HostCram review — FiberState (over two years in)

It’s been over two years since we signed a colocation agreement with FiberState (we started in November 2023), and I can say with confidence that this is one of the best vendor relationships HostCram has had. We run only custom servers, ship racks of gear, and push our providers hard — FiberState has handled all of it with competence, patience, and real care.

Shipping, intake, and hardware handling

We shipped a lot of hardware to the data center and never had anything missing or damaged. The intake process is clean and professional; they treat gear like it matters because it does. When we needed to RMA parts, FiberState made it easy to ship components out from the DC via UPS to the manufacturer. On the rare occasions we didn’t have spares, they offered replacement hardware at cost, which kept services running and saved us from long outages.

Network help and technical expertise

Their network team deserves special mention. We brought in a Juniper QFX, and I didn’t know how to get it online or build VLANs the right way. FiberState walked us through the setup, helped configure VLANs, and assisted with our custom BGP sessions. That kind of hands-on network expertise — not just hand-waving, but actual configuration and testing — is rare and extremely valuable for a shop running bespoke infrastructure.

Remote hands, emergency support, and people

Support is where FiberState really stands out. Remote hands are excellent: small, quick tasks are often handled without charge, and longer jobs are billed at $100/hr, which is fair for the level of skill and responsiveness we get. When a server went offline, we had emergency troubleshooting and escalation available immediately. There’s one person I always call out: Dan — whenever I needed something done, I could count on him to get it done, no drama.
We’ve been tough customers — custom servers mean oddball requests and a lot of pressure on support — and the team stayed professional and generous throughout. That professionalism under stress is a huge differentiator.

Culture, value, and why we’re staying

Beyond the technical wins, FiberState’s team has been generous and relationship-focused. They consistently choose a long-term partnership over nickel-and-diming small issues. That attitude shows up in free quick remote hands, practical help with RMAs, and stepping in with hardware at cost when needed.
After more than two years of real-world use, HostCram has decided to stay with FiberState for the long haul. They’ve earned our trust through reliability, technical competence, and plain old good service.

Final verdict

If you need a colocation partner who treats your custom gear seriously, provides real network expertise, responds quickly in emergencies, and backs it up with practical, no-nonsense support, FiberState is an excellent choice. Highly recommended by HostCram.

Note: FiberState affiliate links are in use. Non-affiliate link.

I’m sharing my experience with HostDize so others can make an informed decision.

My VPS services were suspended without any prior notice, warning, or request for clarification. There was no communication about:

any policy violation,
any complaint on my IP,
or any activity that allegedly triggered the suspension.

When I contacted support, I was immediately demanded full KYC documents (passport, photograph, address proof, etc.) before they were willing to explain why my services were suspended.

In fact, I had recently purchased a 1-year annual VPS from the Blackfriday deals this year!

I was never asked to share my personal documents with the host while I was ordering and making the purchases. In the interest of transparency, I've been trying to understand from HostDZire.

what triggered the suspension,
whether there was a complaint or abuse report,
and the basis for suddenly demanding personal documents now, after arbitrarily suspending my services without any reason whatsover.

These questions were not answered.

HostDize has publicly shared a 99% blurred image succumbing to pressure (no clue if it's real or AI generated; Link: https://i.postimg.cc/c4Nsz2zt/image.png ) stating that they'd received that 'complaint' from the law enforcement agencies.

No where can you make out anything, thanks to the blur. And now HostDzire demands my private information, under the garb of a blurred image. They don't need my KYC to serve me the complaint copy, if it's legit.

• What stops them from sharing the so-called complaint to me on my registered email address?
• Why are my other services suspended?
• India's been prey to many fake cyber-fraud notices. And in the era of AI, it isn't a big deal.

Again, no answers.

This creates a concerning situation:

You pay for a service.
Service gets suspended before anything else
No notice or explanation is given
Customers are pressured to submit sensitive personal documents
Transparency is withheld until compliance

At no point was proportionality observed. Even basic, non-sensitive information (like “there was an abuse report” or “policy X was triggered”) was refused.

I understand KYC requirements where legally mandated - but suspending services first and refusing to explain anything unless personal documents are handed over is not acceptable.

Prospective customers should be aware that:

Your services can be suspended without warning
You may not be told why
You may be required to submit sensitive KYC documents just to get an explanation

I’m posting this as a factual account so others can make an informed decision.

Thank you!

