Experience with Italian budget VPS providers

**checkhost** · 17-01-2011, 13:24

Hello, guys. I'm not from Italy so let me speak in english. We just want to share with you our experience with italian budget Virtual Private Servers providers for non-europeans. We don't want to tell like "xxx hoster is bad, because of ...". Just a few words about some problems.

Client area and support
Some client areas and support systems are not comfortable for using, some of them doesn't have english language for choosing (in that case translate.google.com (Chrome built-in translator) was used).

It seems that WHCMS and internal support system of WHCMS is better than others. WHCMS is used by flarewm.com and keliweb.it

Support is not bad for all providers, may be for aruba.it it's not quick enough.

Payment
Payments over PayPal were successfully for all providers.

Two of VPS providers asked a scan of passport and signed documents (order): 7host.com, aruba.it

No problems with it when you have a scanner, but without a scanner it could be a problem. ;) Any way it's just for preventing fraudulent payments.

VAT
We don't live in Europe, so we don't need to pay VAT. But only a few companies disable VAT for non-european people according client's country. So in other way we had to write tickets to VPS hosting providers for payments without VAT.

Servers
We didn't use VPS servers in a hard way, so we couldn't say nothing about servers' stability and performance. But were no so long networking problems with no one. Also we used only servers under Linux.

Conclusion
We tried some budget VPSes from italian providers (we didn't touch providers with VPS's prices like 50-300 EUR ;))

Tested: 7host.com, aruba.it, flarewm.com, seflow.it, keliweb.it, serverplan.com

We liked flarewm.com, keliweb.it, seflow.it. Why? Prices, comfortable client area, support.

We will happy that our experience with italian VPS providers will be helpful.

Our project
And now let us introduce our project where some of italian servers are used.
See out check-host project in signature - a modern online utility for checking websites

- Website performance and URL availability checking from different places in
the world
- Pinging website from many countries in one click
- Any TCP port checking for availability from different servers in the world
- Domain resolving from nameservers in different countries
- Reports for every check with a permanent link to report (useful for providing this result to support of the provider when you have problems with your site/server)
- Geographical location for website or IP address
- Support of all well-known protocols' schemes for TCP port checking (example ssmtp://smtp.gmail.com)
- Punycode support (example - президент.рф)
- IP Subnet Calculator (CIDR -> IP range, IP range -> CIDR)

Servers are located in many countries (USA, UK, Canada, Russia, Germany,
Italy, France, Netherlands, Australia).

We plan to improve this project adding more features and more servers from other countries.

We are interested in your ideas, feedbacks and suggestions about our italian VPS experience and also about our project in signature

**Ste** · 17-01-2011, 13:47

Welcome Checkhost, your feedbacks are allowed, and let me say that you can add more details if you want, but spam is not allowed, it's against our rules, in particular for new users. If you need more info about our rules please contact me.

**checkhost** · 18-01-2011, 09:39

Yes, we could provide a bit more details.

We used/use Debian OS at all VPSes (and where it's not available we use CentOS), installed Perl, CPAN modules, Mojolicious (perl based web-framework Mojolicious Web Framework - Join the Perl revolution!). So there were no problems in any VPSes for this lightweight architecture.

**edwardp** · 03-08-2011, 07:47

Thank you for the feedback! I'm always amazed how different people have different experiences with the same company. A review and feedback is always good to make up your mind. I tried your website with my web site host and I'm glad to say that I got a satisfactory result. Your website is great.

**checkhost** · 05-08-2011, 12:52

Still using VPS of italian providers. All are good and stable enough. Nobody ran away (it's very often with new providers in USA).

Just 2 issue with 7host.com - 2 days VPS was down (it was crashed, so OS on VPS was reinstalled). But yes, it took 2 days - not so quick. Other issue - changing IP addresses to another (we had been noticed about changing IPs 1 month before). So during that changing VPS was down about 1 day... Also we noticed that 7host.com doesn't provide anything for rebooting VPS/OS reloading/... (like SolusVM).

And 1 issue with FlareVM when during 3-5 hours VPS was not available because of hardware problems.

So http://flarewm.com , http://seflow.it and http://keliweb.it are still very good italian providers for us. By the way, seflow has updated their design.

If somebody is interested in technical details how we use VPS servers you could read this article Using Perl, Mojolicious and Redis in a real world asynchronous application / No time to wait

Also may be Firefox addon for checking servers will be useful for somebody - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...on/check-host/

**Esalogica** · 05-08-2011, 13:07

Hello Checkhost, leaving aside the fate irony of a monitoring appliance that stays down 2 days straight, I'm a bit surprised you use low cost VPS to monitor performance. Considering low cost VPS may degrade performance in unpredictable ways a dedicated server seems more suited to this role in my opinion.
Anyway good luck with your service.