Reviews
Feb 11, 2012

QuickWeb Hosting Review - Fast, Reliable, Affordable

Finding the perfect VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting company can always be tough. We reviewed other companies like the Rackspace Cloud before, but to be quite frank, they are very expensive. For most people, we  really do not want to disk out $30 a month to spend for a server.

Sure, you might be getting a faster network, but for the most part, it is not entirely needed. This is where QuickWeb Hosting comes into play.

 

Introduction

Not only do the people over at QuickWeb know what they're doing, they have been around for quite some time, four years to be exact. If a hosting company lasts for even two years, there is a good chance they are going to stick with it. With QuickWeb, you do not have to worry about them shutting down your VPS; I for sure never want to go through the data center to get my data again. I am not once so ever frightened about QuickWeb pulling any move like this, which adds a huge trust factor to the company.

QuickWeb is also very attractive to many VPS buyers as it seems that they always have some sort of sale going on. As for myself, I picked up the Supa VZ1 in Phoenix (512MBs of dedicated ECC RAM, 768MBs burst, 500GB of bandwidth, and 25GBs of hardware RAID10 storage). For $100 a year (when I picked it up) you just cannot beat this deal.

I have been with QuickWeb for a little more than two months now and have been very impressed with their service. But let's not rush this review, how about a little more detail?

 

Reliability

Every server administrator out there knows that having a reliable server is more important than other factors. You can spend a ton of money on the fastest VPS with two dedicated cores and 2GBs of RAM, but if the server is not reliable, what is the point of even having it? With QuickWeb, the entire point of reliability won't even come to your mind: it just works. In fact, I haven't even rebooted my VPS since the day I set it up... now that is one reliable server!

The VPS itself is not the other thing that's reliable, it would be their entire network as well! But we will get to that in the next section! But the main point of QuickWeb's reliability is that it is just perfect. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

 

Network

You know what, I think I will let this section speak for itself.

root@mirani:~# wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2012-02-12 05:03:35--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 64.0M/s   in 1.6s    

2012-02-12 05:03:36 (64.0 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

Yup, that's right, QuickWeb can download a file from CacheFly at a mere 64MBs a second! Hot damn! That's all I have to say.. it's quite amazing. QuickWeb even happens to download this file faster than the Rackspace cloud! That is one fast network they have there... keep in mind this is only for $100 a year!

 

CPU Performance

One of the most important aspects to me has to be how fast the server can compute all kinds of information. For their lowest end "Supa" VPS package, it is not too shabby. Here are the GeekBench results (32 bit):

System Information
  Operating System      Linux 2.6.32-274.3.1.el5.028stab094.3 i686
  Model                 N/A
  Motherboard           N/A
  Processor                       Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz @ 3.19 GHz
                        1 Processor
  Processor ID          GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7
  L1 Instruction Cache  32.0 KB
  L1 Data Cache         32.0 KB
  L2 Cache              256 KB
  L3 Cache              8.00 MB
  Memory                15.6 GB N/A
  BIOS                  N/A

Integer
  Blowfish
    single-threaded scalar   2080 ||||||||
  Text Compress
    single-threaded scalar   2699 ||||||||||
  Text Decompress
    single-threaded scalar   3233 ||||||||||||
  Image Compress
    single-threaded scalar   1795 |||||||
  Image Decompress
    single-threaded scalar   1445 |||||
  Lua
    single-threaded scalar   2808 |||||||||||

Floating Point
  Mandelbrot
    single-threaded scalar   2670 ||||||||||
  Dot Product
    single-threaded scalar   4290 |||||||||||||||||
    single-threaded vector   5218 ||||||||||||||||||||
  LU Decomposition
    single-threaded scalar   2852 |||||||||||
  Primality Test
    single-threaded scalar   4593 ||||||||||||||||||
  Sharpen Image
    single-threaded scalar  11566 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Blur Image
    single-threaded scalar   8921 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Memory
  Read Sequential
    single-threaded scalar   7272 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Write Sequential
    single-threaded scalar  11880 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stdlib Allocate
    single-threaded scalar   5255 |||||||||||||||||||||
  Stdlib Write
    single-threaded scalar   8599 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stdlib Copy
    single-threaded scalar  16893 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Stream
  Stream Copy
    single-threaded scalar   7470 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    single-threaded vector   8336 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stream Scale
    single-threaded scalar   7294 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    single-threaded vector   7876 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stream Add
    single-threaded scalar   7595 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    single-threaded vector   8627 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stream Triad
    single-threaded scalar   7280 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
    single-threaded vector   6389 |||||||||||||||||||||||||

Benchmark Summary
  Integer Score              2343 |||||||||
  Floating Point Score       5730 ||||||||||||||||||||||
  Memory Score               9979 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
  Stream Score               7608 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  Geekbench Score            5582 ||||||||||||||||||||||

But you know what, that's not enough. 5,582 is a great GeekBench score, but what does UnixBench say? GeekBench is a great performance benchmark, but UnixBench really stresses the entire I/O. How about we view the results below?

TEST                                        BASELINE     RESULT      INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables        376783.7  8821539.9      234.1
Double-Precision Whetstone                      83.1     1827.7      219.9
Execl Throughput                               188.3     6025.7      320.0
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         2672.0   189296.0      708.4
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           1077.0    47406.0      440.2
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        15382.0  1251688.0      813.7
Pipe Throughput                             111814.6  1223865.5      109.5
Pipe-based Context Switching                 15448.6   338243.3      218.9
Process Creation                               569.3    16766.7      294.5
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    44.8     1107.3      247.2
System Call Overhead                        114433.5  1050716.9       91.8
                                                                 =========
     FINAL SCORE                                                     274.6

The UnixBench score isn't too bad with only one core, but it could get up in the three-hundred range. Then again, I highly doubt you will ever stress the system so much like UnixBench does. In my mind, UnixBench isn't a good representation of the performance as stressing the entire system for around twenty minutes is quite absurd. If you do that to the VPS, on any provider, I'm sure they'll wonder why your load averages were so high.

With the performance in mind, I have not seen any struggles in performance; it is clear that whatever QuickWeb is doing, they are doing it right. I am sure they are not being like other hosting companies and cramming as many VPSes as possible.

 

Overall

I really like QuickWeb for their amazing service. But in fact, Roel, the main guy being it all, is one amazing guy; he is quite active on Web Hosting Talk and just a very kind person. Unlike other companies who are just in the hosting business for the money, I believe Roel is in it just because he enjoys his customers.

Overall, I am very impressed with the service thus far by QuickWeb, They have an A+ in my book and hope they will stay in my "top hosts" list.

 

More Coming Soon!

Thanks to Roel, he has also given me the chance to review his new Supa V8 Solid State Drive (SSD) powered Virtual Servers. If you're looking for some of the fastest VPSes out there, these SSD nodes will be part of it! As SSDs are quite expensive (I just installed a 120GB SSD in mine for a discounted price of $200), especially server-grade, SSD VPSes are a bit more than the regular RAID10 VPSes, but the difference is huge. How huge? Wait for our review to find out!

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