Hello LEBers, My name is Mark, the second member of the LEB trio and I’ll be your pilot this evening. Ashley from VMPort has sent us the following OpenVZ Medium listing with approximately 30% discount and also a KVM offer for LEB members.

Ashley was helpful enough to include the following test IP’s

• UK > RackCenter #1, Hampshire > 188.227.165.34
• DE > Equinix DC, Dusseldorf > 80.83.123.200
• US > WholeSale Internet, Kansas City > 63.141.247.106
• US (KVM) > NJ3 Equinx > 108.60.137.162

• OpenVZ Medium £4.42/month ($6.95USD/month)
• 512MB RAM
• 1024MB Burst
• 60GB HDD Space
• 2 CPU Cores
• 600GB Data transfer on 100Mbit
• Signup Link (Promo Code: LEB)

• KVM Tiny £4.42/month ($6.95USD/month)
• 12GB HDD Space (Based on a 4X 15K RAID10 disk setup)
• 256MB Dedicated RAM (DDR3/ECC)
• 500GB Data Transfer (On a 1000Mbit connection)
• 1 Xeon “E3-1230″ CPU Core @ 3.20GHz with HT
• 1 Dedicated IPv4 Address
• SolusVM Control Panel
• 100% Non oversold resources
• Signup Link (Promo Code: C5BZDN8K)

VMPort’s offerings are based out of Germany, the UK and the USA with the KVM Nodes running Intel Xeon E3-1230 CPU’s and 15K Raid 10 storage setups.

• UK/AT – XEN/OpenVZ mini
• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 100GB/month data transfer
• £4.25/month Xen (Direct signup link)
  £3.50/month OpenVZ (Direct signup link)
  

• USA West Coast – XEN/OpenVZ mini
• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer
• £4/month Xen (Direct signup link)
  £2.50/month OpenVZ (Direct signup link)
  

Servers in either Manchester UK, Vienna AT or Fremont in West Coast USA. 20% VAT is payable for those in UK/EU. Both PayPal and Google Checkout are accepted. Also note that provisioning is currently a manual process which can take up to 12 hours wait. According to CompaniesHouse, Castlegem Ltd has been registered since 2008 and they are boasting 1,400+ customers according to Bernhard. Bernhard was from Austria running the Progipark team that has been doing business since the ’80s, and been on the Internet since 1995.

They do have funny DNS server name. Fartling? YouNaughtyMonsters? Geez…

• 128MB memory
• 2.5GB storage
• 20GB/month data transfer on 40Mbps
• Xen/Custom VM

Servers might get deployed to their old datacentre, RapidSwitch in UK (test IP: 95.154.254.253), or their new datacentre (which I can’t seem to be able to find info about). As I have previously stated, they have been on LowEndBox for more than 3 years now, and XenVZ have been in business for more than 4 years. They have much expansion recently with new racks in a second datacentre in UK and became a full RIPE NCC member. They are using their own control panel integrated with their own billing system. It’s not pretty but very functional. I have actually been a customer of XenVZ for about a year and was very happy with their service.

While their servers have 100/1000Mbps ports, “LowEndXen 2012″ is port limited to 40Mbps to ensure fair distribution of bandwidth. I doubt you need more though, since you’ll easily chew up your 20GB monthly quota. For those looking for higher plans, I found their Christmas offers are still available with 512MB Xen VPS + 250GB/month for £3.75/month. Some other points that Sean wishes to mention:

• Since these are rock bottom price, no technical assistance beyond control panel provided by them, i.e. you are on your own once you are on the command prompt.
• Be considerate when you think about asking for refund, especially when providers are already having tiny margin on these plans.

• 256MB memory
• 20GB storage on RAID10
• 150GB/month data transfer
• 1x vCPU core
• Xen

PayPal is the only available payment method. Their servers are with BlueSquare in Maidenhead UK, according to their About Us page. On the same page they also stated that they use HP Proliant for servers and LeftHand for SAN storage. Michael disclosed that VMHosts provide “True Cloud XEN infrastructure” without any specific details. OnApp maybe?

Domain has been registered for 18 months, although “VMHosts” does not exist in CompanyHouse. Michael seems to be a seasoned IT solutionist though. Reasonable ToS — no IRC, no torrent, and no dodgy Perl scripts.

