Cloud Computing is becoming increasingly popular, this is a direct result of the huge demand for technology services, as companies grow their infrastructure does too. There is an important trend in the industry being followed by many, to outsource the hosting of websites and software systems. With a VPS provider, you don’t need to buy expensive hardware or maintain a dedicated rack of servers to support your technological needs. Host1Plus is an interesting VPS provider because they offer flexible plans that adapt to different requirements, and the best of all (and the main reason for this review) they accept Bitcoin.
Host1Plus’s website is a perfect example of why modern businesses have to step up and improve their online presence, we are greeted with a clean beautiful looking site. The main offered services are just in front of us: Virtual Private Servers featuring SSD caching, Intel Xeon Processors, and DNS management; Solid Web Hosting with unlimited space and traffic, and a Reseller Hosting (giving you the possibility to resell Host1Plus hostings plans).
Host1Plus VPS
Host1Plus advertises itself as a provider of solid performance with 99.9% uptime and (in the case they are wrong about this) a 14-day money back guarantee. One of the main concerns that businesses and start-ups think about when they plan to acquire a VPS/Cloud Computing is the scalability issue: how to easily increase the capacity and specs of the rented server. Host1Plus offers full flexibility and control to easily upgrade to higher plans and boost the heavily demanded resources. They also claim to offer an excellent customer support, so without further ado, let’s jump to the review!
You can choose between 5 different locations to host your server (ideally, in order to reduce network latency issues, you have to choose the one which is most close to you). The locations are Chicago and Los Angeles in the USA, Sao Paulo in Brazil, Frankfurt in Germany and Johannesburg in South Africa. You also have to choose the billing cycle, the more months you sign up in advance, the bigger the discount in price (up to 11% if you choose the 24-month plan).
The guys at Host1Plus offers a total of 6 different VPS plans -ranging from the most basic 0.5 CPU Core, to the most powerful Intel Xeon eight-core CPU. The prices start at $2 per month for the basic Amber plan, to the most expensive Diamond which costs $105 a month. Host1Plus kindly gave us a free VPS to test, for this review, they delivered a free trial of the Silver plan which includes a Dual-Core CPU, 2GBs of RAM, 80GB of disk space, and up to 2000GB of monthly bandwidth.
The supported Operating systems are Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Suse. The one provided to us came with Debian 7 Wheesy.
After receiving our login details we fired up our PuTTY client to connect to the VPS. After authentification, we ran the typical “sudo apt-get update” and “sudo apt-get upgrade” to make sure we had everything in tip-top shape. Next, we ran a “df -h” command to check out the available disk space, we had 74GB available as expected. We also used the “cat /proc/cpuinfo” command to check the CPU information, everything was perfect, so we proceeded to run a full suite of benchmarks called the Unix Bench, a tool created to evaluate the performance of computers under a plethora of circumstances and load conditions, instructions on how to download and operate this tool can be found here. This benchmark is very extensive, and it can take more than 1 hour to complete, depending on the computer’s hardware.
Host1Plus Silver Plan Benchmark
The results were very good and the VPS got a 982.3 index’s score. The results showed that the server can handle a good amount of database queries.
We also ran a network speed test with the “wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O – -o /dev/null|bash” script, this basically downloads dummy files from different servers from around the world, just to make sure that we were getting the advertised bandwidth, according to Host1Plus website, the upload speed is limited to 500Mbits/s. The bandwidth test revealed that the Internet service works just as advertised, the download speeds were excellent, reaching the 300Mbits/s mark, depending on the location.
Overall, the test results were on-point with what the Silver plan was supposed to offer, it’s nice to mention that the SSD caching provides very good disk speeds, the Internet is also very fast, allowing us to quickly download and update packages, this can quickly decrease the time needed to deploy heavy applications.
The customer support was also very good, the guys were prompt to answer any question I had over the chat.
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