Background
Do you own OpenVZ or KVM VPS like me? Well, I always scout for cheap offers at lowendbox and had one time owned more than 5 VPS mostly from U.S. due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. I had since reduced to 2 VPS, 1 NAT and 1 shared hosting. My 2 VPS are located in U.S. and the rest in Singapore, Asia. VPS1 is on he.net which is fine but VPS2 is on telia.net which is one hell of a headache. In the past 2 years, I had opened a few tickets to the host provider due to bad latency or slow transfer speed but the problems always return after a while.
Even VPS Provider Also Shakes Head
In a recent case, I gathered all my PingPlotter images as evidences and log a ticket to my VPS provider and I was kind of surprise with his response. You see, sometimes host providers just want to avoid additional work and especially if you are on their lowest tier subscription plan. I had met a few that redirected the fault at my upstream providers despite the proof I showed them. Therefore, I was glad that he sided with me on the Telia high latency case. Over the years, I had learnt to be patient with support staffs, address them nicely in tickets, provide dozens of PingPlotter images and traceroute from different locations.
Head to Head Vultr v.s. LunaNode Cheapest Hourly Prices Tested
If you had read Which Cloud Providers Cheapest On-demand Pay-as-you-go Hourly Prices, LunaNode and Vultr are two cloud providers that offer the cheapest on-demand hourly prices. LunaNode VPS is based in Montreal and Tornoto in Canada and Roubaix in France. Vultr has many locations but I tested New York, US and Toronto, Canada. New York was selected because it is the only location that still serves the $3.5 /mth plans while others starts at $5 /mth.
Although both LunaNode and Vultr have Toronto as one of the VPS locations, they used different upstream providers. LunaNode transits on Cogent Communications (cogentco.com) and Vultr transits on Telia Company (telia.net).
Red and More Reds, What Do They Have in Common?
All five of them VPS2@Phoenix, LunaNode@Montreal, LunaNode@Roubaix, Vultr@New York and Vultr@Toronto transit on Telia network. I was doing some work over SSH terminal and it was so lagging that letters I typed only appeared on screen after 2-3 seconds. I had to write my codes on Notepad and do a copy and paste on the terminal.
Packet Loss Lasted How Long and What Else?
While I did not take note when it started, my guess would be it lasted at least 24 – 48 hours because I had 2nd day PingPlotter summary that showed it was still experiencing packet loss after 24 hours.
In 2019, I logged a ticket due to experiencing slow upload speed of just 60 kb/s and the traceroute did not present anything unusual. We had a small debate going on as I was telling support that I did a speed test (speedtest.net) on my end to New York – ColoCrossing and the result was upload speed of 30.84 Mbps but why it dipped to a mere 60 kb/s for my VPS (in New York) on Telia network.
Conclusion
All these grumbling and it could be my fibre broandband upstream at fault but I signed a 2 years contract with them and I do not think they will switch upstream provider because of me. However, Singapore is well-known for its good network in Asia and for example, AWS ans Azure had chosen Singapore as one of its Southeast Asia data centers. Therefore, no matter which end is at fault, I would totally avoid or at most own one VPS on Telia network. Judging from the PingPlotter summary above, if I had to launch a VPS for a few hours, days or a couple of weeks, I would go for LunaNode@Toronto which is cheaper than Vultr and not on Telia network.
