Frequently Asked Questions

Are VPSBenchmarks tests influenced by VPS providers payments?

No. VPSBenchmarks receives funding through advertisement and Featured Provider subscriptions but all tests for all providers are conducted in the exact same way.

What are Featured Providers and how do I sign up?

To be featured at vpsbenchmarks.com, first check out the Featured Provider page. You can also contact us using this form.

Featured providers get the following benefits:

• Guaranteed VPS tests for plans chosen by the provider.
• A permanent provider page.
• Appear above non featured providers on the VPS Screener page.
• Direct links from vpsbenchmarks.com to your website.
• Publish Announcements with news about your services on vpsbenchmarks.com.
• 2 free Private Trials per month
• A banner ad on the provider page (ex: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/hosters/provider_name)
• 20% rebate on Private Trials and Cloud Reports

The Featured Plus subscription is at $120/month and includes 1 guaranteed test per quarter for a maximum VPS monthly price of $100. The Featured subscription is at $75/month for 2 guaranteed tests and a maximum VPS monthly price of $60.

How are grades calculated?

At the end of each trial, grades are calculated and assigned to the VPS that was tested. Grades are made of metrics collected from all the tests that were run. Grades are then used to sort VPS plans in the Screener and in Best VPS rankings.

How are grades calculated?

See also the metrics that grades are made of.

What are Price Weighted Grades?

The Screener and other pages offer the option to display "price weighted" grades. With this option turned on, a low price plan that has the same performance as a high price plan will be shown with higher grades.

The price weighted view tries to answer the following questions:

• What plans have the best value?
• How much performance do I get for every dollar I spend?

For low price plans, the grade "bonus" is proportional to the difference between its $30 and monthly price. The function used to calculate the bonus is designed to have a small impact on very low grades and maximum impact on medium to high grades.

Similarly, grades for high price plans are displayed lower when this option is turned on: the higher above $30 the monthly price is, the stronger the hit on the grades. In this case, the function is designed to have a small impact on excellent grades and maximum impact on medium to low grades.

Why is VPS performance important?

In all cases, it matters because of the cost. A VPS from provider A that costs $10 a month can give you double the capacity of a VPS from provider B at the same price. In other words, to do the same amount of work, you might need to buy 2 VPS for a total of $20 from provider B when could spend only $10 with provider A.

Then there is the user experience. If you are using your VPS as a web server, the response time can vary dramatically from one provider to the next. Users are very sensitive to the time it takes to load a web page. If it takes more than 3 seconds, many users will simply give up on your website and move on to the next result in the Google Search page. A fast VPS can make the difference between a site that loads in 2 seconds and one that loads in 10 seconds.

Google page ranks will also be influenced by the speed of the web server running on the VPS. A slow responding server will be penalized.

What are VPSBenchmarks Web Runs performance tests?

Web Run tests are made of a load test tool and a database intensive Rails web application.

The load test tool sends HTTP requests to the web application at a controlled rate and records HTTP response codes, response latencies and timeouts. The load test tool is multithreaded and runs on the same VPS where the web application runs.

The intent is to measure:

• the response times (latency) of the web server
• the amount of CPU used to serve those requests under various load levels
• what's the maximum load at which 100% requests are served without timing out.

What are VPSBenchmarks Sysbench performance tests?

The Sysbench test suite test various aspects of the VM individually, namely the CPU, the disk and memory components of the machine.

We run the Sysbench tests after the web tests have completed to avoid any interference. In the case of VPS that implement a CPU credit balance system, we wait until the balance is above it's starting value before running the sysbench test.

What are VPSBenchmarks Endurance performance tests?

The goal of the endurance tests is to determine if the VPS can sustain prolonged CPU utilization without degrading and what's the total amount of work the CPU of the VPS can accomplish during the test.

The endurance test lasts for 24 hours, it pushes the CPU to 50% use and VPSBenchmarks records the amount of work that's done during every 10 minute interval as well as system metrics.

Over allocated VPS as well as those that throttle the CPU will be be easily identified in the results of those tests.

What's the difference between managed and unmanaged VPS?

Managed VPS

A managed VPS comes with a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk that facilitates software installation and management on the VPS and make root console access unnecessary. The applications that the control panel manages are typically a database (mysql), Wordpress, Joomla... The control panel will also manage emails and user accounts.

A managed VPS might also come with a CDN, DDos protection and backups. Support for a managed VPS will be more readily available than for an unmanaged VPS in most cases.

Managed VPS are substantially more expensive than the unmanaged kind.

Unamanaged VPS

Unamanaged VPS on the other hand don't usually give you any of those tools, you can still setup the same applications as in unmanaged VPS but you have to install them yourself usually through the command line. You won't get any provider support if they stop working because of your mistake.

Unmanaged VPS still get support but only at a low level. They will help you if the VPS entirely breaks, if you can't connect to it or if it gets disconnected from the internet for example. The best unamanaged VPS still provide some form of monitoring, backups and DDoS protection.

What is VPSBenchmarks testing?

We exclusively test unmanaged VPS.