Apparently, I didn’t realize an email two weeks ago that my previous VPS hosting, WebSound decided to kick all its customer as they are shutting down the VPS business. I finally noticed that they sent me an e-mail 2 days ago about this issue. They said that they are going to shut down all VPS on March 10! They only give 2 weeks notice period of their cancellation and they are directing their customer to use another VPS provider. See the e-mail below:

I never know HosToDo before, but they seem have been quite a while in cheap VPS business. But it is unclear whether we are going to get an equal feature, as well as if the contract will be renewed as previously when it is expired. Therefore, I decided to look for somewhere else to put my VPS rather than following the migration scheme.

So, I decided to browse through LowEndTalk (LET) and LowEndBox (LEB). I read that LEB nowadays have a lot of scam offer, especially with too-good-to-be-true deals. There have been cases, such as HiFormance shutting down without notice, left many customers lost their data. I feel grateful enough that WebSound didn’t do shit like that and still offering some mitigation plan to cover their customers, despite the notice time is too short.

To prevent drama in the future, I tried to look for some hosting companies that at least have been operating for more than 3 years. Another consideration is that I want to move the server to Europe instead of the US. It should have lower latency rather than US-based server when accessed from Europe or Asia.

I found a cheap alternative service, First Root, which provides almost similar feature. It also looks like that they actually have a legitimate business, with their address, company registration ID, as well as VAT ID. Although it is still very minimal, they seem to have a quite good review at LET, and the owner is actively promoting their service to people who are looking for options. Currently, no bargain discount from their site, but at least, I think the price is still make sense for services they are offering.

I purchased yesterday evening and within an hour, my new machine has been set up. They also offer custom ISO for installation but you have to file a request via support ticket. They responded my request really fast and the ISO is readily available in the ISO list. Within an hour, my VPS has been installed with my preferred OS. So here’s the benchmark so far:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Superbench.sh -- https://www.oldking.net/350.html
 Usage : wget -qO- git.io/superbench.sh | bash
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 CPU Model            : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v2 @ 2.20GHz
 CPU Cores            : 2 Cores @ 2199.970 MHz x86_64
 CPU Cache            : 4096 KB
 OS                   : Fedora 29 (64 Bit) KVM
 Kernel               : 4.20.13-200.fc29.x86_64
 Total Space          : 3.6 GB / 76.0 GB
 Total RAM            : 377 MB / 1990 MB (563 MB Buff)
 Total SWAP           : 0 MB / 4091 MB
 Uptime               : 0 days 7 hour 3 min
 Load Average         : 0.07, 0.04, 0.04
 TCP CC               : cubic
 ASN & ISP            : AS41108, FirstRoot
 Organization         : First Root UG
 Location             : Düsseldorf, Germany / DE
 Region               : North Rhine-Westphalia
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 I/O Speed( 1.0GB )   : 635 MB/s
 I/O Speed( 1.0GB )   : 1.4 GB/s
 I/O Speed( 1.0GB )   : 1.4 GB/s
 Average I/O Speed    : 1167.4 MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Node Name           Upload Speed      Download Speed      Latency
 Speedtest.net        93.78 Mbit/s     597.58 Mbit/s       7.171 ms
 Fast.com              0.00 Mbit/s      179.5 Mbit/s        -
 Jakarta MyRepublic    4.95 Mbit/s     156.44 Mbit/s        -
 Jakarta Telkom       23.58 Mbit/s      33.43 Mbit/s        -
 Surabaya FirstMedia  72.22 Mbit/s      30.03 Mbit/s        -
 Helsinki Telia      151.75 Mbit/s     369.70 Mbit/s        -
 Berlin              111.82 Mbit/s     485.93 Mbit/s        -
 Los Angeles         137.17 Mbit/s      88.87 Mbit/s        -
 New York            131.70 Mbit/s     161.59 Mbit/s        -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Finished in  : 3 min 6 sec
 Timestamp    : 2019-03-03 22:24:07 GMT+8
----------------------------------------------------------------------

It looks like a quite old machine they have. But they certainly have a really good SSD to support the disk operation. The network performance is standard, I think. For a simple server mainly used for hosting blog, I think it is very adequate. Let’s see if I can do something fancy with my VPS this time, and hopefully no shut-down drama anymore. I should think to make an automated backup from now on.

The migration itself is really smooth, as currently I have nothing much on the VPS except my blog. I reconfigure my new machine in around one hour, including copying stuff and configuration scripts from old server to the new one, setting up partition configuration, modifying SELinux permissions, and adding firewall rules. I’m starting to get used with all those Linux command to install, configure, deploy, test stuff after several times doing this. I have a blog post draft talking about configuring this server. I will finish it as soon as possible. 🙂