First, you get one of their "VM.Standard.A1.Flex" instances:

• Ampere A1 (arm64) processors (that's Neoverse-N1 cores)
• 24gb RAM
• Up to 200gb of block storage
• 1 ipv4

The bad:

• Oracle Cloud UI is subpar, even compared to their competitors' which aren't great themselves (AWS, Azure...)
• Instances may not be available for creation in your prefered region depending on when you're trying it. I choose a nearby region and it's worked fine for me.
• Depending on your luck, registering can be a hassle due to strong anti fraud checks which also impact legitimate users: UI is slow and unreliable, and the process may fail without a clear reason.
• You need to give a credit card number, although they won't charge you.
• We're talking about an ARM instance, this can be a problem if you want to run x86/amd64 specific software, though that's becoming less of an issue over time.

The good:

• Unusually powerful cpu, incredible ram amount, sizeable storage.
• Instance/network seem fairly reliable, no major problem since I've been using it.
• I've run heavy stuff such as Elasticsearch and Kubernetes on it, with success.

You can look at some benchmarks just after, but to sum up, I'd say that if you can pass their registration process and there are instances available, it's kind of a no-brainer.

# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
#              Yet-Another-Bench-Script              #
#                     v2023-04-23                    #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #

ARM compatibility is considered *experimental*

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime     : 740 days, 15 hours, 23 minutes
Processor  : Neoverse-N1
CPU cores  : 4 @ ??? MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM        : 22.6 GiB
Swap       : 8.0 GiB
Disk       : 100.0 GiB
VM Type    : KVM
IPv4/IPv6  : ✔ Online / ❌ Offline

IPv4 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP        : Oracle Corporation
ASN        : AS31898 Oracle Corporation
Host       : Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (uk-london-1)
Location   : London, England (ENG)
Country    : United Kingdom

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 13.45 MB/s    (3.3k) | 27.16 MB/s     (424)
Write      | 13.47 MB/s    (3.3k) | 27.97 MB/s     (437)
Total      | 26.93 MB/s    (6.7k) | 55.13 MB/s     (861)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 24.80 MB/s      (48) | 24.45 MB/s      (23)
Write      | 26.92 MB/s      (52) | 27.28 MB/s      (26)
Total      | 51.73 MB/s     (100) | 51.73 MB/s      (49)

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider        | Location (Link)           | Send Speed      | Recv Speed      | Ping           
-----           | -----                     | ----            | ----            | ----           
Clouvider       | London, UK (10G)          | 3.99 Gbits/sec  | 1.22 Gbits/sec  | 2.09 ms        
Scaleway        | Paris, FR (10G)           | 4.00 Gbits/sec  | 371 Mbits/sec   | 8.80 ms        
NovoServe       | North Holland, NL (40G)   | 4.01 Gbits/sec  | 2.55 Gbits/sec  | 7.46 ms        
Uztelecom       | Tashkent, UZ (10G)        | 717 Mbits/sec   | 49.8 Mbits/sec  | 102 ms         
Clouvider       | NYC, NY, US (10G)         | 937 Mbits/sec   | 82.4 Mbits/sec  | 70.2 ms        
Clouvider       | Dallas, TX, US (10G)      | 662 Mbits/sec   | 89.1 Mbits/sec  | 107 ms         
Clouvider       | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 491 Mbits/sec   | 68.4 Mbits/sec  | 132 ms 

-------------------- A Bench.sh Script By Teddysun -------------------
 Version            : v2023-06-10
 Usage              : wget -qO- bench.sh | bash
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 CPU Model          : CPU model not detected
 CPU Cores          : 4
 AES-NI             : Enabled
 VM-x/AMD-V         : Disabled
 Total Disk         : 100.0 GB (22.8 GB Used)
 Total Mem          : 22.6 GB (4.5 GB Used)
 Total Swap         : 8.0 GB (275.6 MB Used)
 System uptime      : 740 days, 15 hour 34 min
 Load average       : 0.06, 0.06, 0.04
 Arch               : aarch64 (64 Bit)
 TCP CC             : cubic
 Virtualization     : KVM
 IPv4/IPv6          : Online / Offline
 Organization       : AS31898 Oracle Corporation
 Location           : London / GB
 Region             : England
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 I/O Speed(1st run) : 55.7 MB/s
 I/O Speed(2nd run) : 50.5 MB/s
 I/O Speed(3rd run) : 52.2 MB/s
 I/O Speed(average) : 52.8 MB/s
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Node Name        Upload Speed      Download Speed      Latency     
 Speedtest.net    1543.83 Mbps      947.64 Mbps         0.81 ms     
 Los Angeles, US  301.05 Mbps       22.04 Mbps          129.99 ms   
 Dallas, US       289.66 Mbps       538.64 Mbps         102.12 ms   
 Montreal, CA     176.57 Mbps       140.22 Mbps         75.06 ms    
 Paris, FR        1465.03 Mbps      159.86 Mbps         9.59 ms     
 Amsterdam, NL    1338.97 Mbps      189.83 Mbps         6.98 ms     
 Shanghai, CN     113.45 Mbps       535.47 Mbps         216.68 ms   
 Nanjing, CN      170.08 Mbps       513.50 Mbps         259.69 ms   
 Hongkong, CN     177.91 Mbps       1735.52 Mbps        246.73 ms   
 Singapore, SG    286.40 Mbps       8.75 Mbps           161.03 ms   
 Tokyo, JP        133.62 Mbps       16.18 Mbps          230.15 ms   
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Finished in        : 6 min 15 sec
----------------------------------------------------------------------

