o2switch cPanel Hosting
o2switch
€5.00/mo
Pros
- A ton of features
- Integrated caching system
- cPanel control panel
Cons
- No upgrade available for big websites
o2switch is a mid-size web hosting company in France. After few months testing their services, here is my verdict.
o2switch company overview
o2switch was selling services since 2003 (name/brand comes from 2009), as their website states. They operate their own network on their own datacenter and have their own ASN: AS50474. They are declared as telecom operator in ARCEP (french telecom authority regulation).
More information is available on their website.
o2switch product overview
As you can see on their website, they have only one hosting package. Then you can be sure they will not upsell your subscription. Everything is almost “unlimited” (remember, nothing is really unlimited in web hosting industry).
Their hosting service are based on CloudLinux + cPanel servers. However, their in-house built IP xTender, xTrem Cache and LsCache system seems to provide a CDN-like system. We can expect that these caching/proxying servers are running on another OS.
They claim to use NVMe disks on database, but nothing stated about site files. Looking deeper on their system using SSH, I found that they have software RAID. According to LVE I/O limits, we have 31.44MB/s so we can expect a RAID5, RAID6 or RAID10 on SSD for website files ; and maybe a HDD RAID on disk abuser servers. IOPS are not limited.
As far as I know, nobody run soft RAID under a VM, they would prefer run RAID at host OS level, and guest VM will store its data inside this RAID. So, their web server may be a bare-metal server, not a VM. This means that under hardware failure, moving customer into another hardware is harder (vs. live migration of cPanel VM which can be done in ~5mn interruption).
Stated on their website, we see 12 CPU threads and 48GB of memory. Under terminal SSH, I see 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660v3. This CPU have 10 cores and 20 threads. So they have 20 cores and 40 threads in total. Other server may have different hardware.
On Resource usage page in cPanel, I see that they allocate 600% CPU quota in LVE, which is known to correspond to 6 cores. But CloudLinux CEO himself says on cPanel forum that CloudLinux will treat HyperThreads as cores.
Following these data, the 12 CPU threads stated in product page can be considered as tricky, even cheating. We can consider that they provide us 6 cores so 12 CPU threads ; but if we take in consideration previous statement, we only get 6 threads so 3 cores. Something to investigate. If anyone has real information about it, take time to leave a comment.
Effectively, you got 48GB RAM but I expect that you can’t use 100% of them a lot of time. The server seems to have 128GB RAM. LVE process quota are set to 120 plus 110 entry processes.
Caching and proxying
o2switch have a built-in house system to provide custom IP address for each website. By installing IP xTender, you can choose your website’s IP address. They have multiple IP addresses on multiple locations (UK, Germany, …) and multiples ASN. Seems that some of them are OVH Failover IPs. This technology provide a CDN-like setup for your hosting, at really no cost.
By installing IP xTender, you can setup xTrem Cache or LsCache. These two caching system provide respectively Varnish and LiteSpeed ADC caching. They use Apache on their cPanel server, not LiteSpeed. xTrem Cache provide custom caching rules which can be used to optimize caching efficiency.
Benchmarks
I’ve run benchmark from my SoYouStart dedicated server using Apache Benchmark tool. When using IP xTender for caching, I’ve taken measures to avoid OVH IPs.
Same conditions as I’ve done testing LWS cPanel M package, I’ve got surprisingly less values than with LWS.
Hello world in HTML got 79.54 requests per second without caching, 118.82 with xTrem cache and 118.72 with LsCache.
Hello world in PHP got similar results: 78.93 requests per second without caching, 117.9 with xTrem cache and 118.65 with LsCache.
WordPress benchmarking got a signifiant boost with xTrem cache, both with and without caching plugin.
Prestashop have approximately same results with or without caching.