• 128MB memory/128MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer
• 4x vCPU cores
• Xen/SolusVM

Corresponding WHT offer here (different code, same discount). They have servers with ServerHouse in UK (test IP: 195.49.147.100). OnePoundWebHosting is a registered UK company since 2006 (company number: 05886975). IRC is explicitly forbidden in ToS. Sounds like a strong team — but it could still be a one man show, like how this review almost 5 years ago has described.

• 128MB memory
• 20GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer
• 1x IPv4 + /64 IPv6 (fully native & routed)
• Xen/Custom panel

Payment in PayPal or credit card, and 20% VAT is payable for those in UK/EU. Servers in UK (test IP: 109.200.19.115 or 2a02:2658:1011:1::face). Evorack has had pretty good track record here on LowEndBox and they are owned by UK registered company “ABPNI Computer Solutions Ltd” since 2004.

• 512MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
• 20GB storage
• 500GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Annual payment also gets 10% off further discount + a free .com, .net or .co.uk domain registration, by logging a support ticket after signing up. Their servers are with RapidSwitch in Maidenhead UK, and you can get the detail of test IP/download files here (test IP: 78.129.251.251). A well established UK hosting company since 2002 with good reviews here in the past.

• 128MB memory/128MB swap
• 2.5GB storage on SAN
• 50GB/month data transfer on 1Gbits
• 1x IPv4 + IPv6
• Xen/OnApp

Servers in the Synergy House in UK (test IP: 217.114.62.48). Quite a bit low in resources. However from the descriptions on the website, it looks like a nice setup with redundancy everywhere, and James said that it would “outperform pretty much everything on LEB”. We’ll see.

• 256MB memory/256MB swap
• 25GB storage
• 350GB/month data transfer
• Xen PV/SolusVM

Direct link for signup. You can pay by either Google Checkout, PayPal or credit card. Their servers are in Spectrum House in Maidenhead UK (test IP: 95.154.246.177, see Chris’ comment), and xenSmart has been trading as PCSmart Hosting since 2006. They have in fact been on LowEndBox for more than 2 years. Just quoting Pascal’s comment here:

Been with them for 10 months now, service has been excellent! Not the cheapest indeed, but it pays back in reliability.

• 1024MB guaranteed/1536MB burstable memory
• 15GB storage
• 1TB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

They are taking PayPal only. Servers with Redstation in Hampshire UK. IRC is explicitly forbidden in their ToS. Their domain has only been registered since July, with WHOIS privacy protection and their whole website is hosted with HostGator (who uses non-redundant NS setup). “Meteor” but with a single-eyed green man theme. They seem to be doing mostly Minecraft hosting, as when you google “meteorvps”, most results are Minecraft related. Chris is based in North England, and is ~16-17 years old from the age he filled out on some online forums.

• 128MB memory/256MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 400GB/month data transfer
• 1x IPv4 + 10x IPv6
• Xen/SolusVM

They’ll take payment in PayPal or credit card. Their servers are in Maidstone UK (test IPv4: 91.220.127.200, IPv6: 2a00:1c10:3:634::10). I guess quite a few people here can vouch their service — simply one of the best UK providers featured here. They are also having Hyper-V based Windows VPS in the works & there might be a LowEndBox special for that. Stay tuned.

• 256MB memory/256MB swap
• 25GB storage
• 300GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• 2x IPv4 (1 needs justification)
• Xen/SolusVM

Payments in either Google Checkout, PayPal or credit card. Servers on their own hardware in Bluesquare DC in Maidenhead, UK (test IP: 94.76.194.5). Registered business in UK since mid-2007. You’ll find generally positive feedbacks here and on WHT.

• 128MB memory
• 10GB storage on RAID10
• 200GB/month data transfer on 1Gbps
• 1x IPv4 + 8x IPv6
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

It comes with free R1soft backups. Servers with BurstNET in UK. IRC and and VPN are fine for private & legal use. According to James, “QualityServers have their own office, IP space, racks and equipment, which allow them to do this at this price”. Their new nodes are however, not CentOS 6 based thus no vswap (but burstable memory instead), as CentOS 6 nodes are still having some pending stability issues.

Just scanning through other low end offers in UK, there isn’t any at this price point. Well, there was one that’s even cheaper, but that provider did not end up too well. Let’s just hope James has got everything planned out with annual VPS offer.

