HotlineServers Benchmark and Review (8GB, Chicago Location)

Note: Out of respect to the provider, because the offer I purchased was exclusive to a certain forum, the publishing of this post was delayed until the offer expired.

Welcome to my first review of a web hosting provider! This review will be about Hotlineservers, a new hosting company I discovered on a hosting forum a few weeks ago, as a result of a fantastic offer they posted (more on that below). Additionally, the review will follow my review methodology I posted about 2 weeks ago.

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Provider Overview

• Founded: May 2020
• Location: Chicago, incorporated as Hotlineservers LLC in Illinois, USA
• Locations Offered: At the time of writing, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Frankfurt, and Miami locations are offered. All of these locations are from GTHost, except for Miami, where some nodes are with ReliableSite.net.
• Payment Methods: At the time of writing, Stripe & PayPal
• Company Website: https://hotlineservers.com

Hotlineservers is a fairly new American hosting company. They continue to expand globally at a rapid pace, but they have asserted that their locations are mostly profitable. For more information, visit their company website above. A looking glass and uptime reports are available there too.

Plan Specifications

Note that I purchased this plan at a 55% recurring discount from their regular price.

• CPU: 4 dedicated? threads, Intel Xeon E5-2660 v2
• RAM: 8GB RAM (type unclear)
• Storage: 160GB SSD storage, RAID10
• Network: 10TB bandwidth @ 1Gbit/s
• 1 IPv4 Address, 5 IPv6 Addresses on request (from a /64). Additional IPv4 are $2/mo each.
• KVM virtualization
• Coresite (GTHost) datacenter in Chicago, IL, USA
• Free DirectAdmin license and nightly backups
• Price: $6.53/month

As you can see from these specifications, the VPS provides extraordinary value for the price, especially when factoring in the bonuses like a free DirectAdmin license - even beating ridiculously cheap providers like Contabo. Yet, unlike providers like Contabo, the performance is quite good, as you will see in the following benchmarks.

Additionally, in the Miami location, it is possible to get a node with a Ryzen CPU for an extra $2.50/month.

Server Benchmarks

YABS.sh

# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
#              Yet-Another-Bench-Script              #
#                     v2020-02-10                    #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #

Thu 18 Jun 2020 10:11:44 PM EDT

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v2 @ 2.20GHz
CPU cores  : 4 @ 2199.998 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 7.7Gi
Swap       : 4.0Gi
Disk       : 157G

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4kb           (IOPS) | 64kb          (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 186.54 MB/s  (46.6k) | 976.94 MB/s  (15.2k)
Write      | 187.04 MB/s  (46.7k) | 982.09 MB/s  (15.3k)
Total      | 373.59 MB/s  (93.3k) | 1.95 GB/s    (30.6k)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512kb         (IOPS) | 1mb           (IOPS)
  ------   | -----          ----  | ---            ----
Read       | 1.38 GB/s     (2.7k) | 1.01 GB/s      (994)
Write      | 1.45 GB/s     (2.8k) | 1.08 GB/s     (1.0k)
Total      | 2.83 GB/s     (5.5k) | 2.10 GB/s     (2.0k)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider                  | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed
                          |                           |                 |
Bouygues Telecom          | Paris, FR (10G)           | 867 Mbits/sec   | 301 Mbits/sec
Online.net                | Paris, FR (10G)           | 886 Mbits/sec   | 241 Mbits/sec
WorldStream               | The Netherlands (10G)     | 868 Mbits/sec   | 317 Mbits/sec
wilhelm.tel               | Hamburg, DE (10G)         | 861 Mbits/sec   | 387 Mbits/sec
Biznet                    | Bogor, Indonesia (1G)     | 615 Mbits/sec   | 46.7 Mbits/sec
Hostkey                   | Moscow, RU (1G)           | busy            | busy
Velocity Online           | Tallahassee, FL, US (10G) | 922 Mbits/sec   | 869 Mbits/sec
Airstream Communications  | Eau Claire, WI, US (10G)  | 943 Mbits/sec   | 929 Mbits/sec
Hurricane Electric        | Fremont, CA, US (10G)     | 920 Mbits/sec   | 414 Mbits/sec

