Reviews Berman Hosting Review

Berman Hosting Review

Updated 2014.12.21

Berman hosting was given birth in October 2011 and from the start it was offering cheap windows vps hosting. Although the prices were risen a bit it still is one of the cheapest available. The provider’s data is publicly available in whois database, so we easily learnt that the business is run from Bulgaria.

Vps offer
It is quite clear what you can and can’t do with your vps, because of short and clear Terms of Service. In general: no illegal or copyrighted materials, no proxy servers. There is one, quite amusing for me, passage about adhering to “US Federal, State or City laws”. Guys! I’m living in Europe, you’re living in Europe, the servers are hosted in Europe – what US has got with it? And what if I break a City law of Morgantown, West Virginia? (kudos for people from WV!). I’m pretty sure that the most of TOS of small providers is copied from somewhere…
Ok, enough this old pirate rant, let’s see the offer.
[magictable-shortcode1 provider=”Bermanhosting”]

This is a really straightforward vps offer: no micro vps, no huge machines. Looking at the prices you can see that they’re very competitive! however please notice that:
1. The declared network port speed is 100Mb/s (but see over findings below!). You can upgrade to 1000Mb/s for 5$ a month.
2. The Windows OS costs additional 2$ a month.
So all in all your monthly payment for 1GB Windows box running on 1000Mb/s port will be 21.99$, which still is cheap, but not so dead cheap.

As of December 2014 all the prices include both Windows licence costs and 1000Mb/s port. Great!
Berman hosting declares unlimited bandwidth.

Support
I paid for the vps Saturday evening and it was ready Sunday afternoon (in 19 hours), which is ok. Yes, I love making orders and creating tickets at night and during weekends – I’m testing them for you! The problem was I had no idea, that my windows vps machine is ready to go, because I didn’t receive any confirmation email. I put it through to Berman hosting support (ticket answered in 7 minutes at night) however they couldn’t manage to solve it. Still you have all the emails gathered under My emails tab in the client’s area, but it’s very inconvenient! I was given this advice and no further investigation from the host side was conducted. That’s bad guys!
In general the vps was set up promptly and the support is responsive – I just wonder if they will be willing to help in some non-standard cases.

bermanhostingdesktop

VPS Benchmark
This Windows VPS is run on a desktop processor Intel Core i7, where usually in servers there are server processors used (like Intel Xeon). Berman Hosting Windows VPS has a good CPU speed, while RAM and disk performance is below average.

NovaBench Score: 310
4/16/2013 2:52:41 PM
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
Intel Core i73770 3.40GHz @ 3400 MHz
Graphics Card: VMware SVGA 3D

1024 MB System RAM (Score: 114)
- RAM Speed: 8682 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score: 185)
- Floating Point Operations/Second: 25681180
- Integer Operations/Second: 105400203
- MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 1128855

Graphics Tests (Score: 0)
- 3D Frames Per Second: 0

Hardware Tests (Score: 11)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 50 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 82 MB/s

Now let’s see the network performance. The results are quite surprising (remember that this machine should run on 100Mb/s port)! Usually I connect with a few different servers near the VPS host location and measure the average speed, but in this case I have to split the results into two tables.
First server: average download is 197.28 Mb/s and 97.72Mb/s for upload. Please note this is more that you can get on a 100Mb/s port even theoretically! Download speed is quite stable (176.58 Mb/s min and 216.73Mb/s max), while the upload is fluctuating (65.90Mb/s min to 131.35Mb/s max).

Second server: rock stable (up to 2% difference between min and max) 498.66Mb/s download and 754.59Mb/s upload!!! You can’t see this kind of numbers often.

Just before you get too excited let me say, that probably the second server is hosted in the same location as our VPS. It’s also clear that it’s not a 100Mb/s port. And even for a 1000Mb/s port in a shared server environment this is amazing!

There is about 470MB of RAM occupied after login, which is over 100MB too much. I was investigating the problem, but no final solution found yet (for sure I can see 35MB Microsoft Antimalware process running).

Now our traditional responsiveness test:

Place Avg. ping
Germany 24 ms
Poland 27 ms
USA / Chicago 116 ms

The server is located in Gunzenhausen (Germany). The ping values show that you can comfortably work from Europe and you get an average responsiveness when connection from US. What’s interesting ping packets are being blocked by this Windows VPS (by default) so it won’t answer to your ping – it can be important for monitoring tools.

Comments

  1. First remark:
    The opinions on the forums are mixed. I’d say extremely mixed. Most people are cursing the support, so if you don’t have any special wishes and all is working fine – you can get a really cheap Windows VPS here.

  2. Second remark:
    I got to find or create a tool that will benchmark the VPS with SEO tools in mind – I think it should simulate the kind of traffic and load most SEO tools generate. I’ve tried to use GScraper free for this purpose, but it shows a very different results and it’s hard to compare.
    Anyway, stay tuned!

  3. Bermanhosting is offering now 1Gbps ports and Windows license fees are included. All this for a litte bit more gold. I like it.

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