Practical experience with little-known European cloud hosting

Hello colleagues.

In this article, I briefly describe my experience with several little-known European cloud hosting and share my objective assessments and subjective impressions.
It so happened that I have to regularly select, try, test and use various hosting systems to host client services (mainly, of course, sites). And to diversify risks (so as not to put all the eggs in one basket), various client services are usually located at different sites.
TL; DR;
Vultr, Elastichosts - like
Dedify, CloudSigma - so-so
RunAbove - dislike
Attention! This article has no advertising purpose, purely sharing experience and impressions.

I didn’t like the prices for Russian hosting even a long time ago, and their quality, unfortunately, does not at all correspond to the prices, so I try to bring everything to Europe, since the connection to Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt and other sites is good enough. The main server configuration is the classic lamp-stack (Gentoo linux, nginx, PHP-fpm, MariaDB), but there are also mail servers, backup and syslog servers, etc. In general, a complete zoo, including Windows. Configurations change periodically, as well as the load on them, so the "cloudy" ability to flexibly change server parameters always comes to the point. From hypervisors I prefer KVM and less Xen (VMware and Hyper-V - thanks, no need). For the overwhelming majority of services, guaranteed iops, private clouds and other hard-features features are absolutely not needed.

Elastichosts

The sites used are Amsterdam (ams-e) and London (lon-b).
I started working with them a few years ago, when the SSD was not yet mainstream, and the Digital Ocean went under the table on foot. The overall impression is positive.
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Disadvantages:

1. Occasionally (once every few months) there are problems with network providers or data centers, respectively, communication is lost. The servers themselves are working without problems. In ams-e is less, in lon-b more often.
2. High enough price.

Advantages:

1. Good stability of the entire infrastructure.
2. High performance.
3. Fast and competent technical support at any time of the day.
4. Early warnings about the planned work and inaccessibility on their part (basically everything comes down to updates of the control panel and API and does not apply to servers).
5. A couple of times they compensated for downtime of servers due to some accidents on their equipment.
6. KVM.
7. SSD and non SSD drives to choose from.
8. Large selection of pre-installed OS and LiveCD.
9. Ability to upload your image (disk) and create a server from it.
10. Flexible independent adjustment of all server parameters (CPU, RAM, HDD, traffic).

One of the used configurations for an example: 2000 MHz CPU (2 cores), 2 GB RAM, 620 GB HDD (not SSD), 900 GB traffic = € 150 / month (prices www.elastichosts.nl/calculator )
UnixBench (the more the better) = 2133.9

Cloudsigma

Used playground - Zurich.
I have been working with them for a long time too, once there were ordinary disks, then everything was transferred to SSD for the same price.

Disadvantages:

1. Periodically there are problems with the nodes, then with the connection. It is repaired quickly, but the impression deteriorates, especially since status.cloudsigma.com is not updated with every problem.
2. "Spam" SMS and email notifications about planned work, the beginning of work, the progress of work and the completion of work. Taking into account 5 sites, weekly works and the possibility to subscribe only to everything, and not to one site, they fill them in full.
3. High price.

Advantages:

1. Adequate compared with many stability of the entire infrastructure.
2. Fast and competent technical support at any time of the day.
3. Compensation of server downtime due to accidents on their equipment, if you write in time technical support (best in chat).
4. Early warning of planned work and inaccessibility from their side.
5. KVM.
6. SSD and non SSD drives to choose from.
7. Large selection of pre-installed OS and LiveCD.
8. Ability to upload your image (disk) and create a server from it.
9. Flexible independent adjustment of all server parameters (CPU, RAM, HDD, traffic).

Recently, the performance of the server hosted by them noticeably slipped, while we are sorting out with technical support what happened and on which side, so I don’t put it as a disadvantage, but the UnixBench measurement was made there.
One of the configurations used for the example: 2000 MHz CPU (2 cores), 2 GB RAM, 272 GB HDD (SSD), 5 TB traffic = $ 51 / month (prices www.cloudsigma.com/pricing )
UnixBench (the more the better) = 493.1

Vultr

Used sites - Amederdam and Frankfurt.
Already more or less well-known company in Russia and so far my leader. I work with them for about a year.

Disadvantages:

1. Confusion in payments: the amount automatically removed from the card is rounded up to $ 10 (for example, at the actual cost of $ 37 / month they will be charged $ 40 automatically), but the difference, of course, remains on the account, accumulates and in some of the months simply does not have to pay with a card. You can manually pay any amount without rounding. This is not critical, but client accounting sometimes asks questions.
2. Only fixed server parameters (CPU, RAM, HDD, traffic) within the existing tariffs.

Advantages:

1. High performance.
2. Fast and competent technical support at any time of the day.
3. KVM.
4. SSD.
5. Ability to upload your image (disk) and create a server from it.
6. Low price.

