Hello everyone!
Just new at this place.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for attention

Regards,
Ruslan Ratush

Please note that following the data breach issue Hostdoc has closed its business with immediate effect.  This means that VPSs 13 & 14 are no longer available to post4vps.  

I'll be removing VPSs 13 & 14 from our current Giveaway and ask those who applied, to apply for another VPS.

We thank HostDoc for their excellent service during the two years when they provided us with locations completely outside our normal location zone. I.e. Australia and Singapore and then recently changing Singapore to Finland. Those IPs were very valuable. We're really sorry to see the business failing.

Email from Hostdoc to Dynamo Wrote:HostDoc Is Closing (2 Feb 2020)

It is with great regret that I write this email.

HostDoc will be closing its doors today and will no longer accept orders for any service moving forward.
All payment gateways are now inactive. All clients will be refunded pro-rata and a few refunds have already began being issued. If your refund has not yet been recieved, please open a ticket and be patient, all valid requests will be refunded.
If you have a paypal subscription set up, please cancel it now.

As much as I enjoy providing a hosting service basically for free (there has never been a profit margin which was not reinvested into new hardware), and as much as I can fend away many if not most of the trolls or those that try and bring the brand or reputation down, it is a much harder feat when it is someone that was once trusted.

As such, this is a notice that backs ups should immediately be taken and alternative hosting solutions be sought as a replacement for the services you currently have with us.

Services will not go down immediately, however, acting immediately would see you prepared for when our services do eventually go down which can be up to 30 days from today.

Our cpanel shared hosting may stay available for the next 6 months. If this is the case, no further fee will be charged to current users however, you are urged to use this time to prepare backups and migrate away from HostDoc.

I am sorry to those I will be letting down with this decision.
I am sorry I could not be the host I envisioned being.

Thank you for choosing HostDoc and allowing us to serve you as best as we could.

Windows 10 updates - are they still completely automatic or is there a workaround yet for controlling them with the option of disabling or enabling them manually?

About two years ago we had a discussion here about the Home version of Windows 10 making automatic updates compulsory.  I.e. there isn't an option to disable automatic downloads so you can pick or disregard some of the updates. One can disable it but it would only be temporary and will be enabled without the ability to control when it gets enabled again.

My question is has someone found a work around of this?  Is there a way one can disable automatic updates for Windows 10 or at least have some control over the process?

And if not, what Windows 10 (Home/Professional/Enterprise/Education) allow disabling of automatic updates?

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A lot of people will surely already know but for the others: 1 February 2020 the Brexit process started and will end on the end of 2020, we can say that starting 2021 UK will be official out of EU and will be alone.
The entire 2020 will be a crucial moment because UK will try to set up an agreement with EU regarding the business relations.
What do you think about it?
Brexit has been delayed for 2 year and now it started, during these 2 year we saw a lot of people begin against this separation but UK is going to do it any way.
The vote results have been set public and we can say that the majority of vote are from old people, the youngsters voted against it. Regarding this news, right now the web is talking about the "UK and its colonialism is back".
This is my little sum-up regarding Brexit effects:

• Right now there is any real good study about the post-brexit economy but we can be sure that GBP will suffer and its value will go down;
  
• No more EU financial help;
  
• Unknown relations between European Banks and their UK's customers; 
  
• No EU laws/regulations will be applied to UK so: no more free data roaming for example, no more GDPR;
  
• As a student, I will not be able to go with Erasmus on the UK, and as a tourist I will need a passport to go there;
  
• Every purchase on the UK will be under customs clearance;
  
• Foreign people will no have right to stay there to work, they will need new proper paper document to do so.
  These are the worst cases if UK will not find any agreement with EU.

Well... let's see what will happen in 1 year.

• 6x VPS 1
  
• 2x VPS 3
  
• 2x VPS 6
  
• 1x VPS 8
  
• 1x VPS 9 (Location: Dallas) (Note: Detailed justification needed for using large specs)
  
• 2x VPS 10
  
• 1x VPS 11
  
• 1x VPS 12
  
• 1x VPS 16
  
• 1x VPS 17
  

For comparing the VPS Specifications, Users can check https://post4vps.com/compare/#1,3,6,8,9,10,11,12,16,17

PLEASE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE SPONSOR BEFORE YOU APPLY - REFER BELOW:

• Users must read and agree to all terms of the SPONSOR (of the VPS which they want) when they apply.  These can be found on our Plans Page.  
  
