Svea.net - a budget friendly Swedish Server Provider for Performance and Privacy

Paul Nixer

— 7 min read
Svea.net - a budget friendly Swedish Server Provider for Performance and Privacy

If you have a new project or want to migrate from a bad or unstable hosting, you have a lot of options - it's super easy to find a hosting these days. Despite the gigaton of hosters and options, there are only two patterns that can be used to solve the situation:

  • Jump on the board of the most popular cloud hosters like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure and pay extra for brand, stability and traffic.

  • Use a less popular service and pay less for computing resources, data storage and network traffic.

If the second pattern suits you well, wellcome - we hope this post will be helpful and save you a lot of nervousness.

Big advantage in comparison with top alternatives is acceptance of cryprtocurrency: Svea supports Bitcoin, Wire Transfer, Credit Card and PayPal payment systems.

The Svea services and pricing

Dedicated servers

All Svea server plans come with dedicated bandwidth and no traffic shaping. Each server has an IPv4 address and IPv6 /64 subnet included in all packages. 15% discount if customer pays for 12 months in advance. You can ask for more details at Telegam Sveahosting.

  • Dedicated Pi on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B: 129 EUR / month

    • ARM v8 Cortex A72 (64-bit)
    • 4 cores @ 1.5Ghz
    • 8GB RAM (DDR4)
    • 32GB MicroSD
    • 1Gbps Unmetered traffic

Raspberry Pi 4 is more powerful than the previous 3 generations and comes with gigabit network interface and quad-core ARM v8 A72 CPU, which makes it more than powerful enough host for small projects like web server for a blog, not high-load load balancer and the like. It has 8 GB RAM which is good enough to handle big data services like static websites and video streaming services.

  • Dedicated Small on Supermicro - 195 EUR per month

    • Intel Xeon E3-1285v6
    • 4 Cores / 8 Threads
    • 3.5Ghz, turbo 3.9Ghz
    • 32GB RAM (max 64GB)
    • IPMI (remote management)
    • 1 Gbps Unmetered traffic
    • Prices are excluding storage.
    • With 10 Gbps Unmetered: 749 EUR per month.

"Small plan" sounds kind of ironic here, with server Intel Xeon CPU and 32GB of memory, this plan is suitable for heavy websites, popular video streaming or gaming servers.

  • Dedicated Medium on Supermicro - 295 EUR / month.

    • Dual Intel Xeon E5
    • 12 Cores / 24 Threads
    • 64GB RAM (max 256GB)
    • IPMI (remote management)
    • 1 Gbps Unmetered traffic
    • With 10 Gbps Unmetered traffic: 949 EUR / month
    • Prices are excluding storage.

Dual Xeon CPUs with 64GB of RAM - this beast is suitable for large, high-traffic websites or media encoding. If that's not enough, talk to support and request more processing power.

VPS

screenshotfrom2024-01-3115-20-02.png

All plans include one IPv4 address and one IPv6 /64 subnet. Paying for one year of service with a single payment will bring 15% discount.

  • 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 1 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 8 EUR per month.

  • 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 10 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 11 EUR per month.

  • 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 20 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 13 EUR per month.

  • 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 18 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 10 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 15 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 20 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 15 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 22 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM / 10 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 18 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM / 20 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 20 EUR per month.

  • 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 25 EUR per month.

  • 4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 20 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 34 EUR per month.

  • 4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 38 EUR per month.

  • 8 vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 63 EUR per month.

  • 8 vCPU / 8 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 63 EUR per month.

  • 8 vCPU / 16 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD / 1 TB transfer - 83 EUR per month.

You can always check the actual pricing here.

Personally suggest to check 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM / 10 GB SSD plan for 18 euro and 4 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 20 GB SSD for 34 euro.

Collocation

Collocation is a nice business option that allows you to host your server in a friendly data center and don't have to worry about fire, power outages, water and the like. As always, Svea gives 15% discount when 12 months are payed in single bill.

Svea provides units with power, cooling & connectivity in our Stockholm datacenter. Redundant internet connections, cooling and A+B power supplies are also provided.

  • Colocation 1U - 49 EUR / month.

    • 1U Rack Space
    • One IPv4 address.
    • IPv6 /64 included.
    • 1Gbps Connection
    • 100mbps unmetered traffic.
    • With 1 Gbps Unmetered: 195 EUR per month.
    • Additional vlans for free if you collocate more than one server.

  • Colocation 2U - 69 EUR / month.

    • 2U Rack Space
    • One IPv4 address.
    • IPv6 /64 included.
    • 1Gbps Connection
    • 100mbps unmetered.
    • With 1 Gbps Unmetered: 215 EUR / month.

  • Additional Units

    • Per extra unit required
      20EUR / month.

Giving back

To improve Internet privacy and security on planet Earth, Svea provides a Tor node with a 2 Gigabit network interface for free. We welcome similar initiatives, let's make the Internet safer. If you have good ideas for benefiting the open source community, please contact [Svea] (https://svea.net/contact).

