One of the primary reasons tech-savvy consumers choose SSD-based hosting like you get with SSD Nodes is that they want top-tier performance. You might think all SSD hosting performance is the same, but that's far from the truth. Real performance depends on a solid platform—how does yours stack up?
If you're already an SSD Nodes customer, we'd love to see you try out some of these benchmarks and let us know about the results. If you're hosted elsewhere, maybe it's time to see if your host lives up to their promises.
Perform a network speed test
Speedtest is the ubiquitous platform for users who want to see just how fast (or slow) their new connection is compared to the other available options. Did you know that you can use the same platform to see how well your VPS performs? Thanks to a small command line tool from Github user sivel, it's well within your reach, and it's easy to get running.
Just download the script and make it executable.
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py
chmod +x speedtest-cliAfter that, you can run the script:
speedtest-cli --shareThe '--share' argument will output a URL leading to an image that you can use to share on social media or with your hosting provider. If you have a VPS with SSD Nodes, send us your results!
Give the hard drives a "spin"
Of course, we're being a little facetious—the entire purpose of an SSD is that there are no moving parts like traditional hard drives, which is why they offer such incredible speeds.
But a lack of moving parts doesn't mean you can't use the same tried-and-tested commands for examining disk I/O.
dd if=/dev/zero of=benchmark bs=64K count=32K conv=fdatasync
dd if=/dev/zero of=benchmark bs=1M count=2048 conv=fdatasyncEach of these commands will run for a few moments, so be patient! The faster the platform, the faster they'll finish up, of course. The output will look similar to the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=benchmark bs=1M count=2048 conv=fdatasync
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 2.32303 s, 924 MB/sTry a benchmarking script
If you'd rather try a single command that outputs results from all these different benchmarks, there are a number of different tools available:
https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench
https://freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh
Most of these can be downloaded to your VPS and run without any intrusive installation. They all have different methods and arguments, so it's not quite worth going into the details. While the output of each are a little different, you can use the raw numbers to better understand how your VPS meets, exceeds, or falters against what your host promises.
A quick warning: As with the Speedtest tool above, make sure that you investigate the code behind any of these scripts before you run them on your VPS. If a script is on Github and seems to have lots of stars/forks and a community around it, there's a good chance it's legitimate, but it's always good to check yourself.
How SSD Nodes stacks up
As we said before, we love to be transparent about how our platform performs against the competition.
A new customer tested out their Preon system using ServerScope and came away with some numbers that made us quite happy to see:
Test results for Preon at ssdnodes Server specs: 4 × Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GHz 16 GB RAM / 82 GB disk space Debian 8.7 Las Vegas, United States Benchmark summary: UnixBench - 3669.7 Disk Read - 9088 MB/s Disk Write - 1143 MB/s Bandwidth - 1842.47 MB/s More: https://serverscope.io/trials/lrAw
One of our customers recently ran a Speedtest on their VPS and was very happy with their results as well.
If you're with SSD Nodes, let us know how we're doing. The more data we have, the better we can serve you now and well into the future. And if you're with another host, and the numbers aren't quite what you hoped for, maybe it's time to reconsider.
Our everyday prices are routinely described as spectacular for the speed we deliver, and if you're crafty, you just might be able to hop in during one of our 24-hour sales, which offer incredible deals on high-performance nodes. And, for the life of that server, we won't ever raise your prices.
Just some of the benefits of partnering with a SSD hosting provider that actually listens.
