No. VPSBenchmarks receives funding through advertisement and Featured Provider subscriptions but all tests for all providers are conducted in the exact same way.
VPSBenchmark's goal is to report the performance that end user will experience when buying the server themselves.
To be featured at vpsbenchmarks.com, first check out the Featured Provider page. You can also contact us using this form.
Featured providers get the following benefits:
The Featured Plus subscription is at $150/month and includes 2 guaranteed trials per quarter for a maximum VPS monthly price of $100. The Featured subscription is at $90/month for 1 guaranteed trial and a maximum VPS monthly price of $60.
At the end of each trial, grades are calculated and assigned to the VPS that was tested. Grades are made of metrics collected from all the tests that were run. Grades are then used to sort VPS plans in the Screener and in Best VPS rankings.
See also the metrics that grades are made of.
The Screener and other pages offer the option to display "price weighted" grades. With this option turned on, a low price plan that has the same performance as a high price plan will be shown with higher grades.
The price weighted view tries to answer the following questions:
For low price plans, the grade "bonus" is proportional to the difference between its $30 and monthly price. The function used to calculate the bonus is designed to have a small impact on very low grades and maximum impact on medium to high grades.
Similarly, grades for high price plans are displayed lower when this option is turned on: the higher above $30 the monthly price is, the stronger the hit on the grades. In this case, the function is designed to have a small impact on excellent grades and maximum impact on medium to low grades.
In all cases, it matters because of the cost. A VPS from provider A that costs $10 a month can give you double the capacity of a VPS from provider B at the same price. In other words, to do the same amount of work, you might need to buy 2 VPS for a total of $20 from provider B when could spend only $10 with provider A.
Then there is the user experience. If you are using your VPS as a web server, the response time can vary dramatically from one provider to the next. Users are very sensitive to the time it takes to load a web page. If it takes more than 3 seconds, many users will simply give up on your website and move on to the next result in the Google Search page. A fast VPS can make the difference between a site that loads in 2 seconds and one that loads in 10 seconds.
Google page ranks will also be influenced by the speed of the web server running on the VPS. A slow responding server will be penalized.
Web Run tests are made of a load test tool and a database intensive Rails web application.
The load test tool sends HTTP requests to the web application at a controlled rate and records HTTP response codes, response latencies and timeouts. The load test tool is multithreaded and runs on the same VPS where the web application runs.
The intent is to measure:
The Sysbench test suite test various aspects of the VM individually, namely the CPU, the disk and memory components of the machine.
We run the Sysbench tests after the web tests have completed to avoid any interference. In the case of VPS that implement a CPU credit balance system, we wait until the balance is above it's starting value before running the sysbench test.
The goal of the endurance tests is to determine if the VPS can sustain prolonged CPU utilization without degrading and what's the total amount of work the CPU of the VPS can accomplish during the test.
The endurance test lasts for 24 hours, it pushes the CPU to 50% use and VPSBenchmarks records the amount of work that's done during every 10 minute interval as well as system metrics.
Over allocated VPS as well as those that throttle the CPU will be be easily identified in the results of those tests.
VPSBenchmarks runs performance trials on servers purchased from Featured Providers. Each performance trial includes web, sysbench, network transfers, endurance and yabs tests. Public trials can be reviewed by anyone starting in the trials feed. Public trials can also be found in the Screener and all recent ones are included in Best VPS rankings. VPSBenchmarks always purchases servers like a regular customer for public trials.
Preview trials are visible by all, they include all the same benchmarks as regular public trials, but Preview trials are not included in the Screener, in Best VPS rankings or in the trials feed. They may run on VPS setup directly by the provider as opposed to servers purchased for regular public trials.