SSDNodes Singapore is online!

Jimmy · Feb 19, 2020

Singapore is online!

Free backups for life: 48 hours only!

Finally, get blazing-fast cloud hosting with low latency access to India, China, Australia and the entire Asia-Pacific region, from the world leader in affordable VPS hosting.

Celebrate our newest location with our lowest prices ever + free backups at all 7 of our global locations!

Standard VPS$79/yr16GB RAM - SSD Storage

Performance VPS$99/yr24GB RAM - NVMe Storage

Limited time. Limited quantity. Get yours before they're gone!

GASTAN · Feb 24, 2020

are they any good?
the discount is quite big.
aint their HW oversold?

eva2000 · Feb 24, 2020

i posted my experiences at Benchmarks - SSDNodes - ssdnodes.com upto 91% discount on KVM VPS until May 31, 2018 with latest opinions at end of thread at Benchmarks - SSDNodes - ssdnodes.com upto 91% discount on KVM VPS until May 31, 2018

eva2000 said: ↑

Just thought I'd update with my experience wtih ssdnodes - the servers are great if you manage to get Intel Xeon Gold Scalable Skylake series or you maybe unlucky and get older Intel Xeon E5-26xx series. However, support response times are very very slow. Recently they have new deals with 2x disk and anniversary sale and I was trying to get my affiliate credits to use for their sale. Unfortunately my support ticket took them 2 weeks to reply and they didn't even fully transfer the credits I had !

Before this experience, I would of been happy to get ssdnodes VPS for use and even thought about using them for centminmod.com site VPS cluster. But 2 weeks to reply is very long even for budget/lowend VPS provider ! As it stands ssdnodes seems good for testing or if you have strong/frequent external/remote backups of your data as they don't have native backups and I wouldn't be confident in relying on their technical support for matters which require a timely reply.
Click to expand...

FYI, I still have a unreplied ticket from November 26, 2019 ~2 months ago from billing regarding why my referral credits where being credited the right amount. It resolved itself as they corrected the referral credits but never replied to my ticket so I closed it myself.

Folks at LEB forums also reported memory allocated can't be utilised properly as disk/cache buffers get cleared out at 4GB mark SSDNodes RAM is not fully utilized. But that thread has no actual proof that I see and I don't have ssdnode VPS active anymore so wouldn't know if things have changed. So make up your own mind if it's true.

Just the slow ticket support would rule out any important site/production usage when you need help etc. Probably good for testing type sites or learning the ropes for Centmin Mod testing. Though you could do that with any hourly billed VPS host like vultr, digitalocean, linode or like highly recommended Upcloud - signees also get US$25 credits to use as well.

LEB member decided to investigate at SSDNodes Singapore Launch - 32GB for $8.25/m and discussion onwards from that post

Doing some testing for kicks and giggles

Removed the virtio_balloon kernel module (rmmod)

Disabled the module from loading: /etc/modules.d/blacklist.conf with 'install virtio_balloon /bin/true' to make it look like it loads

loaded up a tmpfs filesystem with random data, 98% memory usage

Disabled swap

Let's see how long this lasts...

One fun observation - they are absolutely compressing memory. I wrote non-random data and usage didn't go up. It's odd to see this in production, usually the CPU overhead isn't worthwhile.

I'll report if I get any unexplained reboots or unfriendly contact, the box is essentially idle other than sitting on some memory usage. If they reboot me, I'll set this up to just fill the memory on boot and see how bad it gets.
Click to expand...

and

I just found this verbiage in the portal, guess they're leaning on/expecting this pretty heavily. Doesn't bode well for my experiment

To ensure high performance and reliability on our KVM platform, we require ... and all virtio modules.

These are included by default on all KVM servers, and disabling these services will result in downtime.
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Virtio balloon driver Virtio balloon

First of all, what is a balloon driver if you’ve never even heard of the concept? It’s a way to give or take RAM from a guest. (In theory at least), if your guest needs more RAM, you can use the balloon driver to give it more RAM. Or if the host needs to take RAM away from guests, it can do so. All of this is done without needing to pause or reboot the guest.

You might think that this would work as a RAM “hot add” feature, rather like hot adding disks to a guest. Although RAM hot add would (IMHO) be much better, currently this is not how ballooning works.

What we have is a kernel driver inside the guest called virtio_balloon. This driver acts like a kind of weird process, either expanding its own memory usage or shrinking down to nearly nothing, as in the diagrams below:

When the balloon driver expands, normal applications running in the guest suddenly have a lot less memory and the guest does the usual things it does when there’s not much memory, including swapping stuff out and starting up the OOM killer. (The balloon itself is non-swappable and un-killable in case you were wondering).

So what’s the point of a kernel driver which wastes memory? There are two points: Firstly, the driver communicates with the host (over the virtio channel), and the host gives it instructions (“expand to this size”, “shrink down now”). The guest cooperates, but doesn’t directly control the balloon.

Secondly, memory pages in the balloon are unmapped from the guest and handed back to the host, so the host can hand them out to other guests. It’s like the guest’s memory has a chunk missing from it:
Click to expand...

The original user reporting ssdnode taking away it's cache/buffered memory at 4+ GB reported he moved to Singapore ssdnodes and not seeing that behaviour like on Frankfurt ssdnodes VPS SSDNodes Singapore Launch - 32GB for $8.25/m so could be new ssdnode VPS host nodes not getting that virtio_balloon due to less neighbours sharing Singapore VPS host node yet.

So looks like there's some evidence you may not get to use your full memory allocation when ssdnode VPS host node is crowded with neighhours and virtio_balloon driver is in play which is default for all ssdnode VPSes.

so you can your memory buffer/cache usage via free command like
Code (Text):
free -mltw
Code (Text):
free -mltw
              total        used        free      shared     buffers       cache   available
Mem:          64000       12524       44037         553         304        7133       50407
Low:          64000       19963       44037
High:             0           0           0
Swap:          2047           0        2047
Total:        66048       12524       46085

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