Server hosting for a website. Comparison of disadvantages of VPS providers. Anti-rating 2024

Most articles on the Internet offer you almost the same list of hostings with approximately the same slightly rewritten text. But, to tell the truth, all hosting providers offer the same thing on their sites at similar prices, and this is terribly boring. That is why I have compiled this “Anti-rating”, in which I have collected all their “jambs”. I will not rank the services on purpose. You will not find out who is the worst of the worst, or the best of the worst. I will simply collect from reviews and news items what should be taken into account when choosing a service, and what hostings will never place on the main page of their site.

Let's get started!

Best and worst hostings

Yandex Cloud

And we'll start with Yandex Cloud.

How the company positions itself: reliable universal PaaS cloud for business.

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Bulk deletion of virtual machines (here article ​​source)

2. All incidents are collected on a special site page (and this, in my opinion, is good practice)

Basically, there are problems with the network, GateWay API and general unavailability. But, in general, if you allow a couple of hours of downtime per month, then you can safely host;)

Price increase happened in one day, by 40-60%, taking into account the mandatory linking of cards (here is the source). True, this happened a couple of years ago. Most likely, it's time to increase again. Otherwise, the KPI will not be met. And why did I tell them …

What customers complain about:

You can find a lot of interesting things on link with reviews. In short, people complain about arbitrary deletion of virtual machines, formal long-term support (from the category “you're an idiot”), exorbitant prices, mandatory linking of a card from which money will then be debited, discrepancy between the declared IOPS and the actual performance of disks (I can personally confirm this – I took measurements and it was 3-4 times less)low test results (probably, when oversubscribing for CPU by 5-10 times, it may sometimes not be enough;)

For the rich and “smart”. But “Yandex”.

Selectel

How the company positions itself: Leading IaaS provider with its own cloud.

Indeed, dedicated servers for every taste, even truly “museum” exhibits. But if there are museum exhibits in dedicated servers, maybe there are some under the hood of the cloud?

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Here is one with unavailability – source link

2. Here's a more recent one, but it seems they weren't to blame – link to source

Price increases:

1. An example of a jump of 62% at once – link to source

What customers complain about: deletion of all data and disks with a slight delay in payment, arbitrary deletion of virtual machine disks (backups are our everything), weak support.

From my experience, when the problem is on their side, you can start escalating very persistently, complaining, demanding, begging, threatening, and then the problem is solved. You can even return the stated guarantee (three kopecks) under the SLA!

I was also impressed by the speed measurement (source) of the Selectel virtual machine compared to other providers. The performance in the test was an order of magnitude lower than that of others. It was as if either old equipment was used, or the equipment was so overloaded that it began to degrade in performance to the level of a “calculator”.

VK Cloud

How the company positions itself: universal PaaS cloud for business.

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Daily drop in November 2023 – (Description of the incident)

1. List all incidents (as I wrote above, I think keeping such a backlog is a good practice, incidents happen to everyone, but few dare to publish them openly)

Price increases:

1. Example price increases of 20-50%, which the company called an “adjustment.” A downright “negative drop” in value)

What customers complain about: cost of services, speed of response of technical support.

TimeWeb

How the company positions itself: Like Digital Ocean, only in Russia.

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Fall in December 2020 (source)

Price increases:

Just the other day there was a strong one (up to two times! see comparison table) increase with necessity pay for IP separately (150 rub.)

What customers complain about: security holes (source 1 and source 2), account bans for various reasons, formal work of technical support, server crashes. And much more. More can be found here link with reviews.

FirstVDS

How the company positions itself: cheap virtual hosting

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Data center crash – source 1 And source 2

2. Regular multi-hour downtimes due to updates on network equipment (source).

Price increases:

1. Increase in July 2024 by 25%. Moreover, the increase is even for archived tariff plans (source). This means that if you have paid for a year, you will be asked to pay extra.

What customers complain about: I have a bot with an ML model for recognition. And in my tests, recognition on the FirstVDS server was 6 times longer than on an old dedicated server with a 2012 processor, and about 10 times slower than in public clouds. And judging by the reviews – unstable operation and slow servers. Surprisingly few complain about support. Link to reviews.

RuVDS

How the company positions itself: cheapest vps servers

What we managed to find:

Incidents:

1. Fall for a few hours – source

Price increases:

1. In 2023 – (source link)

2. In 2022 – (link to source)

What customers complain about: Frequent technical work without warning, server crashes, poor technical support. Link to reviews

Aggregating information

This is a very subjective assessment based on the analysis conducted. Many people may probably have different opinions on this issue.

In fact, I took quite good providers for the review. Many others have much worse. And you shouldn't pay much attention to reviews. When there are many users, there are always problems. And everyone has drops. And it is very difficult to maintain prices with high inflation. It is just important to know what features and disadvantages even the best providers have.

The article can't cover everyone. But if you want to share a “not so great” experience working with someone else, let's do it in the comments.