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv6):
---------------------------------
Provider                  | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed
                          |                           |                 |
Bouygues Telecom          | Paris, FR (10G)           | 854 Mbits/sec   | 275 Mbits/sec
Online.net                | Paris, FR (10G)           | 877 Mbits/sec   | 228 Mbits/sec
WorldStream               | The Netherlands (10G)     | 864 Mbits/sec   | 371 Mbits/sec
wilhelm.tel               | Hamburg, DE (10G)         | 845 Mbits/sec   | 223 Mbits/sec
Airstream Communications  | Eau Claire, WI, US (10G)  | 917 Mbits/sec   | 871 Mbits/sec
Hurricane Electric        | Fremont, CA, US (10G)     | 908 Mbits/sec   | 776 Mbits/sec

Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value
                |
Single Core     | 489
Multi Core      | 1890
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2594533

Nench.sh

-------------------------------------------------
 nench.sh v2019.07.20 -- https://git.io/nench.sh
 benchmark timestamp:    2020-06-19 02:26:44 UTC
-------------------------------------------------

Processor:    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v2 @ 2.20GHz
CPU cores:    4
Frequency:    2199.998 MHz
RAM:          7.7Gi
Swap:         4.0Gi
Kernel:       Linux 5.4.0-33-generic x86_64

Disks:
loop0     55M  HDD
loop1   71.2M  HDD
loop3   30.3M  HDD
loop4     55M  HDD
loop5   29.8M  HDD
loop6   69.3M  HDD
vda    160G  HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
    4.029 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
    7.041 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
    2.258 seconds

ioping: seek rate
    min/avg/max/mdev = 45.1 us / 75.7 us / 7.39 ms / 63.3 us
ioping: sequential read speed
    generated 27.8 k requests in 5.00 s, 6.79 GiB, 5.56 k iops, 1.36 GiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
    1st run:    118.26 MiB/s
    2nd run:    132.56 MiB/s
    3rd run:    125.89 MiB/s
    average:    125.57 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
    your IPv4:

    Cachefly CDN:         51.79 MiB/s
    Leaseweb (NL):        10.34 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   30.12 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      12.38 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         32.37 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
    your IPv6:

    Leaseweb (NL):        10.70 MiB/s
    Softlayer DAL (US):   46.93 MiB/s
    Online.net (FR):      10.21 MiB/s
    OVH BHS (CA):         37.02 MiB/s
-------------------------------------------------

Speedtest.net

While the results of the CPU and disk benchmarks aren't necessarily stunning, they are well above those of competing providers at this price point. Additionally, the network is very good (something that I expect of Coresite datacenters).

Provider Support

I had to contact Hotlineservers's support for three issues; first, to have a DirectAdmin licensed assigned to my VPS; second, to have noVNC enabled in the Virtualizor control panel; and third, to have some IPv6 addresses allocated for my VPS.

In all 3 cases, the response from the support staff was quick (within the hour), and they appeared to be very competent. However, I noticed many unprofessional English errors throughout their ticket responses. (While this does not affect the quality of their support, it can be a turn-off for some, including me.)

For the most part, issues were resolved quickly. The DirectAdmin license and the IPv6 addresses were provisioned within an hour of the ticket being opened, but enabling noVNC required several hours. It appears this delay might have been caused by requiring support from Virtualizor directly, however.

Concluding Remarks & Verdict

Overall, the decent performance of the VPS paired with rapid, excellent support makes the value of my Hotlineservers VPS almost unbeatable. Though Hotlineservers is a nascent provider, their transparency to the community along with the claim that they are profitable suggests that they will be around for many more years. I hope to see more of them in the future.

If Hotlineservers does run the 55% off promotion again, then I would highly recommend picking up a VPS from them!