About:
BudgetVM, known also as their parent company Enzu, was founded in 2005. Enzu also operates their own website, operates the BudgetVM website and also operates the brand RapidXen.
For this review, we’re going to focus on the BudgetVM offer of Xen VPS services in Miami. Their Miami location is located in “downtown Miami” according to their Miami network information. I know the physical location is located at 36 NE Second Street at the IM Integrated facility.
Plan:
I have an older legacy plan that is a 128MB VPS. 1GB plans start off at $4.99/mo which is a great deal for a Xen VPS.
I feel the size of the plan doesn’t matter as it’s the same VPS on the VPS node with other larger plans which are more I/O intensive than my network testing VPS which I sometimes use as a proxy/SSH tunnel.
Hardware:
The VPS node I am on has 1 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz CPU with 15mb of cache. Not a newer v2 or v3, but at least it is an Intel Xeon E5 series CPU versus E3 or the E/X/L series of Xeon processors.
The uptime is 19 days. The VPS node was reboot for some reason 19 days ago and previously, the VPS node was physically moved between facilities when BudgetVM moved out of the old Miami location. Before the migration, this VPS had over 365+ days of interrupted uptime.
Performance: the results of the Unix Bench benchmarking program are located here. The test was ran Oct 13th 2015.
Hardware / Performance Summary- not bad at all compared to other “low end” providers however BudgetVM/Enzu has “low end” prices targeted to that market but has a large infrastructure, their own network in some of their locations and their own IP assignments which low end providers do not have.
Network:
The network, according to the Miami datacenter info, is a blend of 1x10Gb Cogent, 1x10GB Zayo and 1x10GB nLayer giving the facility 30Gbps. However with my testing, it seems that a traceroute from the Zayo looking glass in Germany and Amsterdam is showing the traceroute riding the whole way to the VPS on the Cogent network.
Testing from Zayo- I checked from Germany, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Houston and a few other locations which showed a few hops on Zayo which was in Houston and the rest of the traceroute was done over Cogent. I was unable to verify a complete route from start to finish, on the Zayo looking glass, over the Zayo network as it took Cogent primarily.
Testing from nLayer- I checked from Paris (FRA1) and actually connected from the Paris looking glass to Miami completely on the nLayer/GTT network without it touching Cogent. The same occurred with Seattle (SEA1). However nLayer’s looking glass spit out random errors about being unable to connect via SSH to an IP address which made checking of nLayer more difficult.
UPDATE 10/13/15:
I decided to run a MTR report from a BudgetVM / Enzu LA OpenVZ service to see if this was exclusive to the Miami facility. From the VPS to my home IP address, the route was Cogent until it was handed off to Comcast in Los Angeles, which went to Dallas, Atlanta and North Florida which isn’t a bad route. To the home IP address to the VPS, the route was pure Cogent once exiting Comcast at Miami/NOTA. Not sure what’s up with the network blend with BudgetVM / Enzu when it sells a better blend, which there’s nothing wrong with using Cogent, and it seems like you always get Cogent. I have been told that BudgetVM / Enzu runs a better network in Los Angeles anyways.
However, when downloading a 100mb test file from Cachefly, it was completed at the rate of 24.5M/s in 4.1s which beats your 100Mbps limited ports with other providers and this test was ran at almost 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Also a few weeks ago, there was random Miami outages on the network which can occur with Miami providers who end up hosting game servers, VoIP applications like TeamSpeak, and cPanel servers from Central and South American clients which attract DDOS attacks.
Network summary- if you’re looking for a quality network, if your location in Europe has nLayer/GTT you’re good but if you’re looking for Zayo connectivity it seems to be lacking in the network blend.
More information about BudgetVM / Enzu’s ASN located via looking up AS18978
Conclusion:
I am very satisfied with BudgetVM/Enzu in their Miami location.
However, I’m concerned about being told that it’s a blend of Cogent, nLayer/GTT, and Zayo that isn’t showing itself being much more than primarily Cogent within the US. When I traceroute / MTR from my VPS to my home IP and do the same for the VPS IP address, it’s all Cogent.
Granted, the latency is less than 30ms as I live in Florida and Miami is a great location plus I’ve seen weird routing where the routing goes into Atlanta then back to Miami. I believe a BudgetVM / Enzu VPS is a great VPS to have in your collection of services for your projects, infrastructure and customer’s needs.