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Please Read before Applying

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5. Read TOS of VPS providers before applying.
   

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Today is 31st January, 2020 and I got this crazy VPS from our awesome Post4VPS giveaway in the first week of July, 2019. It is a KVM VPS located in Germany ( Hetzner Online gmbh Datacentre ).

Let me get the specs out there,

Specifications:

Processor: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2
Topology: 2 Processors, 2 Cores [from Geekbench 5]
bogomips is actually 2 * 6999.8 . Cause that was per thread.
That bug-details really worried me. But ! .. yes ! But the following result will put you at ease !

So clearly most of them are mitigated ! Which is an awesome news !!

So that means 2 cores with a total of 2 threads.
RAM: 10GB

Storage: HDD 300 GB
Network: 1 Gbps
Bandwidth: unmetered (FUP)
Virtualization: KVM - full hardware virtualisation
IP address: 1 IPv4
Control Panel: Virtualizor
Location: Germany

I upgraded to latest dev version of Ubuntu during all this, which is 20.04
along with the latest mainline kernel, manually installed.

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VPS Usage:

I hope none will mind if I only mention the regular things I do on this VPS. I do not want to embarrass myself.

>> Downloading and working through different versions of source codes to find the changes and learn and modify them. I have very slow internet and I move a lot. So this server is like my online lab that is always there for me.

>> Learning to configure old and new softwares and set ups on VPS. I do all kind of weird combinations with that stuff. It helps me learn things a lot.

>> I was going to host some websites. two of those I moved away to a much lower spec VPS and one friend who had loads of pdf educational materials and a fairly big site with good traffic went ahead and bought a multi-year plan from a very useless webhost just to save money and now suffering as hell.

>> I have developed multiple websites on it. From fairly simple ones to multi-page adaptive ones.

>> I am really afraid to use too much of CPU and hurt the other users on the machine besides me. So I never run compiles on it, which I hope I will get to do when I buy a paid one from them when I am ready and have some more time to spare.

>> We all lesser mortals are in the shadows of HR here. Though I have no complaint. He deserves that. I hope I will find some time soon to write up some of the crazy stuffs I learned to do while using it.

>> I will probably be taking part in an online data science course and I am sure this VPS will be a godsend. AI has been a constant source of excitement to me. Though I am more interested in the theories.

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Performance:

I will start with cpu benchmarks. Then it will be storage and network in that order.

CPU Benchmarks -

I actually did three runs of Geekbench 5. It uses i3 8100 as base with 1000 score and these scores are relative to that. So as you can see, with two threads, it is like having two cores of i3 8100, almost, with ECC RAM. will talk more on this in the final words at the end.*1*
First one with Ubuntu 19.04, kernel 5.0.0-36-generic
718 - Single-Core Score
1432 - Multi-Core Score
Now on Ubuntu 20.10 with kernel 5.4.0-12-generic
725 - Single-Core Score
1387 - Multi-Core Score

This is Ubuntu 20.10 with kernel 5.5.0-050500-generic

729 - Single-Core Score
1459 - Multi-Core Score

Here is a search at Geekbench 5 browser with i3 8100.
i3 8100

I won't be doing Unixbench. Cause I think they are old enough to be even more useless than geekbench. Given all the specialised ISA and hardware accelerators, it is getting really hard to compare general performance in a meaningful way. So it is always better to know exactly what you want to do and find out the various possible ways of implementing them and may be then you could go on comparing their performance on various parameters. That will be a heavily specialised one. But much more useful than a general score thrown out by such benchmark softwares.

