WTF?!!! About 1.5 hours ago the out bound bandwidth utilization of this low end VPS went from ~50kbps to almost 5Mbps! I thought, hurray I have finally made it to the Slashdot. But then I looked through the logs and spotted something else instead. Someone was using Load Impact to “load testing” this very site. Who the @#$% did that?!

I have never used Load Impact before but I’ll be amazed that you can do free denial of service “load testing” on any site you wishes on the Internet — 50 simultaneous users are enough to crash some badly configured shared hosting sites. Anyway, this VPS at QuickWeb seems to cope pretty well. Here is the loadavg graph of the same period.

That’s it for today. Guys — don’t kill it while I am away.

Update 10 Hours Later…

Yup. LowEndBox got DDoS’ed.

Here is an updated graph of what was going on.

The big spike of in-bound traffic there 2 hours after someone’s “load test” is caused by floods invalid HTTP requests. It did not last very long, but this VPS becomes irresponsive shortly afterwards. Nginx’s error log got flooded with garbages so it filled up all the available disk space on this VPS (which only has 5GB storage). Access log also got truncated so it is not possible to get the full picture. The site did not come back properly until I free up more space.

• DDoS starts at around 15:31 UTC.
• 64,000+ requests after my logs died at 15:48 UTC.
• Top offenders are from Germany, Uruguay, Vietnam, Russia and Brazil. Most are residential IP addresses.

Someone did asked me 2 days ago that “just wondering what you use for DDoS protection on such a little RAM VPS — or don’t you?”. Okay here is my answer Jack — no I don’t have DDoS protection on this small VPS. Not worthwhile — if I want to spend more effort on it I’ll get a bigger meatier server with more active monitoring.

Now someone can go and boast to his mates on IRC “hey my botnet brought down that site with just 80MB of memory, l33t huh?!”.

And here is a question that I am thinking of throwing here for a while. I have been collecting and tracking hosting companies that provide “cheap roots” below a price point. We are getting providers from all over the place — some good, some bad. Some are still going, some have raised price, and some have since fallen into the dead pool. So next time when I have a small project that requires a new low end box — which provider from the ever growing list should I choose?

Here is an idea. Maybe we should have a list of “projects” — web sites, online stores, blogs, whatever that are actually hosted on low end providers, what their statistics is (amount of traffic, how busy the sites are, so no just-another-personal blog should apply), who they are currently hosting with and how long have they been with this low end provider. This is your show off time — tell us how 1337 you are with your memory optimization skillz, and stories on how your cheap VPS coped with being dugg/slashdotted.

I am making a start.

• LowEndBox.com — hosted on QuickWeb.co.nz‘s 80MB Xen VPS in Softlayer/Dallas since a month ago (it’s a courtesy testing VPS so free for me, thanks to Joe @ QuickWeb)
• 27k visitors/month and 92k page views/month according to Google Analytics
• Only use ~1GB of disk space & 20GB/month of data.

Never been dugg/slashdotted although I dare to try that :)

Now, your turn, and I am heading back to work.

LowEndBox has been hosting on VPSLink for more than a year now — and thanks to Dan L at VPSLink/Spry for sponsoring this blog so I have not really been paying for this Link3 VPS. Their network and stability is also quite good — my VPS always feels fast with 150+ days of uptime currently. However, as some of you might know, VPSLink has been acquired by Endurance International at the end of March. Moreover, all the VPS (I have two with VPSLink, another one that I’ve paid for) are migrating from Seattle to Boston (!!) Hmm, okay. Until you read about all the migration issues including higher latency, 24+ hours of down time, new control panel, unresponsive support, etc. I have just received my 48 hour notice of migration, so I think I better migrate my sites elsewhere first, just in case there’s any unforeseenable disaster.

I have now temporarily moved the site to my Xen VPS at 2HOST.com, which I acquired 12 months ago and now running Debian 5.

I might move back to VPSLink once the migration completes and everything stablise again. However I much prefer to be on a VPS on the west coast (LA, San Jose or Seattle). We’ll see.

• 64MB memory
• 2GB storage
• 50GB/month data transfer
• Xen

Servers are in Germany. It is now one of the cheapest VPS package around — probably the cheapest Xen provider around?! I noted that under the list of Linux distributions available, NetBSD was listed. Although it probably shouldn’t qualify as a Linux distro, but now we have a very low cost xBSD provider.

