Host Europe vs GoDaddy vs Hetzner vs Rackspace

Posted by Stephan Kristyn on October 25th, 2010 / 19 Comments

This is a review of web hosting services. I compared prices, customer service, backend, speed and the DNS management of the contenders.
 
I’m almost sure you were also stabbed in the back, spitted upon, lied into your face and left in the dark by a hosting service company at some point during your career as IT professional. I will see if anything has changed.
 
Whether as a hobby web master or as an employee you most likely came to a point in your career where you desperately want to know if there exist any good hosting service providers at all.

The good news is: Yes there are.

After being ripped off by countless third class hosters I cancelled my latest one, I settled with the court -yes it went that far- I took my domains and moved them to goDaddy. Moreover I rented myself a cloud server at Rackspace. But I needed some backup, so I signed with the hosting companies DomainFactory, Host Europe and Hetzner Online, too. In this roundup I will try to compare these companies to each other. Please bear in mind that I am not a professional reviewer and therefore this review might be biased or not very scientific.

Hetzner Online deserves some attention. They won the bavarian state startup award. And in Bavaria everything is better anyway; if you want to believe the german saying. Although one should never call Franconians Bavarian, they’re going to hang you, no seriously. Hetzner expanded internationally and is known for extremely good service and fast servers and low prices.

If you are concerned with renewable energy, there is one thing I should mention. HostEurope is powered with RECS energy, which is re-labeled fossile energy. They promise to plant a tree for every server. Hetzner on the other hand powers its datacenters with energy produced in hydroelectric power plants. This is much better than RECS labeled energy. However these are owned by EnBW which, in theory, could take the revenue from the renewable energy to build new nuclear plants or coal-fired power stations. So in my opinion this is typical for ecological situations: everyone has to know for himself the level of ecological involvement that suits his consciousness.

RackSpace

Helpful and knowledgable customer service. Very fast server deployment. The ‘order-to-ssh-login-time’ equaled to a few minutes.

Price
They charge about $12 a month for a 256MB RAM cloud server; given that your site attracts low traffic. You have to shell out $40 a month for a 1024MB vServer. This is the only one that is actually usable in a production environment and the one you should get.

Backend
Unfortunately the backend was very slow. This droves me nuts, at least it comes with all necessary services like server restart or DNS configuration.

Speed
I could not test their network and server speed properly due to the overall slow server I bought. 256MB of memory for a cloud server was clearly insufficient for even my simplest web pages. They recommend a 1024MB server. The speed of a more pricey server should be great. High traffic Web 2.0 services like Tweetphoto host on Rackspace.

DNS
You will get only the option to alter your basic DNS records. I could not alter any NS records. Rackspace does not want to be a domain registrar, but if you are desperate you can register with them through Tucows.

GoDaddy

I could instantly transfer my domain and use it after ordering. I found their FAQs really helpful. GoDaddy has a high reputation among customers.

Price
They charge ~5€ for .com domains. You can choose from many TLD’s.

Backend
The backend is a bit cluttered up but offers a lot of functionality in return.

Speed
I only use GoDaddy as a domain registrar and DNS manager.

DomainFactory

I did not like DF. Why did I sign with them? They promise fully editable name server entries right at their front page. Most importantly they offer a moneyback guarantee in case you are not satisfied. DF has a relatively high reputation amongst their customers.

Both promises turned out to be somewhat untrue in my case. NS SOA editing was not possible. When I wanted my money back they told me -and this is no joke- I should read the small print.

Price
~6€ for .de domains.

Backend
Down last time I checked. When it’s up, it does the job. A bit cluttered but a also lot of options.

Speed
I did only buy domain services.

DNS
You can create SOA records only for third level domains (NS-Delegate), not for second level domains. As pointed out in the comments below by Chris AAAA and TXT records are possible.

Update Jan/2012
I’m happy to mention that DomainFactory added the Features I missed a few months ago. Now you are able to configure an external nameserver! With a very competitive pricing scheme and its corporate-responsible stance to support WikiLeaks Mirrors hosted on its servers one year ago, I highly recommend this hoster!