Storage Benchmark:

dd:

NOTE - Everyone loves to see dd results on reviews. But keep it in mind that dd is single threaded and sequential. So it is one of the worst in giving you an idea on real life performance of your storage. Especially on a VPS that involves shared environment and multiple threads.
   fio and ioping are the proper utilities for that. But since testing with fio and a 4GB will take 50 minutes or more, I will refrain from doing that in this case. If you really want to see the results, you may request in your reply below and I will comply.

write speed -
Doing 10 times and taking the average, it comes at 44.3MB/s, a pretty good score on HDD. I can confirm that I have seen it go higher, but never below 35MB/s.

Read speed -
Read speed from cache,
Doing 10 times and taking average, I got 7.9 GB/s.

Direct read speed from HDD -
Reapeating it 10 times and taking average, the result is 51.2 MB/s. I must say I am happy with this.

hdparm - cached

hdparm - direct


Using S - this project on github aims to mimic real life usage to calculate performance. Here we see a throughput test under various read and write loads using different schedulers.
    This is a much better way to do the testing. It uses fio and results are said to be more realistic.

I recently installed graphical interface (gui). You could get some idea of how fast the system responds from its bootup time.
Awesome timing on an HDD system !

Finally we come to ioping.
ioping
disk seek rate -

disk sequential speed (MiB/s)

Disk I/O latency in various modes:

Default mode
Asynchronous mode
Direct mode
Cached mode
Write mode
Alternate Read/Write mode(ping-pong)

 #comment on ioping results#
     This being a QEMU virtualized disk, the results are consistent with that bit of information. the improvement at cached mode is due to in system caching and the increase in delay at write and alternate read/write mode , which can be considered as more realistic measures, are witness to the effect of virtualization and caching at other levels.

Network Benchmark:
Using the post4VPS benchmark script [thanks to HR and sohamb03]
Info for the uninitiated. Nothing to worry about those low figures. The speeds depend on the throughput of the other side too. Here is the proof for the Gbps link.

speedtest.net
As good as promised !!

SPECIAL NOTE ON HARDWARE:-
 If you run hardware detection utilities, you will see that there is VGA hardware. But do not turn on the VGA option in control panel. It will just keep your system from booting. I had to do a support request for that. Simply because I never expected that to cause this.
  That VGA is an emulated one by QEMU. hence dont expect hardware graphics acceleration.

Final Words :-

I think all the information I have already provided up there speaks for itself. The processor is Ivy Bridge 130W 22nm 6core/12threads chip released in 2013.

*1*
1) You get AVX on it, but no AVX 2, F16C, FMA3 which you get in i3 8100. That is one of the reason why single core  Geekbench 5 score for the i3 is mostly around 950, while for this xeon it hovers around 700. But if you check their average Geekbench 4 scores, they appear much closer in single core rating (both hanging around 4000 with i3 8100 almost always just couple hundred ahead). This Xeon also has almost 1.5 times memory bandwidth, Higher on-chip cache and the benefit of ECC relative to i3 8100, even though it takes DDR3 RAM. So that and the 6c/12t explains its high multi-core performance.
   So basically we have two fairly powerful cores here. More than enough for all the jobs I usually do on it.

1A) Shadow Hosting have very generous CPU usage restriction in their TOS. It says, "On VPS, you may not use 90% CPU for more than 30 minutes.". I have seen 5/10/15 minutes.

2) The storage performance I think is totally awesome for HDD based system. No two words about it.

3) When it comes to network, it brings a smile on my face. Ipv6 allocation would be a nice bonus. But there is HE tunnels, for all your ipv6 needs.

4) no TSX on it. So no hardware bugs from it. Unfortunately the SGX is there. But from our investigations above, it seems most of the issues are well taken care of. Do I need to remind you that it is at Hetzner DC after all. 

Therefore, Considering all the above, I would say Shadow Hosting has a pretty solid platform there and I would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone looking for entry to mid level VPS with enough RAM and storage.

Quality of support:
  First, dear reader, let me remind you that I am on a fairly high spec VPS sponsored by Shadow Hosting which I am using free of cost, as a perk of being an active member of this vibrant community. Hence I never expect [and I think no one at my position here should expect] the level of service that you will get when you are a paying customer. That is a no-brainer. 
    But what surprised me about Shadow Hosting and Manal, the guy running this show, is how quick he is at responding to any question or problem, even here on Post4VPS. So far I had to open two support request threads. The reason for one of them were mentioned above [VGA selection in control panel]. On both occasions, he responded within 12 hours with the solution. It was in the second month of my use. I was doing a lot of experiments back then on ways to set up the VPS. 

