Time4VPS Review – Cheap and Reliable EU Hosting

Time4VPS is a European web hosting provider that offers VPS hosting, storage servers, containers, and more. They’re often praised for their uptime and reliability. Read our detailed review, benchmarks, pros and cons, and more below.

About Time4VPS

Let’s start with more information on who Time4VPS are. They were a division of “Interneto vizija” which started back in 2003, making them a 15-year old web hosting provider, which is hard to come by these days. Time4VPS as a brand was started in 2012.

Their VPS nodes are hosted on servers with these specs:

• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 2 x Gold 6132 @ 2.60 GHz (56 cores)
• 384 GB DDR4-2666 ECC REG RAM modules
• High performance 10 x 960 GB SSD RAID storage
• 4 Gbps dedicated uplink

Which ensures fast servers.

They own their own data center and they’re based in Lithuania, the center of Europe, which is great for EU traffic.

But basically, all you need to know is that they have more than 15 years of experience and they know what they’re doing.

You can learn more about Time4VPS and their servers on their About Us page.

Hosting Plans by Time4VPS

Here’s an overview of the two most popular hosting types they offer:

Linux VPS Plans

All their VPS plans are self-managed, which means you’ll have to manage and maintain the VPS yourself. Given that fact, their pricing is actually pretty cheap, on par with other leading (cheap) unmanaged cloud hosting providers, and even cheaper than some.

These are the specs of their cheapest VPS plan:

• CPU: 1 x 2.60 GHz
• RAM: 1024 MB
• Storage: 20 GB
• Bandwidth: 2 TB
• Port speed: 100 Mbps
• Virtualization: KVM
• Price: 3.99 EUR per month. Which is about $4.50.

If you use a discount or use a longer billing cycle, it’s even cheaper.

They offer all the major OSes with their hosting plans, and they offer cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, or Plesk as an addon.

You get IPv6 IPs with all their hosting plans, and you can get extra IPs as a paid addon.

As an alternative to their Linux VPS plans, they also offer Container VPSes (which are essentially OpenVZ plans that have double the specs for the same pricing), and Windows VPS plans. The Windows license is included for free with all their plans.

Storage VPS Plans

These plans are quite popular, especially in communities like LowEndTalk and WebHostingTalk. Praise by those communities is a big plus.

These are the specs of their cheapest storage VPS plan:

• CPU: 1 x 1.70 GHz
• RAM: 512 MB
• Storage: 512 GB
• Bandwidth: 4 TB
• Port speed: 100 Mbps
• Backups: Unavailable
• Virtualization: OpenVZ
• Price: 3.99 EUR per month. Which is about $4.50.

The important specs here are the bandwidth, storage, and price. All 3 are great.

You get full root access to your storage VPS so you can install and set up anything you want.

These kinds of plans are great if used for self-hosting software like Nextcloud, or using it as a backup server.

Time4VPS also offers VPN plans starting at 1.99 EUR per month, which is again, pretty cheap.

Benchmarks and Speedtests

We encourage you to test their servers yourself. They offer a 7-day free trial, so you can test them out for free. Nevertheless, here are our tests.

We used nench.sh and ran a couple of benchmarks on Ubuntu 18.04.

Trial – 1GB RAM VPS benchmark results:

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Processor: Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
CPU cores: 1
Frequency: 2593.900 MHz
RAM: 985M
Swap: -
Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-29-generic x86_64

Disks:
sda 20G HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
2.530 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
4.588 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
1.028 seconds

ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 1.29 ms / 2.49 ms / 3.64 ms / 373.8 us
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 978 requests in 5.00 s, 244.5 MiB, 195 iops, 48.9 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
1st run: 48.83 MiB/s
2nd run: 48.92 MiB/s
3rd run: 48.83 MiB/s
average: 48.86 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
your IPv4: 212.24.97.xxxx

Cachefly CDN: 10.97 MiB/s
Leaseweb (NL): 11.17 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 5.60 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 10.79 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 6.25 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
your IPv6: 2a02:7b40:d418:xxxx

Leaseweb (NL): 11.02 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 0.00 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 0.00 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 6.09 MiB/s
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Linux 2 – 2GB RAM plan benchmark results:

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Processor: Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
CPU cores: 1
Frequency: 2593.906 MHz
RAM: 1.9G
Swap: -
Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-29-generic x86_64

Disks:
sda 40G HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
2.542 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
4.532 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
0.969 seconds

ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 1.27 ms / 2.49 ms / 3.63 ms / 365.5 us
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 978 requests in 5.00 s, 244.5 MiB, 195 iops, 48.9 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
1st run: 48.83 MiB/s
2nd run: 48.83 MiB/s
3rd run: 48.83 MiB/s
average: 48.83 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
your IPv4: 212.24.111.xxxx

Cachefly CDN: 11.27 MiB/s
Leaseweb (NL): 11.17 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 5.84 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 10.76 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 7.72 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
your IPv6: 2a02:7b40:d418:xxxx

Leaseweb (NL): 11.03 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 0.00 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 0.00 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 6.24 MiB/s
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As always, we haven’t set up or configured anything. Only updated the system and ran the benchmarking script.

