Server4You Review
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I purchased the Plus X8 VPS package from Server4You. I chose to have the 400GB on spinning rust since I want to use this for storage space and such, as well as some tinkering.
The setup cost plus first month of hosting ran me $28 ($12 one time setup fee, and $16 monthly). Their HQ is in Germany, and their American Office and Data Center is located in St. Louis. So I paid the fee, and a few minutes later, I got the "Thanks for paying" email saying further instructions would be sent, but I never received any.
I decided to go ahead and log in to the web portal after waiting about 15 minutes and bam! I'm in. Upon login, it tells me that my server, <some random name> has not been installed yet, and provides me a link to start a restore...
I have my choice of Linux OS between CentOS 7 builds (LAMP, and minimal), a Debian 7 (LAMP, and minimal), a Debian 8 (minimal), and several Ubuntu builds in the 12.04 and 14.04 flavors. Of note, one of the Ubuntu 14.04 images has Plesk v12 pre-installed. I'm still tinkering around with CentOS, so away I go with a CentOS 7 image.
You can set your own server password, which is nice. They give you a minimum password requirements and also a recommendation to use a few symbols (such as +,-,!,?), but you cannot use $, &, <, >, /, , or %.
UPDATE: The password configured is for the root account of the server. Make sure it is a strong one, and then create a user account and disable allowing of root SSH. Check to make sure that your user account is allowed to perform SUDO before disabling root SSH, lol.
I have confirmed with them that they do not provide console access to the VMs.
I've set my password, and am currently waiting for the image to restore... after about 15 minutes (maybe less), my image was restored, and I now have root access to my server. If I were going to do my own Domain name, I'd purchase through Google Domains or GoDaddy, or whoever... However, I am simply going to make this server run as a subdomain of one I already control.
So that was my experience in a nutshell. As I have Time, I'll go back and do up a few screenshots of the control panel, etc.
UPDATE 2: Scott raised a good question about backups. The backups page looks like:
Which suggests that we can only get backups every 14 days. The 1st backup is a full, and the next 3 would be incremental.
They do give you the ability to keep up to 3 snapshots that you perform manually.
Update 3: The Server4You guys do not support docker in their VMs. I just had that confirmed by one of their support reps.
Update 4: The Server4You systems are not flat out terrible. Their memory and storage offerings are actually quite nice. However, I've had a number of problems with the performance on my system (PHP scripts taking a long time to execute, SSH taking minutes to connect, random disconnects while I am using SSH)...
The biggest problem I have is that the containerization they use doesn't allow for me to customize the system the way I want it to be done. I can't add anything that requires Kernel modules (so no FUSE environments, no Docker, etc...) that they don't have built into the Host OS kernel.
Every time I asked about a way do do something, their support team's answer was "buy a dedicated host)... Which had half the RAM and about the same storage, but was double the monthly price.
Sadly, this means I am shutting down my service with them and migrating the stuff I had running back to my house or back over to my other VPS.
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So far, I'm liking the service. I installed ownCloud and pointed my office desktop client to it, and it synced rather quickly. Disk IO won't be a problem here, it looks like. If anybody wants a gig or two to play around with the ownCloud instance I have running, just let me know...
Next up is getting ZeroTier going, lol
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It is definitely a product that looks really good for ownClowd-like workloads. Things that would stay around long term so that the setup fee does not matter and things that rely on a lot of storage rather than a lot of compute power.
What are the backup and imaging options for it?
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The setup fee is ONE TIME only. Not every time you wipe & reload the VM. The performance of the system seems to be rather well. I uploaded 3 GB of data in about 15 minutes (I had a half decent internet connection where I did the upload).
One thing I haven't noticed is console access, so I have sent in a support ticket about that. Oh, wow... that was quick. Sadly, they don't offer console access to the system... updating the original post with a couple of things.
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This is the server dashboard page... Sadly, it is quite uninteresting as I don't have but one server, lol.
Nice, image uploading works again!
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Not offering console access is pretty common. Amazon and Azure don't offer console either. DO, RS and Vultr do.
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The only time I figure that would be a problem is if the system needs to run fsck or something and it hangs the boot process. (I've had this happen twice at C@C this week... thus my reason for switching, finally).
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I guess that sometimes even "I already paid for it" just is not good enough!
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@Reid-Cooper Ha ha hah a. Yeah.... but I'm in a much better place now. I could probably do a bunch of docker containers for various apps and all once I get that deep in.
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That would be very cool. Can you use Docker with a service like this? How does it handle the extra IPs for the Docker containers?
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@Reid-Cooper I am not sure yet. I figure the only thing that I need to figure out is the multiple IP addresses.
I wonder if OpenVZ may be better to test in an environment like this.
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@dafyre said:
@Reid-Cooper I am not sure yet. I figure the only thing that I need to figure out is the multiple IP addresses.
I wonder if OpenVZ may be better to test in an environment like this.
Docker and OpenVZ are pretty similar. I think if you can solve the multiple-IP address issue either will work just fine.
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@Reid-Cooper said:
That would be very cool. Can you use Docker with a service like this? How does it handle the extra IPs for the Docker containers?
You can do a proxy with nginx and have it link to the containers.
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@johnhooks said:
@Reid-Cooper said:
That would be very cool. Can you use Docker with a service like this? How does it handle the extra IPs for the Docker containers?
You can do a proxy with nginx and have it link to the containers.
That only works if you are doing web pages.
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@johnhooks Good idea!
I need to spend some time with NginX and see how it fares with my OwnCloud instance.
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@scottalanmiller you can link the containers together via a port and then nginx to the front facing container. Everything else you just link the containers with a throwaway container to control it and the delete that extra one.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller you can link the containers together via a port and then nginx to the front facing container. Everything else you just link the containers with a throwaway container to control it and the delete that extra one.
Not sure that I understand what you are saying. The individual containers act like individual VMs. But nGinx just does web not "any" traffic.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller you can link the containers together via a port and then nginx to the front facing container. Everything else you just link the containers with a throwaway container to control it and the delete that extra one.
Not sure that I understand what you are saying. The individual containers act like individual VMs. But nGinx just does web not "any" traffic.
Right but you don't really access them via IP unless they're web facing containers. Like MySQL for example. You would create a MySQL container and then create another MySQL container to attach to it with the MySQL prompt. Then create your database, and then delete the second mysql container. Then you link your web app to the original MySQL container and that's how it accesses the database. All of that is done from the host. The only thing you would really be accessing via IP would be something over http. The containers don't even really need a public facing port number, you can link them behind nginx and then use an upstream block to access each http site or app.
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Are you just pointing out that you can create a private, inaccessible network? Of course, you can build your own private addressing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Are you just pointing out that you can create a private, inaccessible network? Of course, you can build your own private addressing.
What would you be accessing container wise via IP that's not over http?
