Continuing my search for good exotic Oriental VPSes, I accidentally ended up registering for a Dream.jp VPS offer :D Seriously, wasn't sure until the end this was going to work, but it in fact worked.
This service is tailored to sell only to Japanese, and a Japanese address is mandatory at registration; I used a free address provided by the package redirection service Tenso. But from the looks of it I could have just as well made up some random address. Paid with a MasterCard debit card issued in Russia, it was accepted just fine. Billing is pro-rated, which means they charged me only $3.23 now.
The welcome E-Mail warns that the tech support language is Japanese only:
We do not support in any language except Japanese. If you need any help, please find your representatives who can contact us in Japanese.
Before registering, it was kind of hard to tell even which kind of virtualization this is. I expected Xen, because one of their tutorials mentions something about Xen. But it turned out to be OpenVZ.
Specs of the plan:
OpenVZ (runs kernel 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5.028stab069.6xen)
1GB Guaranteed RAM (2GB burst)
50 GB HDD
1 IPv4 + 1 IPv6
100 Mbit Unmetered bandwidth "but we may put a limit if a customer uses too much"
490 JPY/month (around $4.8 at the moment)
Network: http://bgp.he.net/AS10013
Test IP: 27.120.102.123
dd write speed is okay/good:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; unlink test 16384+0 records in 16384+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 10.1608 s, 106 MB/s
ioping is very solid (over 100 requests only one spike to 29ms, all the 99 other lines are ~1ms):
100 requests completed in 100181.8 ms, 935 iops, 3.7 mb/s min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/1.1/29.0/2.8 ms
Tun/tap seems to be enabled:
# cat /dev/net/tun cat: /dev/net/tun: File descriptor in bad state
pings:
hk.edis.at = 55ms
oneasiahost.com = alternates between 86 and 77ms
ransomit.com.au = 216ms
baidu.cn = 50ms
Chinese IP 1.93.21.103 from this offer http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/261550 = 73 ms
The Debian template runs all sorts of crap by default, there's Apache2, Python running, and from what it seems also their own Webmin-like panel for VPS management (called Serversman), etc. SSH by default set to run on a different port instead of port 22. The "Serial Console" also runs on the VPS itself and is accessed via "Ajaxterm".
Now, what is not so good about this offer:
There is a CPU usage limit. In /proc/cpuinfo I see two cores of "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5630 @ 2.13GHz", but each core shows up as 425 MHz, and from using a CPU-heavy app, I could tell (via 'top') that my allowed summary CPU usage is only 40% of one core.
# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=512 | md5sum 512+0 records in 512+0 records out 536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 5.45979 s, 98.3 MB/s aa559b4e3523a6c931f08f4df52d58f2 -
Ask if there's anything else you want to know. I don't think I will be keeping this one, don't like OpenVZ at all, and don't like the CPU limit. But I will have it till the end of May.