As is tradition with all our reviews, we did a couple of basic speed tests.

We installed a WordPress site with caching enabled using EasyEngine. Nothing extra was configured or added.

Both the Trial VPS and 2GB RAM VPS got great results, even compared to other managed WordPress hosting providers.

Trial (1GB RAM) VPS plan WordPress speed test:

The default WordPress homepage fully loaded in 0.736 seconds. You can get the full results here.

2GB RAM VPS plan WordPress speed test:

The default WordPress homepage fully loaded in 0.722 seconds. You can get the full results here.

SSD and 1Gbps port add-ons server results

We ordered the 2GB RAM VPS plan, but used the SSD and 1Gbps port add-ons.

These are the benchmark results we got:

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Processor: Intel Xeon Processor (Skylake, IBRS)
CPU cores: 1
Frequency: 2593.906 MHz
RAM: 1.9G
Swap: -
Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-29-generic x86_64

Disks:
sda 40G HDD

CPU: SHA256-hashing 500 MB
2.535 seconds
CPU: bzip2-compressing 500 MB
4.745 seconds
CPU: AES-encrypting 500 MB
0.976 seconds

ioping: seek rate
min/avg/max/mdev = 72.2 us / 621.6 us / 1.53 ms / 523.2 us
ioping: sequential read speed
generated 3.71 k requests in 5.00 s, 927 MiB, 741 iops, 185.4 MiB/s

dd: sequential write speed
1st run: 191.69 MiB/s
2nd run: 193.60 MiB/s
3rd run: 193.60 MiB/s
average: 192.96 MiB/s

IPv4 speedtests
your IPv4: 195.181.247.xxxx

Cachefly CDN: 59.38 MiB/s
Leaseweb (NL): 38.39 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 12.46 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 39.67 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 14.39 MiB/s

IPv6 speedtests
your IPv6: 2a02:7b40:c3b5:xxxx

Leaseweb (NL): 31.86 MiB/s
Softlayer DAL (US): 0.00 MiB/s
Online.net (FR): 0.00 MiB/s
OVH BHS (CA): 4.37 MiB/s
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Nevermind the fact that the benchmarking script detects the disk as HDD. It’s a common issue with VPSes.

That’s pretty much it for our benchmarks. Again, it’s best if you do your own benchmarks and tests. They offer a free trial anyway.

The Time4VPS Dashboard

It’s what you’d expect from a standard VPS provider. Nothing fancy, but it has all you need. You’ll spend most of your time in the CLI anyway, outside of their dashboard/control panel.

The web console is easy to access. You can reinstall your server with a couple of clicks. You can monitor your server with their usage graphs and usage history. You can add your SSH keys, upgrade your server, open up a support ticket, handle your billing etc. Everything you need is in there.

The Time4VPS Community and Support

This deserves a separate section. Aside from their pricing, this is definitely one of the top strongpoints of Time4VPS. Considering they offer self-managed servers, their support is excellent. We contacted them via chat asking a question and got an answer within half a minute. We opened a ticket and got an actual answer (not automated) within about 5 minutes. You rarely get this kind of support even for fully managed services. Their support is always available and friendly.

Time4VPS also has community forums. People often ask questions there and get an answer pretty quickly.

The Downsides of Time4VPS

Well, nobody’s perfect. There are a few things we don’t like about Time4VPS:

By default, the storage is HDD. You need to pay an extra 1 euro per month for SSD. A bit of a downside, but even if you add that extra euro to the default price, they’re still pretty cheap.

A downside we noticed for their plans is that they’re limited to the Lithuanian servers only. They don’t offer other server locations. But if you need other server locations and still want to get the same level of service, you can use their sister company Hostens.

Though this isn’t really a downside, it’s worth mentioning that they don’t offer shared hosting plans. You can still order a VPS with a control panel. Shared hosting is not what they’re focused on anyway, they’re not Time4SharedHosting 🙂

Note: when browsing their website, keep in mind that the listed prices are for a longer billing cycle, so they may be cheaper than the actual month-to-month pricing. Some of their cheapest plans aren’t listed on their website, but they’re still available when ordering through their client area. Same as the billing cycles, the monthly billing cycle isn’t listed on their website, but it is available when ordering.

Having said all of that, they’re a great choice for a European server provider. One of the best. It’s not a surprise that they’re a favorite among LET and WHT members. Using their free trial, you can’t lose anything by trying them out first and checking how good they are for yourself.