A couple of configurations used for example:
1 CPU (1 core at 3600 MHz per / proc / cpuinfo), 1 GB RAM, 20 GB HDD (SSD), 2 TB traffic = $ 7 / month
UnixBench (the more the better) = 2331.9

2 CPUs (2 cores at 3400 MHz per / proc / cpuinfo), 2 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD (SSD), 3 TB traffic = $ 15 / month
UnixBench (the more the better) = 3160.0

A few days ago, we slightly updated prices and increased the included resources on www.vultr.com/pricing (you need to switch to Monthly Pricing).
A separate plus is the “SATA Storage Plans” tariffs with good prices for computing resources and large, but not super-fast drives.

RunAbove

Used site - Strasbourg.
" Fornication " of a well-known French-Canadian company ovh.ie. Acquaintance with them happened recently and quickly ended due to the absolute insanity of technical support: while setting up and updating a couple of servers, the account was blocked, allegedly for carrying out the attack. It was a Friday or Saturday, but tech support answered only on Tuesday. Technical support of the "parent" ohv.ie, to which the request was also sent after several hours of silence of the main technical support, answered a little earlier - on Monday. The account, of course, was unblocked later, but to the question “how do you work further and which SLA do you have?” Answered that there is no SLA, and the support works only from Monday to Saturday in local daytime. In general, refused their services.

Advantages:

1. UnixBench did not have time to do, but it feels like a very high performance.
2. A cloud on OpenStack with all the firewall, NAT, intranet, etc.
3. Large selection of OS.
4. SSD.
5. Low price (https://www.runabove.com/instances/intel-steadfast.xml).

PS It seems that this is a kind of public beta-version of the service for assessing the demand for the proposed service (cloud hosting), so there is not much experience, there are few customers, there is not enough workload and because of this high performance so far.
PPS Very long and bureaucratic account verification procedure: they are asked to send a photo of a passport, a photo of a bank card with partially stuck figures, scans of several statutory documents of the organization (if the account is of a company, and not for an individual).

Dedify (ex FileMedia)

Used site - Nuremberg.
I am familiar with them a little more than a month, I deployed a couple of non-critical servers, so far the impressions are twofold. One Sunday, their own DNS broke, repaired only for dinner on Tuesday. Because of this, 1) their website did not open 2) the server control panel did not work 3) the payment was not notified 4) payment for services was not credited, because they didn’t receive payment confirmation from PayPal. The tech support proudly was silent for a day and a half, somehow only someone on Twitter replied, thanks to which they managed to solve the problem on Monday evening, and not on Tuesday. However, since then everything is working well and stably. I hope it was a random one-time incident.

Disadvantages:

1. Slow technical support.
2. Lack of auto payments or at least notifications about the need for payment (it turned out after the accident).
3. Payment only through PayPal or local (German) bank.
4. CPU and RAM are fixed and are selected only within the framework of existing tariffs.

Advantages:

1. Good performance.
2. Apache CloudStack cloud with all the firewall, NAT, intranet, etc.
3. Any OS capable of running Xen.
4. XenServer.
5. SSD and non SSD (only for extra drives) drives to choose from.
6. Sufficient selection of pre-installed OS and LiveCD.
7. Ability to upload your image (disk) and create a server from it.
8. Flexible independent adjustment of the disk size.
9. Low price.

One of the used configurations for an example: 1500 MHz CPU (3 cores), 4 GB RAM, 30 GB HDD (SSD), 2 TB traffic = € 12 / month (tariff MICRO-DEDIFY L and all prices www.dedify.com/calculator )
UnixBench (the more the better) = 1389.9

As a bonus

Well-known, very stable and generally excellent Linode.com : 2 CPUs (2 cores at 2800 MHz at / proc / cpuinfo), 2 GB RAM, 48 GB HDD (SSD), 3 TB traffic = $ 20 / month (prices www.linode. com / pricing )
UnixBench (the more the better) = 1005.5

Well-known Russian hosting with the letter C (English "si"): 14 CPU (14 cores at 2267 MHz at / proc / cpuinfo), 2 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD (not SSD), without prepaid traffic = from 1832 rubles / month (~ $ 35 / month)
UnixBench (the more the better) = 881.6

Other well-known Russian hosting with the letter C (Russian es): 8 CPUs (8 cores at 2300 MHz at / proc / cpuinfo), 1 GB RAM, 8.5 GB HDD (not SSD), without prepaid traffic = from 1100 rubles / month (~ $ 21 / month)
UnixBench (the more the better) = 1762.6

I invite to discussion in the comments!

UPDATE
Added information about pre-installed OS, LiveCD and loading of own images (disks).
Added information about flexible / fixed server options.