Hetzner Online

Very fast and professional servers. Very nice and helpful moreover easily reachable customer support. With their server packages you can choose from multiple Linux or Windows operating systems. They also offer FreeBSD or Windows Server 2008 Web Edition.

Price
In my opinion €29,- for your own root server sounds rather great. I went with their Level 4 Hosting solution for €4,90. No minimum contract period. They offer a discount if you pay in yearly installments. With the Domain Registration Robot Package you can register domains starting from €3.6 a year. To me this sounds outstanding.

Backend
Functional and fast. In my view the UX is very clean and the most user friendly of all.
 

DNS
DNS configuration is done via a delightful interface. The DNS Zone entries are configurable. For a onetime setup fee of €19 they offer a package called Nameserver Robot and for €29 you get the Domain Registration Robot which is included for free in the server packages.
 

Host Europe

Very fast servers that have got a high international reputation. Helpful and easily reachable customer support. You get account details in writing from them which I liked because it is more secure than electronically.

Price
I pay €12,90 monthly for a vServer. I could choose from a couple of Linux distributions and went with CentOS. They also offer Windows Servers at a little higher price.

Backend
The vServer comes with a preinstalled LAMP. The apache web server is preconfigured with MaxClients to fit the server – very nice. You also get a preinstalled Virtuozzo and a cPanel if you like.

Speed
Pings ran at ~30ms. Their data centers are located in Cologne about 600km away from Munich, so these are good values. For €12,90 the server performed beautifully. You get 1GB guaranteed with up to 2048MB dynamically allocated memory and a 50GB HDD.

DNS
They offer DNS management even if you don’t register your domain with them. I successfully pointed a domain from goDaddy to their names servers. With a web hosting package they possibly charge you for DNS management with an external domain, but for vServers it’s free of charge. Once you imported an external domain into their DNS you can also set AAAA, TXT or NS-Delegate records.

Speed Tests

In the meanwhile I had the opportunity to get my hands on a just-released vServer from Hetzner. I got the v12 which features 1024MB of memory. I will compare it now to HostEurope’s vServer which has also 1024MB of guaranteed memory. The prices are the same and it will be interesting to see which one is faster.

Cashing and Compression is off. This time I deactivated dzone, twitter, gostats and adsense. So only Askimet and Syntax Highlighting with Chili is activated. The values should therefore be accurate. I flushed the cache every time.

Firebug (seconds)
hetzner 1.19
heurope 1.07

iWebtool (seconds)
hetzner 1.13
heurope 0.99

mod_headers (computing time in milliseconds)
hetzner 132, 296, 1.31
heurope 151, 225, 0.43

The above values represent loading times for javascript, jquery and css.

ping (roundtrip in milliseconds)
hetzner: 27 avg
heurope 25 avg
 

HostEurope’s vServer performs better about 100 milliseconds. I would say the results are very comparable and are a draw. So to conclude the paravirtualized server by HostEurope would be a more attractive choice speed-wise by a very small margin in terms of latency, but if you need full virtualization then Hetzner is the only choice.
 
httping
I had the chance to do another test this morning using a Linux tool called httping. This tool is like ping but for http-requests.

“Give it an url, and it’ll show you how long it takes to connect, send a request and retrieve the reply (headers or whole page). Be aware that the transmission across the network also takes time! So it measures the latency of the webserver + network.” (httping website, 2010)

httping -G -B -c 50 akamai.com 

Hetzner to Akamai
round-trip min/avg/max = 304 ms
Transfer speed: min/avg/max = 24.3 KB

HE to Akamai
round-trip min/avg/max = 428 ms
Transfer speed: min/avg/max = 81.3 KB

httping -G -B -c 50 meshfields.de/'someDeeplink' 

MacOSX Client to Hetzner
round-trip avg = 302 ms
Transfer speed: avg = 95 KB

MacOSX Client to HE
round-trip avg = 239 ms
Transfer speed: avg = 118 KB

-g selects the url to probe and -c sets how many probes should be done. -G issues a full GET request instead of a HEAD request. -B enables compression given that the server supports this.

