly

whoami

I reckon you should add Ransom IT to the whitelist. The VMs aren't super cheap but the dedicated servers are great value. Oliver has been around a while and his service is good.

poisson

@whoami said:
I reckon you should add Ransom IT to the whitelist. The VMs aren't super cheap but the dedicated servers are great value. Oliver has been around a while and his service is good.

Thanks for bringing them to my attention. Anyone else has tried Ransom IT? That name is pretty neat!

uptime

@poisson said:

@whoami said:
I reckon you should add Ransom IT to the whitelist. The VMs aren't super cheap but the dedicated servers are great value. Oliver has been around a while and his service is good.

Thanks for bringing them to my attention. Anyone else has tried Ransom IT? That name is pretty neat!

@dahartigan and @daniel and @trewq may be able to add some color to that picture

would warrant at least one of these guys might know a guy who knows a guy there, or something like that.

as for me - I've just heard the name enough to assume they are definitely not a summerhost

Daniel

I haven't used RansomIT directly myself, but I think @mikho's Australian NAT VPSes are hosted there. Those things are faster than some of the VPSes I've tried that cost much more.

For Australian VPSes, I'm using https://quantumcore.com.au/. Their parent company (GoHosting) has been open since 2003 so I don't think they're going to deadpool any time soon. Their prices are in AUD and the cheapest plan is AU$5 (around US$3.45) per month.

Neoon

RansomIT is lit, besides he had some cheap services that he all discontinued, such as 12$/y KVM.

poisson

Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys! They are going up on the whitelist

whoami

@Daniel said:
I haven't used RansomIT directly myself, but I think @mikho's Australian NAT VPSes are hosted there. Those things are faster than some of the VPSes I've tried that cost much more.

For Australian VPSes, I'm using https://quantumcore.com.au/. Their parent company (GoHosting) has been open since 2003 so I don't think they're going to deadpool any time soon. Their prices are in AUD and the cheapest plan is AU$5 (around US$3.45) per month.

Yeah Quantum Core is really good. I did a comparison of a bunch of similarish boxes I have with various hosts on OzBargain and their CPU performance on the ZNC compile was close to my home ESXi with dual E5-2643 v3s.

Here's the post for those interested: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/496882#comment-7985267

cybertech

Generally in the geekbench4 3000 single core range , I have a strong preference for Xeon Gold's as well. The I/O is most consistent across all providers tested that use em.

poisson

2019 is coming to and end, and so far I have been able to give fairly regular attention to this side project with help from the great LES community. At the closing of 2019, there are currently:

65 whitelisted providers
15 LEBRE value evaluations

Because LEBRE evaluations takes time and I don't have time to evaluate the waves of great offers from whitelisted providers, I will only pick those that are more exceptional for review. However, I have set up a Twitter account (and a Telegram public channel that forwards the tweets) to post offers from whitelisted providers I am unable to review. I hope this will result in more visibility for whitelisted providers and reduce the visibility of the bad apples.

Finally, coming in 2020 will be LEBRE Xtended reviews, where I will provide longitudinal evaluations (around a month's worth of daily benches) on boxes that either I own or have been kindly donated by LES community member for evaluation. These reviews will probably be published at a lower rate than LEBRE offers because it is an extensive review of lots of data (and takes even more time than the usual LEBRE reviews), but I trust that they will be sufficiently helpful in terms of indicating real-world performance.

I will try my best to keep this project afloat for the entire 2020, and let's look forward to the next big bumper crop of deals during Easter 2020 (hopefully we can have @FAT32 come up with easter egg hunts on LES for Easter 2020).

seriesn

@poisson said:
2019 is coming to and end, and so far I have been able to give fairly regular attention to this side project with help from the great LES community. At the closing of 2019, there are currently:

65 whitelisted providers
15 LEBRE value evaluations

Because LEBRE evaluations takes time and I don't have time to evaluate the waves of great offers from whitelisted providers, I will only pick those that are more exceptional for review. However, I have set up a Twitter account (and a Telegram public channel that forwards the tweets) to post offers from whitelisted providers I am unable to review. I hope this will result in more visibility for whitelisted providers and reduce the visibility of the bad apples.

Finally, coming in 2020 will be LEBRE Xtended reviews, where I will provide longitudinal evaluations (around a month's worth of daily benches) on boxes that either I own or have been kindly donated by LES community member for evaluation. These reviews will probably be published at a lower rate than LEBRE offers because it is an extensive review of lots of data (and takes even more time than the usual LEBRE reviews), but I trust that they will be sufficiently helpful in terms of indicating real-world performance.

I will try my best to keep this project afloat for the entire 2020, and let's look forward to the next big bumper crop of deals during Easter 2020 (hopefully we can have @FAT32 come up with easter egg hunts on LES for Easter 2020).

Not trying to sound like a shill, but thanks to your list, I added two new VPS providers for my own personal usage Keep up the great work my good man. I hope to see that list grow and prevent others from getting spammed!

DP

@seriesn said:
Not trying to sound like a shill, but thanks to your list, I added two new VPS providers for my own personal usage Keep up the great work my good man. I hope to see that list grow and prevent others from getting spammed!

Scammed you mean? ☺️

seriesn

@thedp said:

@seriesn said:
Not trying to sound like a shill, but thanks to your list, I added two new VPS providers for my own personal usage Keep up the great work my good man. I hope to see that list grow and prevent others from getting spammed!

Scammed you mean? ☺️

Yes. Fat fingers and auto correct. One or the other. Or both.