Cloud computing

Linux in the Cloud: Hostworld VPS Review

Last Updated on October 18, 2022

Summary

If you need more than a basic host but can’t afford a dedicated server, VPS hosting may be a sensible choice.

Hostworld’s VPS-3 plan offers good service, DDos protection, root access, as well as a wide range of operating systems combined with a competitive price. There’s consistent connectivity with good download and upload speeds. You get a good value and capable unmanaged VPS hosting plan.

We really like that backups are included for free in the plan. Many VPS plans are kept unrealistically low with important items like backups made expensive extras.

We applaud Hostworld’s unusual stance of clearly stating their CPU throttling policy although the 15 minute window before throttling can kick in is too short. The policy rules out using the VPS as a game server, some scientific studies such as machine learning, or other activities where CPU usage is intermittently high in sustained bursts. However, for many tasks such as small business use, WordPress hosting, testing web apps and eCommerce activities this will be less of an issue. It may actually be an advantage given that noisy neighbours should impact you less.

Hostworld’s transparency in other areas is also admirable. For example, there’s no contracts, and no illusory pricing often used by other VPS providers where an introductory rate is followed by a significant price hike.

Some aspects of a VPS service are difficult to determine. For example, only with a long study can areas like uptime and customer support be properly assessed. Uptime guarantees from hosting companies are best ignored when making comparisons in any event.

Hostworld use a KVM hypervisor, an open source virtualization technology that changes the Linux kernel into a hypervisor that can be used for virtualization and is an alternative to proprietary virtualization technologies, such as those offered by VMware.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – CPU
Page 3 – Memory, Disk, Network
Page 4 – Admin UI
Page 5 – Summary

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Rooster
Rooster
2 years ago

You are right about availability guarantees. I always ignore them.

For example, I see some VPS providers promise 99.999% availability. Pure advertising baloney. If huge multinationals like Meta and Google can’t deliver that with their own platforms, there’s no way a VPS provider will do it.

And when they don’t deliver the ‘guarantee’ what actually happens. A tiny refund amounting to nothing.

Oz
Oz
2 years ago

Availability:

99.9% – 8 hours 45 minutes 56 seconds downtime per year
99.99% – 52 minutes 45 seconds downtime per year
99.999% – 5 minutes 15 seconds downtime per year

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram had a 6 hour downtime in October 2021 alone.

Milo
Milo
2 years ago

I’ve never understood how VPS providers claim that resources are split over a number of physical servers. Does that really happen with CPU, memory?? Surely that’s not practical?

Huw
Huw
2 years ago
Reply to  Milo

Fundamentally it’s possible to share CPU over a cluster of computer systems (nodes), but software running on VPS servers like KVM or VMWare doesn’t do that. It is used in supercomputers with an operating system designed for this purpose and isn’t available for general purpose use even on them.

Any marketing blurb from VPS providers claiming anything like this is just making it up. What they can do is move you easily to another server at the drop of a hat.

Steve Malin
Steve Malin
2 years ago

Good to see hostworld on this review, been using them for over 12 months and can’t fault the service.

Danie van der Merwe
Danie van der Merwe
2 years ago

This has given me serious food for thought as it is a way better deal than I’m getting with 2vCPU, 2GB RAM and 60GB hard drive space at Digital Ocean with a paid weekly backup for $2pm extra. I’m just going to have to set aside some serious time to plan a move as that is the more difficult part, migrating 5 or 6 running services.