Yesterday, I noticed an entry at lowendbox.com of an offer from URPad.com. The offer says, "$12/Year 256MB OpenVZ VPS in Los Angeles, Dallas and Buffalo" and I said "What the heck, How is t possible!?"

Read the post carefully and found that they are a subsidiary of FTNHosting. Also read the comments and I decided to give them a try as I have nothing to lose!

The configuration of the box is like this:

• 256MB Dedicated Ram
• 15GB Disk Space
• 500GB Bandwidth
• Port Speed: 100Mbps
• 1 IPv4 Address
• SolusVM/OpenVZ

Ordered in the morning but couldn't make the payment cause I didn't have fund on my Paypal account. Later at afternoon I collected fund and made the payment. The VPS setup was instant with an automation process. I got both my payment confirmation and VPS information email at the same time.

Logged in via SSH. It was Debian 6 32bit pre installed. Here what I got. The CPU

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 58
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz
stepping        : 9
cpu MHz         : 3400.049
cache size      : 8192 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 8
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 4
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 13
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase smep erms
bogomips        : 6800.09
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

The Memorry

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           256         34        221          0          0         38
-/+ buffers/cache:          8        247
Swap:            0          0          0

And the Disk space

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs             15G  1.9G   14G  13% /
tmpfs                 128M     0  128M   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                 128M     0  128M   0% /dev/shm

Loaded the full LEMP stack and installed a drupal instance. Now it looks like this:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           256         66        189          0          0         38
-/+ buffers/cache:         28        227
Swap:            0          0          0

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs             15G  1.9G   14G  13% /
tmpfs                 128M     0  128M   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                 128M     0  128M   0% /dev/shm

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.6966 s, 229 MB/

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.40858 s, 244 MB/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.07382 s, 264 MB/s

As long I can remember, the best DD result I have ever seen is around 136MB/s and it's always 200+, Insane!

Now the Network test:

wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
--2012-11-07 18:16:28--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null'


100%[========================================>] 104,857,600 91.1M/s   in 1.1s    

2012-11-07 18:16:29 (91.1 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600

wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
--2012-11-07 18:30:01--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[========================================>] 104,857,600 89.0M/s   in 1.1s    

2012-11-07 18:30:03 (89.0 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]

wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
--2012-11-07 18:31:18--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[========================================>] 104,857,600 47.1M/s   in 2.1s    

2012-11-07 18:31:20 (47.1 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]

On a 100Mbps port 92MB/s is also insane though I got the worst result at 47MB/s. But still it's high for a 100Mbps port!

And the time sync:

time sync


real    0m0.001s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.000s

I have did an ApacheBench marker test with the command "ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://drup.ibabar.com/?q=node/1" on the installed drupal site. After test the memory usage seems to be stable too!

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           256         85        171          0          0         41
-/+ buffers/cache:         43        212
Swap:            0          0          0

I don't know how they are providing these at that price tag. And also don't want to know. :P

This is too hard to believe and several providers also did the game of collecting money with tempting offer and flew away, the hell. But there's also exceptional providers like Chicagovps.net. So all that we can is to hope that URPad will not flew away.

What do you think about the offer? Have you got one for you or planning for one? Share your experience with us via comments.