My main focus is on WEB development, and I mostly work with VDS. As a developer gains experience over time, they develop their own preferences. In this regard, I would like to share my experience working with Timeweb.
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I have been aware of Timeweb for over a decade now, and the organization has made a good impression on me in terms of its internet presence. However, I always seem to end up having negative experiences with the service provider, either because of something I did wrong or because the operator never agrees on something in its terms. Let me explain the reason behind this.
Like many other hosting service providers, Timeweb offers a domain as a gift when you pay for a year, but finding the domain can be very challenging. You need to renew the domain every year, and when you pay for hosting yearly, you get the domain again as a gift for one year. The catch is that you must not miss the moment; otherwise, the domain will be extended for money instead of being a bonus. The desired bonus is hidden deep inside the admin area, making it difficult to locate.
The second story involves virtual hosting and load. When selecting a tariff plan, you're presented with an impressive pitch, but nobody tells you about the limitations. There is no information about connection speed or traffic, even though the infinity icon appears in the tariff conditions. Once, I had a website with auto-filled information, a knowledge library, and after only a month, I was politely asked to leave because I had exceeded the limit on traffic and server load.
Finally, let's talk about VDS. Do you know the difference between HDD, SSD, and NVMe? Timeweb does, and they even write a beautiful article on their blog with tabular characteristics. In reality, things may be different.
When we rented a VDS and conducted three tests, here were the declared characteristics:
- RAM: Instead of 2048 megabytes, we had 1993 megabytes for some reason.
- Internet Speed: The daytime average speed was approximately 50 megabits out of 10 tests, and the nighttime speed was about 150 megabits out of 10 tests, but the speed was extremely variable. The advertised stable 200-megabit speed was not achievable.
- NVMe Read/Write Speed: Remember the sign? The average NVMe read/write speed is 3500 MB/s. Nonetheless, my VDS had an average write speed of 600 MB/s during the day and 800 MB/s at night.
In conclusion, when tested with only a bare operating system and no pre-installed software, none of the declared parameters were met.
I do not want to defend any provider, but the table provided lacks an explanation that not everyone may understand. Let me clarify why the write speed to disk can never match the media speed on a VPS, whether it is HDD, SATA SSD, SAS SSD, or NVMe SSD.
The table displays the write/read speed as a whole on the media. The server hosts not only your VPS but also other clients who write and read from the disk, along with IOPS overhead by the hypervisor. Tabular speeds will only be achievable if your VPS is the only one hosted on the hypervisor.
I once tested the speeds of VPS disks (under Postgresql) from various providers. Timeweb turned out to be not the worst; VDSina offered disk speeds one and a half to two times faster, but you now have more on Timeweb than I had on VDSina back then. PQ provider had the slowest at that time (40-60 Mb/s back and forth), while Hetzner had an average performance among the providers I tested. Their cli utility was convenient for me (similar to aws cli). I don't recall much about the others.
I cannot recall any instance where traffic was limited on shared hosting plans. However, the load (cp) on shared hosting is limited in most cases, but not traffic. The issue may arise because site traffic caused a server load that exceeds the tariff limit instead of exceeding the amount of traffic itself. Queries can pull scripts that require many resources with poor optimization, especially when they arrive in large volumes.
If you want to test things out, you could try pulling static files in significant amounts, and if nginx grants permission, there will probably be no fixed load or only a minor one.
Cityhost.ua is a hosting company with 18 years of experience. On their website, hosting rates have two branches: Hosting and Unlimited hosting, each with four tariffs. The Unlimited hosting has unlimited disk space and domains, affordable prices, and a free domain (.in.ua .kiev.ua or .biz.ua) if you pay for a year or more. Their hosting control panel is their own design, and automatic backups are included in the price. They use modern hardware, and data centers are located in Ukraine, Finland, and Germany. All tariffs have a 10-day test period, and technical support is available to help with site transfers from a third-party provider.
Cityhost.ua's services are reasonably priced, and they use modern equipment. However, they do not offer commercial control panels.