2 Crissic plans were tested in 2 weeks. That allowed us to see the best and the worst of VPS hosting performance. The plans were
Both plans are available for purchase at crissic.net although at the time of this writing there seems to be availability issues for the OpenVZ SSD plans (SVZ).
Prices are moderate but there is no hourly billing.
Not everything is clear with regard to pricing, the price displayed on the pricing page, $9 for the SVD2048 plan, does not match the price in the shopping cart, $7. It's a good surprise for sure but it's a little messy.
The KVM1024 offer is a little pricier at $10. SUprisingly it only includes 1GB of RAM and 3 cores while the SVZ2048 offer, that uses OpenVZ virtualization, has 2GB and 4 cores. More importantly, the SVZ2048 plan uses SSD disks while the KVM1024 still relies on HDD.
Crissic justifies the difference by claiming the KVM has better guests isolation than OpenVZ. In theory that's true, but in practice at Crissic, that's not what happened.
Both VMs were up and running in less than 2 minutes after being ordered, that's excellent. Payment has to be made through Paypal. The root password is sent in one of many emails that are sent at that time.
Minimalistic but decent. You can reboot or shutdown the VM, change the root password or the hostname. That's sufficient for most purposes.
The UI also has a 'View Graphs' button but the graphs stay entirely empty.
There seems to also be a SolusVM admin console but it requires completely distinct credentials.
KVM1024 VM
Packages installation is awfully slow. IOWait stays in the 15-25% range during the whole process.
Response times were all over the place with the slowest 1% of requests being served in 1.5s, 7 times more than the average.
This is the slowest VM tested in the past 12 months. Given the database read time, 170ms on average when most other providers are around 10ms, the bottleneck appears to disk access. Crissc is one of the last providers that is still not offering SSDs on all its plans. It shows.
SVZ2048 VM
Fairly quick, no IOWait.
By contrast this VM was one of the fastest of the past 12 months. Database read time was just 6ms and it seemed like we were the only guest on that host, the response time was extremely stable throughout the week and there was 0 IOWait.
That's where it gets interesting: the KVM1024 plan is the slowest we have tested in the past year. At the opposite side of the range SVZ2048 is the second fastest.
There was no outage during the trials.
We opened 2 tickets with Crissic during the trials, both created during the weekend and tagged with medium urgency, and it took several hours each time to get a response. The answers demonstrated good technical skills from support person and a reasonable will to accommodate our requests.
SMTP port 25 outbound is closed.
It makes no sense to us why the under performing KVM1024 plan is stuck with HDDs while the cheaper SVZ2048 has better specs and is using SSDs. The way the Crissic website is presented, KVM is the high end plan while OVZ and SVZ are the low end ones. That's probably the intent but it turns out to be very misleading. Crissic needs to get rid of HDDs and improve its marketing. In the meantime, if you can get your hands on an SVZ2048 VM, you should be a happy customer.