Budget VPS hosting BurstNET (USA) on personal experience

In the topics about German hosting from Hetzner and Server4You (by the way, the latter company has a few more sites - be careful), people were interested, and why hosting in Germany? What is not in Russia, we now already know for sure, and if the project has a target audience in central and western Russia and / or Europe, then the choice of German hosting is often optimal in terms of price / quality / ping. However, if your project is aimed at the United States or the whole world? I think that hosting from Hetzner is rather weak here - this company, like almost all German hosting companies, focuses mainly on the domestic market, without worrying about the availability of servers outside the country (very often in the case of Hetzner ping to Russia or the availability of a server from Russia is under question), nor about good international support in at least English (Hetzner now has this problem, they have decided and the support is available in English, which is not always the case with other German hosts, very often both the site and the German support om language). For a service that focuses on the most profitable - the American segment is desirable and hosting the US and the possibility of "growth."

Because Our company has been a client of one of the American VPS hosting sites for almost a year (we open a small free hosting of pictures there - you can ping and check the work in every possible way), I want to tell you about it by making some comparisons with German hosting (forgive us, for comparing BurstNET VPS with the experience of using the Dedicated server from Hetzner - the weight categories are different, but our experience with Hetzner is based on renting a dedicated server).
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BurstNET - its pros, cons and features.

This hoster has 2 tariff lines - regular VPS (with a port of 100MBPS) and a premium VPS with a port of 1GBPS, reduced server load and memory, the size of which on peaks can increase by 2 times. On average, premium rates are 2-3 times more expensive, so for us there was no special need for them. All tariffs initially included 2 IP-addresses, and additional ones can be purchased separately. Additional options also include external backup media (at the price of a separate VPS, by the way, so their value is very doubtful - it's better to take another VPS and duplicate them on each other), SSL certificate, additional space (also not profitable - It is much better to take a more powerful VPS) on disks or additional traffic.

The tariff we use: CPU 1500MHZ, RAM 1GB, HDD 50GB (RAID), 1000GB traffic costs $ 9.95 - i.e. its price level is at the level of a usual virtual hosting (there is a tariff and is cheaper, but it cannot be considered for any serious things). The comparable price Hetzner VQ 7 has half the memory and more than half the hard disk (20GB). If you overspend traffic in 1TB with Hetzner - you will forever cut the speed to 10MBPS - with such a speed you will not overexpendate anything next month, no matter how you try (returning to 100 megabits will cost 6.90 €), BurstNET will have to you to pay the so-called “Extra Bandwidth” is from $ 0.5 to $ 0.05 per gigabyte, depending on the size of the overrun. Which of these two policies is better - everyone decides for himself (during the work with these hosting sites, we have never had overspending), and then there is time to come to a very significant advantage of BurstNET - the ability to “upgrade” the tariff - something that is not provided Hetzner and Server4You. Those. You do not need to take the tariff "for growth" - you are now taking the minimum, and then, with the growth of the project, go to an increasingly expensive and powerful.

The ceiling (the most serious tariff) for BurstNET is $ 49.95 (CPU 4000MHZ, RAM 4GB, HDD 250GB (RAID), traffic 4000GB) on a regular VPS and $ 99.95 (CPU 5000MHZ, RAM guaranteed 4GB / increase to 8GB, HDD 250GB (RAID), traffic 6000GB, 1GBPS port) on premium plans. Total tariffs of 6 in each of the lines, so that "grow" is where and the most expensive VPS - this is almost a tariff with the characteristics of a Dedicated server.

So, having bought hosting from BurstNET (the bill was paid via PayPal and there were no problems with this), I had to wait a day for the setup, since it happens manually. By the way, it was then that our first contact with the support occurred, which quite intelligibly explained why the VPS is not available right now and when to wait for its setup / installation. After installing the VPS, a letter came in which it was reported that the server was installed, its parameters, passwords and links were indicated. A free vePortal was used as a panel (you can order cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk separately, but it was absolutely unnecessary for us), with a nice interface, but with an absolute minimum of functions like shutdown, reboot and creating backups.

Debian was installed on the VPS (distribution can be selected from Centos, Ubunta, Fedora, Debian and Gentoo) - there were no features or problems with this, and there is no need to dwell on this. The speed to the server was normal, ping acceptable (140-180ms - we saw pings from the USA and much worse).
The uptime of the server is quite decent - for the year there were several small problems with the server being unavailable (for a few minutes), once the server hung and once something happened to BurstNET itself - their website lay for several hours, there was no access to the VPS, but probably that it was a problem with routing, and I fully admit the idea that there were no access problems from the USA.



Everything went well, until, according to vePortal, I didn’t find the terrible traffic overrun at the beginning of the month (monthly traffic was specified as 8.5TB, which translated into tariffs meant quite a childish amount), despite the fact that the site that was on this VPS generated a scanty traffic being in debug state. We immediately wrote down the problem to the tech support and rushed to re-examine the scripts and logs in order to understand where all this came from. After 3 hours, the support responded and reassured that yes, they know about this problem in vePortal and that I did not pay attention to it:
This is a bug bug inside veportal. Get this fully resolved. Unfortunately, there has been no estimated time to be completely resolved. I recommend installing graphs for up to date graphs. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

That's actually all the problems with this hosting, which happened for a year - considering its price, you can not even talk about it - the support showed itself to be quite adequate and sane on simple questions, and we have not yet encountered serious problems.

Not entirely obvious advantages of working with Americans from BurstNET

• during the whole time of contacting the support, we never came across holidays / weekends / non-working hours - we always answered relatively quickly and to the point (this applies not only to BurstNET - I admit that this is just a feature of many American companies);
• real server hardware in racks is full-fledged servers, not desktop-tower, as in Hetzner (this item makes sense only if you compare budget hosting services);
• there is no installation fee (compared to the same Hetzner, this is a rather useful plus);
• payment through PayPal with all its additional pluses and guarantees (you can pay with a card, but I don’t see any point in this);
• referral program (not everyone needs, but some will be able to significantly reduce their hosting payment);
• such a thing as the Firewall Security Service should help (if not eliminate) DDoS - did not try it yourself, so it’s hard to say how it works (and if it works at all) - it’s quite possible that marketing is clean;
• adult is allowed (specified specifically), and although this is not for everyone, but if you have a UGC project, it’s better to be safe: in Germany everything is strict - they won’t talk if one of your users wants to share a strawberry such is the law there;
• Before buying and paying for VPS, you can search for discount coupons - for BurstNET there are 25% discount coupons, which will be beneficial when paying for a VPS, for example, for a year.