IOPS
Let’s talk IOPS.
We want to make sure that all of our customers always get all the resources they pay for. We don’t oversell, we don’t put all of your eggs (data) in one basket (on one central filer), we make sure your services (E-mail, web sites, databases, applications, and all else that you run) are served fast and efficiently.
If you play any online multiplayer shooter or action games, you know about ping times and you know how inconsistent ping times (jitter) create ‘lag kills’. IOPS is to disk latency what network latency is to ping times. Like a good game of “Call of Duty” or “Fortnite”, good IOPS is about consistency and not a roller coaster.
Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced eye-ops) is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). We use real metrics, real world data. We ran the test with the simple command:
ioping -RD /

Fig. 4 - IOPS Read Results - Comparison

Fig. 5 - IOPS Write Results - Comparison
Our IOPS performance is the highest, and it is consistently consistent (yes, “double consistent”) – so you always know what you are going to get: there are no surprises. With Azure the IOPS, only a small a fraction of our performance, varies greatly, thus giving you highly variable and unpredictable roller coaster-like performance (the “noisy neighbor” effect common in oversold clouds), with IBM it is at about half of our IOPS for write and about 1/7th of our IOPS for write with a clear ceiling (maximum performance limitation), but with frequent drops (again the “noisy neighbor” effect, but less dramatic than Azure), while with AWS and Google it is consistently low, with only a few slight upward spikes.
In short, this means that while with us you can easily architect a cloud hosting solution, comprised of one or multiple VMs, with a consistent and easily forecastable performance (thus delivering a consistent and predictable user experience), using other CHPs cloud it is practically impossible to design for a consistent and predictable user experience (performance), given the significant variations in the IOPS, due to the inherently oversold platform where your “neighbors” use of their cloud VMs can greatly impact your performance and thus your user/customer experience.
In other words, if you are running databases, mail servers, a SaaS platform, or other heavy read/write applications, the cloud you host on it will make a massive difference to the performance and thus your users’ experience. Only on the Superb Cloud are you able to run it with predictable, consistent, and not to mention by far the industry’s highest, IOPS levels, exceeding the competition IOPS by a factor of 2 to 7 fold.
Closing
At Superb Internet, we love what we do, we do it better, and we have been doing it longer, than anyone else. Which is why when we say “we get it” – we really get it. After all, we have many more years’ experience with virtualized/cloud hosting than any other CHP. Our “Ahead of the Rest”® standard has always remained unwavering: we never lower the bar and hold ourselves to a consistently high standard, as we believe in either providing the very best to our customers, or in not providing the service at all – there are no compromises when it comes to service quality and performance.
Instead of going along with the others’ highly obfuscated and greatly oversold ways, we strongly believe in the TransparentCloud™: in providing a consistent and always predictable performance, non-oversold cloud to our clients. That not only makes it much easier for our clients to design their cloud hosted applications, it also delivers a consistently predictable user/customer experience – a key requirement for most commercial cloud deployments. The second generation ThunderCloud™ takes it further by using the newest hardware, adding even more layers of underlying platform optimization & acceleration, moving to 100% Solid State Storage technology basis, and adding the largest vertical (VM size) scalability, on top of the already practically limitless horizontal scalability.
The examples above have illustrated that, depending on what performance metric you use (each client application is unique and thus the most important performance value will differ from client to client), to get performance equivalent to our comparable specs cloud account, you may need to spend as much as 56 times more at AWS. It is not only the various hidden fees at other CHPs that may get you (and end up unexpectedly costing you considerably more than budgeted), but so will the other CHPs unpredictable and highly variable cloud performance. If you take away nothing else from this major CHPs comparative study, just remember this:
- Not all clouds are created equal;
- The published specs have little relation on the real-world performance; therefore, you cannot compare CHPs based on the published specs alone (there is a reason why the real-world performance is rarely if ever talked about in the CHP circles);
- Always – always – run tests for your specific applications/use when comparing multiple CHPs, in order to arrive at the quantity and/or size of accounts to compare at different CHPs which provide for equal performance (as opposed to equal or roughly similar “headline specs”).
We live, work, and play in the real world and we’ve made it simple for you. Unlike others’ obfuscated cloud (where you have no visibility inside it), our cloud is the TransparentCloud™ there are no surprises - you always know what you will get, as we strongly believe in full disclosure (transparency) and are committed to no overselling – so with each cloud account you get the same as at least two like configuration dedicated servers set-up in an HA (High Availability) cluster with two redundant load balancers and real-time data replication (all that you get with each and every cloud VM, where just like with a dedicated server pair, your performance is guaranteed, dedicated and consistent).
Simply put, with us you get the latest modern Distributed Storage and InfiniBand® ultra-high performance networking technology working for you, non-oversold and guaranteed fastest computing power, and “no surprises, no hidden fees” simple, budget-friendly pricing, saving you potentially over 50 fold (yes, over fifty times) over other competing CHPs for similar performance cloud. In short, with our specs you get several fold higher performance, along with several fold lower price, than with seemingly alike cloud accounts at other CHPs.
The reason for this is simple: we are in this for the long term. Most of our customers have been with us for many years, with a high number of customers who’ve been with us for over a decade (including an impressive group of clients who’ve been with us, by now, for more than two decades – where we’ve witnessed their exponential growth and their highs and lows, just as they have witnessed and experienced the same with us). We strongly believe in “once a Superb customer, a Superb customer for life.” We base our service specifications, pricing, service quality and delivery, support, and all else on building a life-long business relationship with each and every client. Transparency and consistency is at the core of it. Our goal is not to manipulate our service in a way as to gain the most customers, but to design, build and deliver it in a way as to retain and help each and every customer grow, leaving no doubt as to the performance or cost consistency. When you are our customer, you are not just a customer: you are our partner, and we are your partner in your business success.