• 128MB memory/128MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer
• 1x IPv4, IPv6 available on request
• Xen/SolusVM

Direct sign up link. PayPal or credit card. 20% VAT is payable for EU/UK customers. Servers in Maidenhead UK with BlueSquare. CheapVPS.co.uk has been around since 2007, relaunched in March this year, and it is now part of “Simply Virtual Servers Ltd”.

• 512MB guaranteed/1024MB burstable memory
• 20GB storage
• 1000GB/month data transfer
• OpenVZ/SolusVM

Their servers are with RapidSwitch in Maidenhead UK (test IP/files), and they have been around since 2002. Bob posted some stats back in June, and they have now upgraded their storage system for a faster IO performance.

• 512MB memory
• 15GB storage
• 1TB/month data transfer
• VMWare/Custom control panel

Payment in PayPal, Moneybookers, credit card or bank transfer. They are using a custom control panel integrated with WHMCS to do simple VPS management (reboot, rDNS, etc). Their servers are with BlueSquare in Maidenhead, UK. CCGS Solutions LTD was registered in March 2009 in UK (Company No. 06852472). It seems to be run by Adam and Jacob who are currently studying in University of Portsmouth but also wear quite a few hats at the same time.

Cheap VMware based offers are a bit hard to come by. eNetSouth had some equivalent offers in Chicago and San Jose (although from what I’ve seen, there seems to be quite a bit of support problem right now), and then this VMStormVPS offer with lower memory, but this is the first one in UK.

• 256MB memory/256MB swap
• 20GB storage on RAID10
• 200GB/month data transfer
• 1x IPv4 + 10x IPv6
• Xen/SolusVM

Servers in “Manchester Data Center” according to Daimon, which I guess would be BurstNet’s? This offer can also be found in this LowEndTalk thread, although more than half of the comments were arguing around how VAT should be applied. Daimon however, is quite an active member on LowEndTalk.

• 512MB memory
• 25GB storage on SAN + 25GB backup
• 500GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• 2x vCPU
• Xen

iCloudHosting takes PayPal, WorldPay and bank transfer. Offer is only available to 10 signups or until the end of October. Servers in North London using Gyron data center. Their domain has been registered in November 2009, but domain WHOIS privacy prevents us to know who is behind the business. The domain, however, is registered to “BBS Commerce Ltd” which can be found on the CompaniesHouse (No. 04837714, since July 2003).

The architecture is indeed the interesting one here, which can be found on this page. They use a pair of redundant SAN + backup on NAS, and then hypervisor boxes connecting to SAN via iSCSI switches. If a server crashes, your VM instance can boot straight up on another server without loosing persistent data. I am currently using a SAN based Xen VPS with dual 10Gbps between the blade and SAN boxes, which provides some pretty decent IO throughput and redundancy. It was costly though, so it’s interesting to see a similar setup in the low end box pricing range.

• 128MB memory/128MB swap
• 15GB storage
• 250GB/month data transfer on 100Mbps
• 2x IPv4 (1 included, 1 requires justification)
• Xen/SolusVM

You can pay by PayPal, Google Checkout or credit card, and you should get instant activation. Servers in BlueSquare at Maidenhead UK (test IP: 94.76.194.5). You can check their ToS/AUP here, which includes restriction on proxy servers and “IRC services” including bots. They are a registered business (GBServers Ltd, No. 06291710 on CompaniesHouse) that has been around since mid-2007.

If you are interested in servers from them that have 256MB or more memory, you can also check out their current promotion on WHT with 50% off recurring discount (code 50OFF) although that does not apply to their 128MB Xen.

• 256MB memory/256MB swap
• 10GB storage
• 750GB/month data transfer
• 1x IPv4 + 1x IPv6
• Fully managed
• Xen/SolusVM

Here is the link to order. That offers is actually getting better with USD as US greenback appreciated a bit over the last couple of weeks. Servers in UK with BurstNET I believe (from previous post, test IPv4: 217.114.63.178, IPv6: 2a02:21a8:2:3b::e76a:c130). I am not too sure about the level of management provided here, although James did mention helping clients migrating websites so I guess it might be part of the package.

James/QualityServers provides pretty decent service and one of better UK providers out there. Check previous posts for past reviews and comments.