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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