Reference deployment — Residential VPS Guide

The numbers

Performance, ranked

Every box, one uniform pass: single- & all-core CPU (sysbench events/s), memory bandwidth (GB/s), network download (Mbps), and 4K-random disk IOPS — then a single equal-weight Overall / 100. Stronger values tint blue, weaker red.

Box	Type	Overall/100	CPU 1-coreeps	CPU all-coreeps	Mem readGB/s	Mem writeGB/s	Net ↓Mbps	Disk readIOPS	Disk writeIOPS
SolaDrive	residential	88	1323	5344	44	26	569	109,775	113,304
BandwagonHost	datacenter	83	1377	5352	43	24	2280	57,318	48,246
BandwagonHost	datacenter	80	1411	2777	42	24	2357	72,418	64,681
BandwagonHost	datacenter	75	1376	4206	41	22	1774	55,499	51,469
AaITR	residential	48	606	611	31	23	29	73,408	62,388
VirVM	residential	38	431	1722	23	19	94	38,813	46,692
AaITR	residential	21	353	706	20	14	103	2,020*	2,019*
AaITR	residential	19	290	577	18	13	102	2,020*	1,986*
AaITR	residential	18	290	581	17	13	102	2,018*	2,018*

* capped disk — see below. Every number is a real measured value.

▲ What the numbers taught us

Two things a spec sheet would never show: SolaDrive is the sleeper — a residential line whose "masked" CPU quietly tops the fleet on disk and ties the datacenter boxes on multicore — while three of AaITR's four boxes are pinned at a provider ~2,000-IOPS disk cap (read ≈ write, identical across the three). The cheap residential boxes are weak on compute, but that's irrelevant for their job: carrying a clean IP.

The setup

How we built it

Exactly the architecture this guide teaches. One datacenter box is the encrypted entry relay (Reality + Vision); it fans out to the residential boxes, each running a lightweight gost forward proxy as an exit. Every exit gets its own port on the relay plus a routing rule, and is firewalled to accept only the relay's address — nothing else can reach it.

The full step-by-step — Reality config, the gost exit, firewalling, and the operations that keep you from locking yourself out — is in Build a network.

In practice

How we use it

Speed-sensitive and management traffic rides the datacenter relay directly — it's fast and always reachable. Anything that needs to look like a real home user egresses through a residential exit, so the destination sees a genuine consumer-ISP address, never a datacenter one. Picking an exit is just choosing which relay port to connect to, so rotating between them is trivial.

✓ The point of the split

The residential boxes are slow and disk-capped — and it doesn't matter. Their entire value is a clean, trusted IP on a real home line. Compute lives on the relay; trust lives on the exit. Buy each box for the one axis it's actually for.

Want to measure your own candidates the same way? Use the score tool, and start from choosing a VPS.