In short, The level of service is very prompt and of the highest quality I have ever experienced. I wish it stays this way, so I can keep on recommending them to people in need of a reliable hosting.

Note.
Well, I never ever misuse things ! But "abuse" is a word that can be applied to my use cases sometimes, without much of a stretch to its meaning. I always liked to explore. "How else can I do this ?" or  "Could I really not do it if I tried harder ?" are some of my favourite questions ! And this amazing VPS 4 has never let me down so far !

sadly i got banned for trying to download a tv show torrent with very low seeder count [old unpopular one. not downloading in india].

So everyone looking for VPS from shadow hosting, remember that they actively monitor and ban you for using torrent to download copyrighted material or tv shows, i.e. they don't practice 'looking the other way' like many other providers out there. So very good vps for other uses. But certainly not for torrent use, not even occasionally... not even once..

They don't shy away from being strict, which might actually be in your favour by keeping the resources more available.

I am Honey and I've been a proud owner of this VPS for a whole year(this month completes the year), and I believe for the services It has offered me, the VPS has long deserved a proper review inside out.

I'll start out by displaying the specs, the VPS is a very strong VPS offered here on P4V, in fact, It only seconds to one or two other VPSes



My personal use case was mostly for game servers and web hosting, in both of which, It proved to be a great server. The game I was hosting was Minecraft, which is known to be a ram hogger, however, It was able to run even modpacks(modded mc) without any problem, that's because the CPU has good single-threaded performance then what's usually offered. I used to own VPS 9 before switching, and one of the main reasons I switched to this VPS was the location. The ping difference was half, so if you reside in Asia and don't require too much ram then this is THE VPS for you.

As mentioned, I was also using this for hosting websites, Its still hosting 2 websites for my school events, here's the stats on one of them.

Cloudflare Image Link

As you can see, 18k requests in a month, but It had no difficulties hosting that site, I had also installed a Minecraft server panel on the VPS to make it easy for my friends to start/stop the MC Server when they want to, and It always functioned without any issues.

Coming to the topic of internet connectivity, I've faced no issues with the server in that regard ever, Here's the speed test benchmark.



Here's a location-based speed test if it interests you,


The speed varies but Its mostly up to the mark, as seen in the picture above.

About the IO part, I never really knew how to notice IO speeds and how they could affect me, but crediting the fluid performance of the server, I think these IO numbers are considered good enough.


Another big feature of VPS 5 is the presence of a control panel, meaning I don't really need to ask the admins when I want the OS reinstalled or restart the server if needed, which is very very helpful especially when you're trying out something experimental, I believe the control panel deserves a good compliment as It always functions just like It should.


Continuing my benchmarks, here is a web server performance benchmark by ApacheBench.


As you can see, Apache handled 5000 requests in under a second, that's how blazingly responsive it is!


GeekBench V3: https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/8841733

ByteUnix Benchmark:

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Hi,
So I recently came across this phenomenon(idk if u could even call it that tbh) known as "Astral Projection", where supposedly your soul can "exit" your body during your sleep, and then you can explore the "Astral Plane" where you might meet other creatures as well. You can't really interact with the physical world but you can roam around and see stuff. I stumbled upon the topic when I was searching about lucid dreaming(i.e. being aware when you're in a dream and thus being able to control it) and I was surprised to see such a big community of people who actually claim that its a thing and that It opened there perception.
I personally tried methods of astral projection available online(there are many) a few times but didn't really work out so far, so I figured I'd try posting it here just to see if anyone else was even aware of it, Its very different from the usual tech/movies topics that get posted here.

#1: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/16...ak-hostdoc
#2: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/16...ng-hostdoc

Read actual messages by actual customers of HostDoc on LET.

Just for your information. I posted this on the shoutbox, too.