joedicastro

More than two months in my spare time. To collect the "static" information, and create the Ansible roles and python scripts to collect the "dynamic" info (the results from the benchmarks) and finally compose the final document.

I lost a lot of time waiting for the benchmark tests to finish ;-)

I suppose that is the same with another tools and providers. The community size and the work that the providers put on this makes a big difference IMHO. Another reason to share this in the comparison. Thanks!

Good to know, I suppose that I would need to change that phrase to be more accurate. Thanks for sharing it.

Linode seems to be working in a new version of their control panel, I hope that they do a great work, because for too much people the current one is a entry barrier, even when they do a very good work.

For me too, I think that is general, I hope.

Thanks!

Yeah, I agree, that would be nice, but as I automate the creation of those tables and cut/paste them every time that I run a set of new tests, to do that would require a lot of manual job to me. That's the reason why I don't do that, to keep it manageable.

I was not referring here about the "activity" per se, I was talking about quotas and percentages of use. No matter for what kind of activity you are going to use the service, I would like to have clear from the beginning what limits of use I have.

Another thing completely different is the permissibility about certain illegal activities or loopholes in their servers. That's not my concern, that's only a question of moral/ethics/legal between the client, the provider and the authorities.

Thanks!

And thank you very much to share your experience with us. I think that the same provider can offer you a very different experience in different regions. Even AWS is not immune to that, they had datacenters with some major outages in some US regions while in another countries almost none big problems.

Thanks for the offer. I'll take into account.

Thanks! I would take into account.

You're welcome! Thanks!

Thanks! Very kind of you!

Well, I would like to include more, in fact I would include Ligthsail for sure if they offered a datacenter in Europe. But to start something like this you have to start small, or the costs will bury you pretty son. As a pet and personal project, the way to limit the cost was setting a clear seat of boundaries, like plans under $5 and available in Europe. And being one-man band to make this affordable in terms of time and effort I had to keep it small at the beginning. I worked on this in my spare time for more than two months. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison. But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.

That's a good idea, I suppose that would have to do the same with another tools like Apache libcloud or Ansible itself.

I'll add this suggestion as an issue to the project. Thanks!

Thanks! I'm glad that is helpful to you.

I put you here the same reply that I gave to another user, because the answer is essentially the same. Anyway, thanks for you feedback.

I understand you, but as I said in another comments, I would like to expand the comparison, but in the end is a question of time and costs. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison. But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.

I totally agree with this, after all is common sense. Even if all the hardware were perfect, and all the software were bugless, you would still have to deal with physics and with those imperfect and error-prone machines that set up all the things called humans.

I understand you, but as I said in another comments, I would like to expand the comparison, but in the end is a question of time and costs. If I find a way to sustain the costs, or the providers itself offer me a way to test their machines, I have no problem to expand the comparison. But in the meantime, I share the tools because I knew from the beginning that I only have limited resources. And after all, reproducibility, independence and transparency are the keys IMHO to have a trustful comparison.

Interesting idea... it didn't though of that for sure. I thought of talking about how permissive the providers are with certain type of contents (like legal adult content), but it is an information not easy to collect and so I went with the official legal terms/ToS instead.

I'll have to think about that, and how collect that information. Thanks!

I don't know, but as NKCSS says, you could do probably that in AWS and being a client like Netflix.

But stressing instances regularly to test them to find a better one is something that you could probably do on your own, but as a service I have serious doubts if the providers would like that from a given scale. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be something rare to have you account suspended. Perhaps, if you arrive a some type of agreement with them and their "business model" is compatible wit that, maybe. But, don't give me too much credit in this, I'm only speculating.

Yes, probably is one of the reasons why they do those checks. I suppose also that depends a lot on the kind of plan that are you going to use, probably they do more checks for more expensive plans.

I did not have to make that with them, but I had to pass a weird process with OVH in order to confirm my identity through a phone call, and in the process have to wait several hours until I have my server available.

Thanks for the information, it's very helpful.

Yes, I know about the OVH plan and IPv6, but in the hurry and in the middle of all the tasks to accomplish I left behind a few things. I'll keep improving it. Thanks!

Thanks!

Well, I would like to include more, in fact I would include Ligthsail for sure if they offered a datacenter in Europe. But to start something like this you have to start small, or the costs will bury you pretty son. As a pet and personal project, the way to limit the cost was setting a clear seat of boundaries, like plans under $5 and available in Europe. And being one-man band to make this affordable in terms of time and effort I had to keep it small at the beginning.

Maybe, If providers offer me free credits to make the tests or if I found a way to assume the costs, them I could think to expand the project.

Well, it's very useful, and in continue development.

In the end you have to know what you are doing, but it will point you to very useful tips and show some warnings that you can look to improve the security of you server. But in this, I still don't know two SysAdmins that concur on the best way to harden a server. There is a lot of things to consider and there are very strong opinions on how to do certain things.

But without doubt, it's a very useful tool, even if you know what you are doing you can use it like a checklist to know if you are forgetting something. It's not perfect (nothing is, and less in this field) but I can only recommend it.

Thanks! Very nice of you.

I totally agree with that.

Well, there are some very good comments in this thread, very little to add.

All of those plans that I compare there use the same technology in the the end, KVM virtualization. The differences are in the "flexibility" and "services" that they offer in order to act more as a cloud or more as a classic VPS. But the lines are very blurred these days. You can almost achieve the same things with any of them in these kind of plans. IMHO I think that you can really start talking about clouds when you're playing in the same league as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

Well, the only thing that you need is to execute the tests on the three of the providers, and compare them yourself if you want. Those are the keys of the project so far, reproducibility, independency and transparency.

I'm inclined to expand the review, but only if I find a way to get free credits from providers or another way to finance the tests. But right now, the best thing I can offer you is the same tools that I used here in the repository itself.

Thanks!

That, I no like it. I understand it, but not like it.

It's like being at their mercy (or other clients) or like if the rules were written in the shore's sand, you're well until the tide rises. I would prefer clear lines into this kind of things.