I was always surprised by the passion with which a number of people, on this forum, constantly recommended EDIS.at. Even the best services rarely had that sort of "fans".
I'm posting some feedback on their Russia KVM location to provide data to weigh those comments with.
The bullet points
- uptime is good (comparable to competitors)
- servers are slower than competitors
- support is competent, occasionally disorganised between people, and not the most responsive
- pricing is higher than competitors
The details
We needed a FreeBSD server in Moscow and could not go for NQHost.com – with whom we had a great experience over 3 years – because they lacked IPv6 in that location.
We then went for EDIS. We purchased mid/high-end KVM package "KVM Advanced plus" (1.5GB ram, dual core).
Support
Billing:
We requested pre-paid yearly billing before subscribing. Response from billing took some days to come in, so we started a test with a PayPal subscription. We repeated request for yearly, wire-transfer payments for the following months. The owners and the secretary responded independent of each other, which caused a short ping-pong. We promptly performed the payment, but at the term of the PayPal month we received notifications urging us to perform the payment. We contacted in double the secretary and owner just to be sure, and they fixed the issue quickly.
There were no negative experiences, but as a Swiss/Austrian channel, the procedures were not up to the efficiency standards that the respective countries are famous for.
Tech: EDIS was the first of our providers to notify about the Jan 29, 2014 Kloxo bug. Amongst the bunch of 8 providers we use, they were also the only ones to be affected to an extent visible to the customer. We make minimal use of tech support, and limit it to reporting problems or requesting details on undocumented features. We have one sample only of such contact, related to downtime. Our ticket was answered within 20 minutes and explained as a DDoS.
Performance
We can compare this server with other fully virtualized ones at NQhost , Hetzner, Prometeus, HostVirtual and others.
With the exact same software configuration, the server at EDIS is receiving amongst the lowest traffic of those providers, and the load is 3x higher than all. I/O runs at 24 MB/s peak, with hetzner reaching 60, NQHost 38 and Prometeus 34.
Network latency is good and stability is great.
We read many comments from LET users about how good EDIS is at picking datacenters. When we looked into a South America location, they were an obvious option. The most significant markets in SA are Brazil and Argentina, however, to which their Chile location has performance significantly worse than cheaper locations such as Miami.
Pricing
Their offers are weak on storage space, so that we found ourself to overshoot all other specs to get a storage space sufficient for some breathing aside the installed OS. For example, their 512MB package is 5GB storage only, barely enough for a small UNIX distribution. Their 1GB RAM package is 12GB storage, which leaves tight space for some data, but no tranquillity for growth.
The first package with some storage is 20$/mo, for which other providers offer 50GB ups and 2GB ram.
Flexibility
According to their support, EDIS does not offer custom plans, and does not upgrade images.
If you suspect you might have growth in one year, and do not want to waste days for a manual migration, their suggestion is to opt for the highest required option upfront.
Conclusion
We are not dissatisfied with EDIS. We just wonder where all the passion for them shared by several users on LET originates. We post this review to provide an additional reference to weigh those with.
When asked for reference, we would suggest EDIS after these providers:
Note that this review covers their Russia KVM offering only – although the part concerning their support will reasonably apply to all other locations. EDIS mentions it's unfair to compare a RU location with EU/US ones. This is true for networking and stability, where we're satisfied of their performance. Server and pricing-wise are the harder spots; there NQHost can afford to keep EU and US prices aligned with their Moscow DC Tel location.