First of all. My computer died. It was no where near low end either (Dell Latitude business laptop), but somehow the hard drive just decided to die on me. ddrescue has been running for 2 days and no guarantee that it’s going to be fixed. So far I am counting it as total lost — very frustrated.

On the other hand there is also Easter holidays, which I will be away from computers to actually get near to mountains and beaches for 4 days. I will be back on 6 April and hopefully I’ll be able to borrow a computer somewhere to continue my posting.

Happy Easter everyone!

Yes. Go ahead and DO IT. I know you always wanted it — be the LowEndBox fanboi/fangal! Here is your chance to show off your support on Facebook :)

Update: Now we have 1 fan! Congratulations to Eydrian from TheServerExperts :)

Interestingly I spotted LowEndBox got mentioned on one of the WHT discussion thread here, when someone asked about “reliable reviews of VPS providers”. I have tested out more than a dozen VPS providers over the years and many of them are in the low end range — however many rarely got posted here.

Why? Because they are most likely negative reviews. Providers that die on me while I am testing them. Those that provide bad services. Or simply bad configuration all over the places that make my little virtual server unusable.

Providers hate it. I have previous experience (not this blog, but something else I’ve reviewed) that the merchant stalked me and chased after my back after a mixed-but-generally-negative review. Maybe it could be a question for the readers — would you like to see negative reviews posted here?

If you have some reviews that you would like to share with other readers on LowEndBox, also feel free to email that to me (contact at lowendbox.com) if you like to have them published.

1. I have moved the VPSLink exclusive offer to a new page — Low End Exclusive Deals. Also thanks to Matt Hall at Kerplunc.com for offering long running 25% off discount for SuperBytes (when you quote LOWENDBOX at checkout).

   All the other providers — feel free to send our readers exclusive offers as well :)

2. LowEndBox has been accepted to BuySellAds advertising network and now you can buy 125×125 buttons for just $10/month! Yeah I know it is more expensive than a low end VPS but that’s the minimum required by BSA.

   It would be my fund for testing out some low end boxes listed on this blog :)

Now it’s my turn to ask the readers — what do you use your under $7/month VPS for?

I had a few ones over the years that I generally use them for:

• Host a few PHP sites that won’t make me cry if they suddenly go off-line (using Lighttpd/Nginx + PHP/FastCGI).
• Secondary MX for my domains (using Postfix + GLD for greylisting).
• Provide backup space for my more expensive VPS & production sites.
• Jabber bots + server providing various services (I’m a big XMPP fan).
• Private proxy via SSH tunnel or TinyProxy (I don’t live in US).
• Cacti monitor for all my other boxes.

Obviously not all of them on the same 64MB VPS, but I guess it is quite possible doing all that for under 7 bucks a month consider how much memory (256MB+ !!!) you can get these days from some VPS providers (oversold? loss leader? not my business…)

Now it’s your turn. What do you do with your low end box?

First of all, WebHostingTalk was hacked with user data compromised. Moreover, the h4x0r has also destroyed the backup server, before wiping out the database tables on WHT. iNET ended up restoring an old backup from October last year, and WHT is pretty much broken as far as I can see.

That’s bad. Because most of the offers I have posted are sourced from WHT. So no WHT — no new offers here at LowEndBox (and I am too lazy to hunt them down myself). They’ll probably going to go offline for quite a while. So expect a quiet week this week :)

Then EveryDNS, the DNS provider for LowEndBox.com was offline from about an hour ago. That means no one can access this site unless you already know the IP address. D’oh. Update: It appears the EveryDNS problem is PEBKAC. Double D’oh.

/me now back to low end box hunting.

So here we have it. Low End Box Forums.

Currently running barebone bbPress, which I haven’t yet bothered to set up a theme for it. Dump stuff there, and let’s get the talk going.

