Quick review of the FlowVPS BF 2019 VPS

Laputa

Christmas Day finally came today, the FlowVPS super BF 2019 preorder special has been provisioned. For those not aware or need reminding, here's the deal:

4 vCPU
4GB RAM
15GB NVMe - Primary
100GB SSD - Secondary (Not bootable)
1.5TB Data
1 IPv4
Some extremely lucky people got this for $15AUD/qtr, and various discounts until the regular $45AUD/qtr price (or $120AUD/year) which you can still get here: https://billing.flowvps.com/cart ... llingcycle=annually

$10 AUD per month for those specs is insane (that's about $7 USD) and considering the fact that it's in Melbourne, Australia on an extremely nice network and a location that's suitable for Australians, this is a steal. Just based on those facts alone, this is already exothermic potassium in my books.

On to the initial benchmark:

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Region: Global  https://bench.monster v.1.4.9 2019-12-24
Usage : curl -LsO bench.monster/speedtest.sh; bash speedtest.sh -Global


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OS           : Debian GNU/Linux 9 (64 Bit)
Virt/Kernel  : KVM / 4.9.0-6-amd64
CPU Model    : QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
CPU Cores    : 4 @ 2599.998 MHz x86_64 16384 KB Cache
CPU Flags    : AES-NI Disabled & VM-x/AMD-V Disabled
Load Average : 0.14, 0.05, 0.01
Total Space  : 113G (1020M ~1% used)
Total RAM    : 3955 MB (46 MB + 304 MB Buff in use)
Total SWAP   : 255 MB (0 MB in use)
Uptime       : 0 days 0:13
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ASN & ISP    : AS136557, Host Universal Pty Ltd
Organization : FlowVPS
Location     : Melbourne, Australia / AU
Region       : Victoria
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Performing Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark test. Please wait...
## Geekbench v4 CPU Benchmark:

  Single Core : 2375  (GOOD)
   Multi Core : 8623

## IO Test

CPU Speed:
    bzip2     :  79.5 MB/s
   sha256     : 150 MB/s
   md5sum     : 397 MB/s

RAM Speed:
   Avg. write : 1464.4 MB/s
   Avg. read  : 3857.1 MB/s

Disk Speed:
   1st run    : 445 MB/s
   2nd run    : 436 MB/s
   3rd run    : 368 MB/s
   -----------------------
   Average    : 416.3 MB/s

## Global Speedtest

Location                       Upload           Download         Ping   
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Speedtest.net                  909.58 Mbit/s    936.92 Mbit/s    1.764 ms
USA, New York (AT&T)           22.32 Mbit/s     16.03 Mbit/s    211.567 ms
USA, Chicago (Windstream)      30.53 Mbit/s     99.00 Mbit/s    235.874 ms
USA, Dallas (Frontier)         47.90 Mbit/s     87.48 Mbit/s    234.247 ms
USA, Miami (Frontier)          67.58 Mbit/s     113.34 Mbit/s   209.820 ms
USA, Los Angeles (Spectrum)    67.37 Mbit/s     134.28 Mbit/s   228.332 ms
UK, London (Community Fibre)   11.81 Mbit/s     69.93 Mbit/s    288.074 ms
France, Lyon (SFR)             18.50 Mbit/s     45.81 Mbit/s    298.372 ms
Germany, Berlin (DNS:NET)      19.98 Mbit/s     49.83 Mbit/s    293.129 ms
Spain, Madrid (MasMovil)       14.36 Mbit/s     49.04 Mbit/s    288.049 ms
Italy, Rome (Unidata)          18.68 Mbit/s     49.62 Mbit/s    275.746 ms
Russia, Moscow (MTS)           17.13 Mbit/s     42.69 Mbit/s    330.809 ms
Israel, Haifa (013Netvision)   15.31 Mbit/s     35.96 Mbit/s    352.838 ms
India, New Delhi (GIGATEL)     111.37 Mbit/s    300.88 Mbit/s   162.172 ms
Singapore (FirstMedia)         180.25 Mbit/s    164.40 Mbit/s    82.545 ms
Japan, Tsukuba (SoftEther)     22.34 Mbit/s     64.39 Mbit/s    244.249 ms
Australia, Sydney (Yes Optus)  683.76 Mbit/s    797.53 Mbit/s    12.575 ms
RSA, Randburg (Cool Ideas)     8.16 Mbit/s      12.11 Mbit/s    451.473 ms
Brazil, Sao Paulo (Criare)     12.64 Mbit/s     28.84 Mbit/s    328.557 ms
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Finished in : 12 min 10 sec
Timestamp   : 2019-12-31 07:01:08 GMT
Saved in    : /root/speedtest.log

Share results:
-
- https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15089465
- https://clbin.com/RkoAD
Sweeeeeet! I love the network. Anyone in Australia understands how shitty the overseas connections can be, but this is a very decent indicator of the best possible speeds that are possible to the tested locations. Singapore in particular is excellent, I think there must be some very premium routing to get that through Perth instead of the long way around.

If you're in SGP, this is an amazing choice for you to locate your servers.

I'm going to use this as a small Plex VPS, hooked up to an unlimited google drive account, and set up rclone cache on the secondary drive. The goal would be to have a fine tuned Plex instance that my family can use, while being mindful of the shared resources (CPU and Network)

The first thing you will need to do after logging into your VPS is to set up the secondary disk. Use your favourite tool to do that, I just used fdisk and mkfs.ext4 and an entry in fstab. If that went above your head, I'll follow up in this thread with a step by step, so please let me know if that would help.

I do plan to document my usage of this VPS, since it's quite unique to me in the location, network, premium FlowVPS and insane price, and hopefully someone can benefit from my experiences.

If anyone can find a 4 vCPU/4GB RAM/115GB of SSD and 1.5TB of data in Melbourne for $10 AUD I'll eat my shorts. Even $20 would be pushing it. A bargain at twice the price.

I suggest to anyone who missed this, or who is savvy enough to recognize a good deal to buy this while you still can. The provider is premium, the network is premium, the offer is premium and the price is insanely cheap. Worst case and I give up on Plex, I'll still keep it idling forever ;)