Re: Web + email hosting recommendations

[Christopher Pinon <cjpinon%secondfloor.xyz@localhost>]

Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:

> On Wed, May 8, 2019 at 9:40 AM Christopher Pinon
> <cjpinon%secondfloor.xyz@localhost> wrote:
> 
> > In my experience, nowadays, KVM and NetBSD play pretty well together,
> > but yes, it's always possible for obscure KVM-related issues to arise.
> >
> 
> I've not used NetBSD that much on KVM, but I've had network and disk
> performance issues with NetBSD VMs on ESXi and VirtualBox, perhaps
> lack of optimized drivers in NetBSD guest? If I remember correctly,
> Linux guests were significantly faster doing network and disk I/O.
> NetBSD on Xen is supposed to be supported quite well, but not sure
> about KVM. So I take it in your case, you had no issues whatsoever and
> you're happy with network and disk performance?

I wouldn't necessarily draw conclusions based on VirtualBox about
KVM. Several years ago, I recall having problems with OpenBSD on
VirtualBox but not having problems with OpenBSD on KVM at a particular
provider. But, as always: YMMV.

In general, I would relativize KVM to "KVM VPS as offered by a
particular provider" because (yes) differences can and do arise among
providers with respect to KVM and *BSD. (Especially concerning NetBSD
and OpenBSD; FreeBSD tends to be less of a potential issue. Again, in my
experience.)

As for the guest drivers on KVM, I would recommend using VirtIO for both
the network and the disk. Nowadays, these tend to be the default choices
anyway. (But you can set these in the control panel.)

As I said, my experience running NetBSD at Inception Hosting (and
earlier at Vultr) has been positive, also in terms of network and disk
performance, hence my recommendation. This said, it may well be that
Linux performs a bit better on KVM -- I haven't made an explicit
comparison -- so if replicating Linux performance is a priority, one may
be disappointed. (But, forget KVM in particular: in general, if one
wants to replicate Linux performance, one probably doesn't opt for
NetBSD or OpenBSD in the first place.)

At these prices, you can always just try it for a month if you're
interested and determine for yourself whether the performance is
sufficiently good. :-) (Again, YMMV.)

C.