It's almost time for our first ever VPS Awards and so to prevent flooding our very first post with a lot of technical information, we decided to create this post explaining the methodology of how we compare servers and award... well... the Awards.

We have three (3) main categories; Server Resources, Server Performance and Other with a weighting of 50, 45 and 5 respectively.

Each is further broken down as follows:

 

Server Resources (Weight: 50%)

Disk Size - 15% - Actual usable disk space available on the VPS.

Ram Size - 15% - Actual RAM available to the VPS.

Bandwidth - 15% - Monthly bandwidth allocated to the VPS.

Core Count - 5% - we give a tiny bonus for more cores as it gives a noticeable benefit for multiple server-type applications. It should be noted however that this metric has a fraction of the weighting of the "CPU Performance" metric to prevent the over-inflation of nodes with lots of low powered cores.

 

Server Performance (Weight: 45%)

Cpu Performance - 15% - Primarily measured using Geekbench ran immediately after Unixbench to trigger throttling if present.

Disk Performance - 15% - Score is calculated using the read and write iops speed for the server (calculated using a 4k random read with a queue depth of 32). Both read and write are calculated separately and given an individual weight of 7.5 each.

Network Performance - 15% - Speed of the server acquired using the speedtest.net application. Both TX and RX speed are calculated independently and given an individual weight of 7.5 each.

 

Other (Weight: 5%)

Provider Bonuses 5% - Provider features such as a firewall and custom iso's factor in here. To see a full list see any provider overview page on this site.

 

At the end of each evaluation, we shall be declaring a winner. There shall be no copping out with an 'it's ultimately up to you'.

With that done, come back soon for our very first VPS Awards where we shall be covering the most popular category. The $5 tier.