SSDNodes (that's my referral link) has been cool. I don't like that they use sleazy fake scarcity marketing techniques - the thing where they have the countdown timer that says their sale only lasts for 24 hours, but once the timer reaches zero, it restarts and you have another 24 hours. Rinse and repeat.

But SSDNodes has a pretty good product. 

At this time I'm using a $40 somthing per year OpenVZ VPS that I found on Lowendbox. It served me well for almost 4 years. Great uptime. I only had two support tickets in that time for problems that were quickly resolved.

Recently, I've noticed that they've had one of their sales. 16GB RAM, 4 cores, 160GB Disk for around $99/year, or $79/year trienially. 

I went for the 1 year at $99. 

I need more space. I was trying to do some autoblogging, or "curating" to euphemize a bit, and the disk space fills up quick when you're using Wordpress to collect RSS feeds of articles and their images. It just takes up a lot of space fast. Reducing image size is important, but in one way or another it's going to take up some space.

So I got the year's worth of VPS hosting on a KVM container with SSDNodes. I liked that I could run Docker containers. For what, I don't know yet. Maybe Solr. 

I ordered a KVM server and it was in New York, but when I ran every benchmark script I could think of, the new KVM server came in slower than the old OpenVZ server that I was paying $40/year for. 

I know that OpenVZ uses the hosts kernel and that can result in some performance benefits, but the new KVM server was marketed as an SSD VPS, which the OpenVZ wasn't. So why the slow disk reads and writes of the new KVM?

Anyway, I got in touch with support and after some back and forth, they put me on a node that had good disk thoroughput. 

But with scripts like bench.sh, I noticed that the download speeds were terrible. But what mattered most was that testing the download of static HTML using Webpage.org showed that this new node offered better network speeds for web clients than the old OpenVZ server.

So I'm kinda happy. 

I've got a lot of new ideas. I can finally run a recent version of Ubuntu (18.04). Or Debian 10, but not if I want to use Virtualmin (Virtualmin doesn't yet support Debian 10).