Servarica, a web hosting/ VPS provider from Canada, had posted their offers for Black Friday 2020 Low End Spirit and Low End Talk, among other places. A 2 TB storage plan for US $ 48 a year in particular piqued interest from a lot of folks, and the plan was sold out pretty quickly. I am posting a screenshot of the offer from their website, in case the page is taken down in the future. The link to the offer on LowEndspirit can be accessed here.
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I had “won” a raffle on LowEnd Talk as a part of their Black Friday 2020 offers, and received a credit of US Dollars 50 from Servarica. I opted to use this credit for the Polar Bear Storage Plan. By then the plans were sold out, and I had to wait till the morning of December 15th when the opened up the plans again. Ordering and setup was smooth, and I was able to reinstall Debian 10 from the web based interface using the Debian 10 template.
Introduction: Servarica Polar Bear Storage Plan
I ran the basic checks- Yet Another Benchmarking Script for disk and network performance and bench.monster for speeds or connectivity from home. The processor and network checked out fine. The disk speeds are rather concerning. I have decided to wait for a week before testing the performance again. Planning to raise a ticket only if the speeds are still unsatisfactory. Update December 18, 2020: The disk speeds seem to have improved. I might run one more test towards the end of the year to check as the heavy users start winding down their uploading/downloading operations.Below you will find results from Benchmark test (YABS) run on this VPS.
YABS : Yet Another Benchmarking Script
Test Run on: December 18, 2020
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 31.81 MB/s (7.9k) | 153.52 MB/s (2.3k)
Write | 31.85 MB/s (7.9k) | 154.33 MB/s (2.4k)
Total | 63.66 MB/s (15.9k) | 307.86 MB/s (4.8k)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 154.43 MB/s (301) | 155.32 MB/s (151)
Write | 162.64 MB/s (317) | 165.66 MB/s (161)
Total | 317.07 MB/s (618) | 320.98 MB/s (312)
https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script I ran YABS with the flags to disable iperf and geenbench because I was more interested in the disk speeds.
[email protected]:/tmp$ curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -ig
Tue Dec 15 02:14:08 EST 2020
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz
CPU cores : 2 @ 2593.768 MHz
AES-NI : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 1.9 GiB
Swap : 376.0 MiB
Disk : 1.9 TiB
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 9.68 MB/s (2.4k) | 23.23 MB/s (363)
Write | 9.71 MB/s (2.4k) | 23.61 MB/s (369)
Total | 19.39 MB/s (4.8k) | 46.85 MB/s (732)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 11.57 MB/s (22) | 7.41 MB/s (7)
Write | 12.78 MB/s (24) | 7.77 MB/s (7)
Total | 24.36 MB/s (46) | 15.18 MB/s (14)
Note the
-s -- -ig flags I added to the main command for YABS (i.e. curl -sL yabs.sh | bash).
The ‘i’ flag disables iperf, and ‘g’ disabled Geekbench. I was only interested in checking the disk speeds. For Geekbench 4 and 5, as well as network connectivity, let us look at results below
Results from ‘dd’ test for disk speeds
I typically do not run this test since YABS is the preferred poison. But due to the low disk speeds, I thought of running this test.
[email protected]:/tmp$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test1.img bs=1G count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 29.2332 s, 36.7 MB/s [email protected]:/tmp$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2.img bs=512 count=1000 oflag=dsync 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 512000 bytes (512 kB, 500 KiB) copied, 6.24575 s, 82.0 kB/s
Running bench.monster
https://bench.monster/ `curl -LsO bench.monster/speedtest.sh; bash speedtest.sh -india`
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- OS : Debian GNU/Linux 10 (64 Bit) Virt/Kernel : Xen / 4.19.0-8-amd64 CPU Model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz CPU Cores : 2 @ 2593.768 MHz x86_64 20480 KB Cache CPU Flags : AES-NI Enabled & VM-x/AMD-V Disabled Load Average : 0.23, 0.54, 0.59 Total Space : 2.0T (2.3G ~1% used) Total RAM : 1987 MB (77 MB + 330 MB Buff in use) Total SWAP : 375 MB (3 MB in use) Uptime : 0 days 0:59 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ASN & ISP : AS26832, Rica Web Services Organization : Rica Web Services Location : Montreal, Canada / CA Region : Quebec --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark: Single Core : 2586 (GOOD) Multi Core : 4699 ## IO Test CPU Speed: bzip2 : 76.4 MB/s sha256 : 141 MB/s md5sum : 386 MB/s RAM Speed: Avg. write : 1945.6 MB/s Avg. read : 4573.9 MB/s Disk Speed: 1st run : 53.8 MB/s 2nd run : 52.5 MB/s 3rd run : 49.5 MB/s ----------------------- Average : 51.9 MB/s ## India Speedtest.net Location Upload Download Ping --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nearby 969.79 Mbit/s 1056.29 Mbit/s 10.932 ms --------------------------------------------------------------------------- India, New Delhi (GIGATEL) 62.68 Mbit/s 129.74 Mbit/s 229.619 ms India, New Delhi (Weebo) 65.38 Mbit/s 50.25 Mbit/s 227.737 ms India, Mumbai (SevenStar) 70.87 Mbit/s 162.28 Mbit/s 209.309 ms India, Mumbai (OneBroadband) 76.38 Mbit/s 153.41 Mbit/s 194.834 ms India, Mumbai (SevenStar) 10.86 Mbit/s 169.75 Mbit/s 209.260 ms India, Bengaluru (I-ON) 21.26 Mbit/s 36.07 Mbit/s 218.422 ms India, Bengaluru (Activline) 6.56 Mbit/s 15.26 Mbit/s 227.760 ms --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finished in : 8 min 3 sec Timestamp : 2020-12-15 06:03:25 GMT Saved in : /root/speedtest.log Share results: - https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15939565 - https://clbin.com/Pl85H
Takeaways and First Impressions of Polar Bear Storage Plan
I liked the overall service, and the responsiveness (and friendly approach) of the provider. Once the disk speed issue is resolved, this storage server (VPS) can be put to use for backing up data for one or more of my projects. This post is a part of a series of server and hosting services from Black Friday 2020 offers. This review is also indexed in the VPS Reviews and Benchmarks library.
This review is a part of the series of Benchmark and reviews for Virtual Private Servers. You can find similar posts from Index page where my other reviews are catalogued.
This post was updated in March 2022.