Isohost virtual private server review
There is a new player in the South African Virtual Private Server arena. Isoho.st offers well thought out packages at reasonable prices with an innovative interface. Will they upset the apple cart?
Virtual Private Servers are nothing new; there are literally thousands of providers world-wide, and quite a few South African ISPs provide the service locally. Many of them offer locally hosted instances.
The general problem with these locally hosted instances is the archaic bandwidth offerings, with some hosts providing as little as 5GB monthly data transfer on their smallest offerings, and some offering only 200GB monthly transfer on their most expensive packages.
Isoho.st takes a slightly more aggressive approach, with bandwidth offerings starting at 50GB per month for their cheapest package, up to a whopping 1TB for their flagship package, and at competitive pricing too.
Given South African bandwidth being still very expensive compared to overseas, there is no uncapped offering as yet.
Working with the Isoho.st infrastructure is generally painless. They provide an in-house developed interface that currently works on Windows and Linux, with MacOS support in the works.
Instead of a web based interface, which can tend to be clunky and slow, their Isoho.st installer makes use of the SPICE protocol and an SSH based interface, allowing the administrator to work on a server at near native latencies with almost seamless desktop integration. It allows the administrator to interact with the server instance on the Virtual Machine level, like restoring the previous day’s backup image, mounting and unmounting ISO’s for booting and rebooting the server should the need arise.
The Isoho.st interface also allows a system admin to log into their instance with SSH and X forwarding, if a SPICE client is not immediately available to allow KVM interaction. Once the server instance is installed normal RDP or SSH protocols can be utilised as needed.
The Isoho.st client is constantly being improved and optimised, and allows the administrator to manage instances as if it were a physical machine, with options to reboot, power up, shut-down, and manage a virtual CD-ROM, among other functions.
A wide range of operating systems are supported out of the box, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos and other Linux distributions. Recently Windows Server 2008 has been added to the lineup, with license costs being added to the monthly VPS rental.
We installed Ubuntu Server on an isoho.st “Mercury” machine, which offers a 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and 100GB disk image with 100GB data transfer per month.
Virtual machine performance is generally impressive, with disk I/O showing very little penalty due to contention with other machines. Running a random seek test returned between 834 and 1071 seeks per second, with a latency of between 0.93 and 1.20 milliseconds.
The virtual machine also happily served 48722 requests of a basic HTML page over a 30 minute period, with system load on the Ubuntu server installation we used peaking at 1.70. More intensive PHP applications would result in significantly higher server load.
Constant network throughput was par for the course for a datacenter hosted instance, with 10 megabytes per second being achieved.
All told we were impressed with Isoho.st. Barring a few minor niggles during initial setup and a power failure that was rectified by migrating our install to another server farm within minutes of the outage being reported, there were no major show stoppers.
Pricing is competitive, and the packages are well thought out, providing one of the better locally hosted VPS products on the market in South Africa right now.
| Pros | Cons |
| Industry leading bandwidth allocation per package. | No web-based interface for less technical users. |
| Published resource contention ratios. | No MacOS ISOHO.st client. |
| ISOHO.st client allows desktop management of instances. | |
| Daily snapshots of complete instance that are easy to restore. | |
| Good server performance | |
| Wide range of Operating Systems on offer. Full Windows Server OS support coming soon. | |
| Reviewer Verdict | Good enough that the reviewer signed up to have an instance of his own for his personal hosting. |
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