Categories
DevOps GNU/Linux

Cheapest VPS Linux Server VM in South Africa

TLDR; As at October 2022 – Hostking.co.za has the cheapest Linux VPS – it is a smooth experience provisioning

What company provides the cheapest Linux KVM based VPS (Virtual private server) in South Africa.

What is a VPS?

  • It is a virtual computer – running on a hypervisor (a bigger computer).
  • It has its own kernel.
  • Used to run any workload, website or application you want without having to deal with maintenance, the hardware or power issues.
  • You pay a fixed fee per month
  • You access the server remotely with a secure shell (not a cpanel web interface)

cheapest-kvm-hosting-south-africa

I recently went looking for a cheap Virtual Private Server that is on the Linux platform and based in South Africa because my clients are in South Africa and latency will be faster 20 milliseconds as opposed to 200ms when the server is in europe.

The Prices

In the table below any extra included services like backup are disregarded. Services that only provide HDD (hard drives and not Solid state drives – SSD’s) like afrihost are excluded.

The prerequisites is that the Linux virtual server must run on a KVM hypervisor. KVM is a very robust hypervisor and is used by many in the industry. It has very good performance.

Updated September 2022

CompanyRAMCPUsDISKR/m(4/19)R/m(9/22)%Location
cloudafrica.net444830537523Teraco JB1, Isando, JHB
domains.co.za4412549856914.3
hostafrica.co.za421004154303.6
vps.co.za42100400370-7.5
telasera.com Now known as rackzar421203993990Africa Data Centres (Samrand JHB2, Capetown CPT1)
cloud.co.za421003403708.8
hostking.co.za4250539219-59.4Xneelo, Samrand, JHB
web4africa.co.za441501350180033.3
web-telecoms.co.za421003993990
1-grid.com42100519389-25.0
paradigmsolutions.co.za4210089999911.1
ivecloud.co.za64200499?
virtualservers.co.za64200499?

Location

It is important to know where the VPS is located.
Afrihost (and Axxess) use the MTN Gallo Manor data centre that recently went down due to heating and cooling problems. They could only recover in a week and are not included in this list.

Superior and reliable datacenters like Teraco are preferable to non-specialised companies like Internet solution’s (Dimension Data) Rand View Data center.

Teraco’s JB1 and JB3 datacenters are located on Isando very close to OR Tambo and hence it avoids being part of load shedding. Their JB2 datacenter Bredell – unfortunately does not but it has 2 huge generators.

Commentary

It is important to note that cloudafrica.net posts their prices exclusive of VAT – so you might be surprised when you get the bill at the end of the month with VAT included.

As the years go by – technology advances and computers get more powerful or cheaper. Some companies are passing on that gain to consumers while others might be upgrading the hardware and networking behind the scenes. Others increase the prices without upgrading the hardware or network though.

It is nice to see that the price of vps.co.za, hostking.co.za and 1-grid.com servers have gone down in price.

telasera.com and web-telecoms.co.za have stayed the same price from 3 years ago.

These providers have increased their prices in order from smallest to biggest: hostafrica.co.za, paradigmsolutions.co.za, cloud.co.za, domains.co.za, cloudafrica.net and web4africa.co.za.

Depending on the quality of service you may want to put plans in place to move away from certain providers that continue to trend up in price but do not provide faster and more reliable offerings.

The Pick

I have tried domains.co.za, cloudfrica.net, 1-grid.com and hostking.co.za

My recommendation is to use hostking as it is the cheapest and has extremely good support.
Provisioning is automated and speedy. The datacentre they use is Xneelo located in Randburg JHB and Capetown.

domains.co.za – is a bigger company but has more of a focus on the domain registration and DNS side of things.

From a pure hardware / output perspective – cloudfrica.net gives you CPUs – processing power. Often the rates are decent.

cloud-africa

I would say avoid 1-grid.com – their support is poor and their web interface is frustrating.

Performance

Update December 2022: While doing some load testing, a difference in performance was noted between hostking and cloudafrica where the same workload performed better by 2 on cloudafrica (on requests per second and response time)

A benchmarking test was looked at using linuxiac.com measure linuc vps performance as the blueprint for the test

Write Speed

Test case:

dd if=/dev/zero of=tmpfile bs=1M count=256 conv=fdatasync
  • cloudafrica: 81.7 MB/s
  • hostking: 56.5 MB/s

Read Speed

Test case:

dd if=tmpfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=256
  • cloudafrica: 6.2 GB/s
  • hostking: 49.2 MB/s

Not reliable

CPU Test

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 | md5sum

what we are looking for:

  • 300 MB/s: modern CPU
  • 100-150-200 MB/s: overloaded CPU-wise or is hard-limiting your CPU allowance to only some portion of a full CPU core

results:

  • cloudafrica (512): 527 MB/s
  • hostking (512): 454 MB/s
  • cloudafrica (1024): 514 MB/s
  • hostking (1024): 406 MB/s
  • cloudafrica (2048): 524 MB/s
  • hostking (2048): 294 MB/s
  • cloudafrica (4096): 524 MB/s
  • hostking (4096): 403 MB/s

Sysbench

sudo apt install sysbench
sysbench --threads=2 cpu run
  • hostking:
    • events per second: 1648.88
    • avg latency: 1.21 ms
  • cloudafrica:
    • events per second: 5487.21
    • avg latency: 0.36 ms

Another test:

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run
  • hostking:
    • events per second: 329.97
    • avg latency: 3.03 ms
  • cloudafrica:
    • events per second: 1069.15
    • avg latency: 0.93 ms

2 threads:

sysbench --test=cpu --threads=2 --cpu-max-prime=20000 run
  • hostking:
    • events per second: 629.06
    • avg latency: 3.17 ms
  • cloudafrica:
    • events per second: 2130.06
    • avg latency: 0.94 ms

CPU Details

Hostking

vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 44
model name  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5660  @ 2.80GHz
stepping    : 2
cpu MHz     : 2792.998
cache size  : 16384 KB
cpu cores   : 1
siblings    : 1

Cloudafrica

vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 15
model       : 6
model name  : Common KVM processor
stepping    : 1
cpu MHz     : 2799.998
cache size  : 16384 KB
cpu cores   : 2
siblings    : 2

Processors sharing cache will be called siblings

Conclusion

After looking at the performance – it is important to take your context into account. If you are running a general utility vm with low load but requirements for more storage then hsotking it the best choice.

If performance is important then cloudafrica wins.