The Svea VPS server test drive

We, Nix Sanctuary, got the test server from Svea and are happy to share the test drive with you. Here are the specs:

  • 4 vCPU
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 40 GB drive
  • Location: Stockholm, SE.

Speedtest

Let's start from test of Datacenter network connectivity:

wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.svea.net/1GB.zip
...
103MB/s    in 10s

103MB/s is 824 MBit/s, not bad. Time to repeat the test with bigger file:

wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.svea.net/10GB.zip
...
99.5MB/s    in 1m 43s

99.5MB/s = 796 Mbit/s. A bit slower result than before, but also acceptable.

To test the speed globally, let's try Speedtest-cli on Ookla servers:

python3 ./speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Svea Hosting AB (193.239.232.229)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Netprotect (Stockholm) [0.89 km]: 2.569 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 771.95 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 606.87 Mbit/s

Nearly identical to the result above. Finally, time to verify speed to Netflix servers using fast-cli:

./fast-cli
Estimating current download speed
 843.16 Mbps - 100.0%
Completed in 0.6 seconds

Not bad! Must say the network connection is good.

Geekbench 6

  • Single-Core Score: 254
  • Multi-Core Score: 873
  • Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
  • Topology: 1 Processor, 4 Cores
  • Identifier: GenuineIntel Family 15 Model 107 Stepping 1
  • Base Frequency: 2.39 GHz

Single-Core Performance:

  • File Compression: 60.7 MB/sec
  • HTML5 Browser: 9.43 pages/sec
  • PDF Renderer: 10.2 Mpixels/sec

Multi-Core Performance:

  • File Compression: 149.0 MB/sec
  • HTML5 Browser: 34.1 pages/sec
  • PDF Renderer: 35.7 Mpixels/sec

The full Geekbench report available here.

OpenSSL benchmarks

OpenWrt project has nice and simple benchmark, all you need is OpenSSL and bash.

  • The single-core/thread performance:
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
md5              23136.35k    67406.68k   144790.19k   204316.67k   232925.87k   234476.89k
sha1             22426.43k    65876.01k   147902.55k   222112.09k   277525.85k   285633.19k
sha256           16250.09k    42279.64k    84388.10k   113213.78k   126178.65k   127494.83k
sha512           11274.91k    45067.18k    82024.62k   127223.81k   152772.61k   155172.86k
des-cbc              0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00
des-ede3          9367.30k     9633.88k     9689.51k     9678.17k     9688.41k     9715.71k
aes-128-cbc     242647.36k   260866.69k   265947.73k   267052.71k   267692.71k   267681.79k
aes-192-cbc     205843.00k   219026.37k   222170.28k   222817.28k   223259.31k   223046.31k
aes-256-cbc     178743.43k   188495.45k   191001.86k   191656.28k   191706.45k   191752.87k
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
rsa 2048 bits 0.002551s 0.000076s    392.0  13111.3
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
dsa 2048 bits 0.001101s 0.000979s    908.0   1021.3
  • The multi-core performance:
md5              92764.85k   270288.51k   580863.83k   817570.56k   932858.54k   942533.29k
sha1             89436.36k   261101.91k   592012.29k   887630.17k  1110712.32k  1140091.56k
sha256           65087.06k   168224.51k   327884.37k   453624.49k   503013.38k   512780.97k
sha512           44604.22k   179648.00k   326982.06k   506333.87k   607494.14k   614585.69k
des-cbc              0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00         0.00
des-ede3         37272.31k    38583.87k    39038.21k    39071.06k    39198.72k    38977.54k
aes-128-cbc     958059.47k  1039192.06k  1060187.22k  1065021.44k  1066382.68k  1064224.17k
aes-192-cbc     822982.39k   864769.26k   874340.18k   884756.48k   883215.02k   890159.10k
aes-256-cbc     712860.66k   751484.29k   761676.03k   763370.50k   761572.01k   763019.26k
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
rsa 2048 bits 0.000641s 0.000019s   1560.4  52449.0
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
dsa 2048 bits 0.000278s 0.000246s   3603.4   4060.6

Disk and memory speed

We're going to write 1 GB file to disk to test the writing speed:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test1.img bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 4.58788 s, 234 MB/s

234 MB/s is great result for VPS!

Let's measure the reading speed:

echo "drop the fs caches"
echo 3 |  tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
time dd if=test1.img of=/dev/null bs=16M

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.394771 s, 2.7 GB/s

Buffered disk read test for /dev/sda:

hdparm -t /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1038 MB in  3.01 seconds = 345.42 MB/sec

Cache read benchmark for /dev/sda:

hdparm -T /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   7230 MB in  1.99 seconds = 3640.46 MB/sec

Conclusion

As we have shown, Svea offers good performance with good pricing, stable network connection and good disk speed. Of course, this service would be even more interesting with a slightly cheaper price.

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