However, one problem of being cheap is — you usually get what you paid for, i.e. cheap service. And I am not talking about unmanaged service where you are responsible to set up every piece of software and are responsible to keep the box up-to-date. I am talking about cheap & nasty hosts. Some of them are probably under-age with no previous sysadmin experience. Some put artificial limit on your server to explicitly cripple them to completely unusable. Some never reply your support tickets, when your server went off-line every second day. Some even accuse you for running warez or malware in order to boot you off, when all you have is securely patched WordPress blog site. (Okay, I know mentioning WordPress and security is a bit of oxymoron but hopefully you’ve got my point…)

If you want horror stories, hosting industry is never short of them, and it is especially true with low end products like the VPS listed here. Got an email from M.N. complaining about a VPS provider that I’ve listed here. I am publishing the email but I am masking off the name of the host, as I have no prove whether the claim is true.

… But I’m having problems with one I found in you site. <provider name removed> My service started on the first week of june, and stop working 2 weeks later.

I would like you to put a post, alerting people to stay away from they.

You can’t get in contact with then in any way. I tried every single email, contact form and phone calls.

Since his domain was created at <date removed, somewhere early 2008>, I’m pretty sure that it’s site is a fraud.

Yes it sucks to have your server offline but the provider is no where to be found. Looking at their history is a good way to check their credibility, and a domain that was registered recently might be a sign of a new business, which might be a sign of untrustworthy. I do not want to be the one who is judgemental here so I do not really want to post my discoveries — so make sure you do your own home work!

On another note, this blog seems to be popular amongst the Chinese/Taiwanese VPS users, and being able to read/write Chinese myself, reading their sites give me some insight on what providers I ought to avoid (thank you Wayne and Matt for being the guinea pig :)

Currently I have two low-end VPS with Datarealm and RapidXen. Both of them are pretty much trouble free so far. Here are some tips on picking the right low-end provider:

• If you are not sure which one to go for, pick VPS providers with Xen over OpenVZ alternatives. You’ll find less surprises with your VPS as it behaves more like a dedicated server. It is arguably more demanding to manage so you are less likely to get an incompetent provider as well.

• If you are not game enough, stick to the big and trustworthy names. From the comparison matrix, I will probably go for either VPSLink, Datarealm or VPS Village. VPSLink is backed by Spry.com, which has many many years of managed Virtuozzo experience in Seattle, WA. VPS Village is backed by GrokThis.net, which again has years of experience in Xen hosting in Philadelphia, PA. Virtual-Dedicated.net/Datarealm is too a veteran with over a decade of experience in hosting industry.

• Do a search on WebHosting Talk, and never be the guinea pig. If the service looks too good to be true, there are always going to be people trying them out for you. Wait for at least 2-3 months for follow up reports if you want to be sure.

The reason why I picked RapidXen is because some kind of trust I guess. When I did my own research on that business, I found it was started by William Pitcock/nenolod, who is a recognisable FOSS and Debian contributor, i.e. someone who probably know more about server administration than you do.

Well. At the end of the day shopping for a cheap VPS is just like shopping for the cheap Chinese import on eBay — sometimes you just don’t know what you are going to get. Actually shopping for VPS is arguably easier because there are a lot of tools (Google, WHT, this blog, etc) you can use to do your own research before you commit a purchase. And make sure you do!

1. Because you are cheap. You are a starving student who does not have $50/month renting a managed VPS to host your forums. Or maybe you do, but you have accidentally spent $45 more than you should in the pub. After all we all want the best bang for the bucks, don’t we?

2. Because you are frugal. You get annoyed when people mentioned the word “cPanel” or “Apache” or “Java” or anything that occupies tons of memory doing nothing, and you enjoy squeezing the last bit of juice from something small and nice. Why waste all these resources — memory, disk space and electricity — when you can achieve the same with a smaller box?

3. Because you are bored. Is there anything that’s more fun than trying to run your entire Django stack, all the way from Apache mod_python to MySQL database, on a 64MB VPS? Yes sure! Trying to get a RoR stack to run on the VPS of same spec.

4. Because you want to learn. Sometimes we can get lazy and rely on GUI and web-based control panels… How dare you?! The best way to learn Linux, xBSD and other operating systems is by dipping into the core. The best control panel? Don’t tell me SSH + Vim is not enough (yes you don’t even need Emacs). A small box will force you to work hard and learn hard.

5. Because you want to brag. Just wander into any discussion thread on WebHostingTalk where someone asks “Do I need 512MB to run my WordPress blogs properly?” Tell them 64MB is more than enough.