The GET request to akamai.com is simply stunning, because it shows a 50MB/sec difference between Host Europe and Hetzner. HostEurope managed to get a 145MB/s peak transfer rate from Akamai. The most practical test however is the MacOSX Client to the vServer test. It shows that my 16Mbit DSL connection manages to get data from Host Europe about 27KB/sec faster than from Hetzner’s vServer.

When I compared the WordPress backend running on each vServer it was very hard to tell any difference.

Unix Bench

Unix bench measures computing and filesystem performance. These are the results:

Hetzner
System Benchmarks Index Score 1459.7

HE
System Benchmarks Index Score 1487.0

If you want install Unix Bench yourself you can do it like this:

yum install libXext-devel
wget http://byte-unixbench.googlecode.com/files/unixbench-5.1.2.tar.gz

As I said earlier Hetzner uses fully virtualized servers. You could build your own kernel or switch off unneeded kernel resources. In above test my Hetzner vServer had about 60 running processes and the para virtualized vServer at Host Europe had about 20 processes running. StartServers in apache were both set to the default 8/2 and MaxSpaceServers were both set to 8/5/20. You can check for these values yourself with the stream line editor sed:

 sed -n '/prefork.c/{p;n;p;n;p;n;p;n;p;n;p;n;p;n;p;}' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf  

Interestingly the Hetzner vServer had 8 whereas HostEurope had only 4 running apache processes. I did find that out with:
 

ps aux --sort -rss

Above line sorts processes according to the resident set size (non swapped physical memory) they consume. Since apache eats up the most memory, above command would most likely print out all apache processes on the top of the list. -rss means reverse order whereas omitting the minus would list the processes with the smallest footprint first.

I wanted to know why I had more running apache processes with Hetzner so I issued a netstat into the command line.
 

netstat -lnp

Apart from the common MySQL socket and ssh daemon I saw dbus-daemon and hald running. The hardware abstraction layer seems important enough to me to leave it running. Dbus is important to enable communication between processes.

Moreover entering mount into the shell revealed that Hetzner comes preformatted with the ext3 filesystem and HE with reiserfs. I have to evaluate these topics further to see if I could possibly tweak something with dbus, Unix sockets or the filesystem. Keep in mind that reformatting or repartitioning isn’t possible with paravirtualized servers.

Conclusion

I cannot repeat this often enough: Stay away from cheap hosters. It is what I did this time, I did not mind the price and I was rewarded with enlightenment.

The following awards should not be taken too seriously. I am in no position to judge these companies. Keep in mind that my review is of subjective rather than analytic nature.

Rackspace might be great for your business, but their backend lacked the snap I need and they offer no domain services. The slow backend could be owed to the slow server I bought and probably the transcontinental network path. Overall I didn’t want to shell out $40 bucks for a server if I could get a more potent server for only €12 that also has a shorter network path to my home. I should point out that Rackspace seemed to me beeing more than just another hosting company. I found out that Robert Scoble works for Rackspace and does some interviews at their blog building43.

3rd GoDaddy is certainly a safe bet. Their backend is outstanding. The FAQs are exhaustive. I could not test their server speed.

2nd HostEurope has a very good reputation and their vServers are extremely fast. Very low domain prices starting at 6€ per year. The DNS and backend management user interface was not best in class. Nevertheless HostEurope has managed to impress me a lot so far. Their customer support works fast. You get a specific service level agreement tied to your product which you can elevate to premium for some cash. I send them a question via email and received an answer within 24 hours. I will certainly stay with this hosting service company. Host Europe marginally misses qualification for the 1st place. To be honest you can pick any of these three contenders and you won’t be disappointed.

1st Hetzner has impressed me the most. Their backend is extremely clean, fast and functional. That’s very important to me, because I -will- spend time at the backend. Shared hosting is fast. Their Nameserver Robot package sounds very promising. The prices for domains were very low and on par with GoDaddy. I liked it a lot that PhpMyAdmin is preinstalled on their web hosting packages. Customer support was immediately reachable. You get all this for €4,99 – therefore Hetzner gets the Meshfields Blue Badge.

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Stephan Kristyn   Edelweißstr. 4   81541 Munich

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