Test cloud hosting from Selectel

Recently, having seen the announcement in Habré , I decided to try the cloud hosting from Selectel, and now, after 2 months of use in 2 approaches, I am ready to share my opinions and results.

And most importantly - you will finally know how much it costs, because Pricing is very unusual: there is no subscription fee, money is taken only for the resources consumed, but these resources are many different.

Let's start with the good: everything works not just fast, but damn fast. Comrades from Oversana are certainly great with their 40 Gbps backbone network, but with 1 Gbps channels to selectle’s drives, the speed does not make you want anything better with a significantly lower price. This is probably the first VPS that I see, where already at the software installation stage, it is clear that everything is flying significantly faster than on the home “dedicated” server (well, the local Debian repository helps).

Main speed test

All the VPS I get into my hands, I test with my website - this is light PHP + MySQL, and PHPBB as heavy artillery. In all cases, the settings are the same, and the same PHP accelerators (APC). The numbers in the cells are the number of requests per second, measured by the “ab -c 10 -t 10 url” utility. Here are my results:
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Test / Server	Selectel (8 cores)	Dedicated Atom 330	ihc.ru VZ-1
Home 3.14.by/ru	1188	220	170
PHPBB 3.14.by/forum	153	21	17

There are no comments here, I think, but it must be remembered that constant work on 1000 requests per second per month will consume a lot of money.

Network and stability

There were no questions on stability - everything works like a clock, they warned about a single reboot almost in a week. The failure was only one minute at 15-20 this week, and for this compensated a week of expenses. Unfortunately, at the moment, the DC at the selector in St. Petersburg, but in the future they promise to Moscow. Because the ping schedule is not so beautiful:

Support

He responds vigorously, but they do not have access to the disks, because they cannot (for now) reset the password or something else, and their functions are limited only to situations when something is not working. When it was not possible to change the size of the disks on the fly - promised to change manually on request. However, maybe someone will be calmer if the support has no easy opportunity to rummage around your system.

Price

As I have already mentioned, money is taken for everything separately) For example, for memory - specifically for the amount of megabytes consumed at the current time. For example, if the server needs 0.5 GB for normal operation, and sometimes 4 GB for 5 minutes, it will cost an additional 16 kopecks. Disk - for operations (pennies), and for the current disk volume (can be expanded, but not reduced). Well, the traffic is a ruble per GB.

Here is the plate of expenses for the last month (burdened by constant habra and reddit effects) of my server on which there are half a dozen sites, the svn repository and other services I need:

9,92 . / 9.920 .
116,32 . / 234.136 * .
: 1,41 . / 0.423 . .
: 5,10 . / 1.530 . .
: 0,79 . / 7.900
: 1,44 . / 14.400
: 14,70 . / 2.942 *
: 1,37 . / 6.850
: 95,58 . / 95.580
246,63 .


As you can see, the main costs of memory and traffic. Already with 0.5TB of traffic, it makes sense to look at regular non-cloud VPS hosters that promise not to ban for 1TB of traffic.

Optimization

Selectel gives administrators a completely new optimization plane - at a price. Now it is advantageous to configure the server for dynamic memory consumption, limited at the top (for example, so that the number of Apache processes is from 1 to 8-16 + launching all sorts of Ruby on demand) + you need to be careful not to load the disk too much. And finally, now there is a financial incentive to optimize, and not just “make it work”.

In general, my opinion is extremely positive - here you are sure that you will not be "asked to leave" for too high a load - but you can spend a lot of money in the case of a non-optimized application. But in the case of a normally configured not too loaded server (mail, repository, hamster) - it turns out very cheap (<200rub / month)

The only thing that I personally would like is the lower / progressive price of traffic and / or the optional anlim according to the ratios for the monthly fee.

Questions / opinions / comments - in the studio