Seeking VPS providers for low volume network probe

Wed Oct 29 22:41:55 UTC 2014

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Josh Luthman
<josh at imaginenetworksllc.com> wrote:
> Ramnode is like $24 a year.  They have a Netherlands cluster.  I'm running
> CentOS6 and get both IPv4 and v6.  They use OpenVZ for the really cheap
> stuff so depending on what you're doing you may run into issues.

+1 for RamNode (AS3842).  I have several VPS'es from them, very very
stable, awesome Support.  Other nods go to OneAsiaHost (AS24482) in
Singapore, and RansomIT (AS45177) down under.  All three of those
providers fundamentally understand BGP/peering.

As for Africa... I use the RamNode Netherlands to provide coverage to
Africa.  I spent the past year and half trolling the African VPS
marketplace, and while there are excellent providers, the peering
SUCKS.  I'm not going to get into why the peering sucks... let's just
say that one or two strategic providers seem to like for everything to
route through London.   Anyhoo... In South Africa you can get solid
VPS'es from domains.co.za, and vps.co.za.  Their network peerings will
also allow you to adequately cover 75% of Nambia, Botswana,  Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique.   On the Eastern side of
the continent there is kilihost.com (formerly aptus.co.tz), however
they are still working with TIX and KIXP (and have been for years) to
establish better regional peering (the whole of East Africa seems to
route 95% of traffic through London... someone on this list provides
that transit.... hopefully at cost....).   Western Africa is best
reached/served from London/Netherlands... however there are a few
Nigerian VPS hosts but the infrastructure is not on par with the
South African or London datacenters.   No VPSes in Riyadh, Dubai, or
Mumbai, seemed to have any capabilities of providing better
connectivity to East Africa.

Why do I know all this, well ~2 years ago there was a thread here
about how geoip DNS sucks (or such) and I set out to build a hobby
geoip CDN to see just how much it sucked.   My takeaway is that the
tech is there, the politics (peering) isn't.... and that is most
prevalent in the whole of Africa (and pretty much unique to Africa).

-Jim P.