If you'd like any other benchmarks, feel free to ask.

As the time passes, I need to order another servers in Singapore for my own project but i can't find one. So I asked the support about that. The reply is crystal clear, but the next lines is somewhat unnecessary. I am still in learning phase, but this one, I would never forget. Ever.

Sorry for my awful english.

On december 7 I hired a small budged webhosting from them, to have as backup/emergency host (all data would be replicated in case of downtime of my main host ( @Abdullah ).
Payment was delivered the same day, instantly after the purchase, and at the third day of no news, I send a ticket to see whats was happening with no service activation. They answered sorry for the delay and that will be moving to automatic provisioning soon. The service was activated (don't have proof, usually don't take pictures of my services and at the time no email was received).
Today I find myself in the search of reseller, and remembered that SmallWeb has some nice offers (wich probably gonna be idling as the other shared). So I login on the site to put an order, I find myself with no service at all, and again on pending.
Immediately after this I send a ticket demanding an explanaition, their answer was "your service was never active and you didn't claim it again with us after your first ticket a month ago, either way we setup the service with a extension date "
So... not only they don't recognize that the service has been active previously and deactivated for some reason, they also blame you for not having claiming the activation at least twice, and also you have to be grateful because they put "a new expiration date" on the service.

Obviously im not gonna hire the reseller there, and expect to be able to test the service and revert this review, but, at the current time, I wouldn't recommend noone to hire a service there, at least not if you expect to be delivered on time.

PD: At least the ticket response was quickly.
PD2: Sorry for the bad english.

Some pictures:

Full disclosure: my review is spontaneous, unsolicited, and there is (AFAIK) no rewarding systems at BuyVM for writing a review. In case there are, @Francisco, I accept cash only ;-)

I have had a few Slices (BuyVM name for VPS with dedicated virtual cores, or CPU threads) over the last 2 years or so. These are the major operating periods I have had most recently:

• 1x 8GB/$30 Slice in LV (Las Vegas) [Ryzen 3900X].
• 1x 512MB/$2.50 Slice in LV, [Ryzen 3900X].
• 3x 1GB/$3.00 Slice (LV [Ryzen 3900X], NY (New York) [Xeon E3-1241 v3], LU (Luxembourg) [Xeon E3-1241 v3] with Anycast.
• The above 3x 1GB/$3.00 Slices plus 1x 8GB/$30 Slice in LV (Ryzen 3900X)
• 1x 8GB/$30 in NY (Ryzen 3900X).

I currently am with the 8GB/$30 one in NY, to which I came back once I let the 8GB/$30 one in LV go.
My reason for letting it go was that LV is too far away from me, geographically, and both NY and LU did not have Ryzen or Slabs (what they call their mountable block storage) at the time.
When I cancelled, I promised that I would come back the moment either LU or NY would get Ryzen and Slabs. So I did when NY got them. I plan to do the same when LU receives Ryzen and Slabs, with one caveat: better peering is needed (see below).

Overall, I am very satisfied with the service. The VPSs perform greatly. They are snappy for my usage, even the $3.00 ones and even those with the older Xeon CPUs. I host websites, "cloud" sync services, automation services, git, wikis, adblocker, seatable, and so on. I have never had any significant downtime, although some users do complain about downtimes on Discord, so I might just have been lucky (see blamefran.com). Even when I see this happening, Francisco is extremely receptive and quick to find out solutions.

The offered I/O, both for the NVMe and the Slab, is excellent. This is the NVMe at the root partition:

curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -ig
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 279.43 MB/s  (69.8k) | 2.32 GB/s    (36.3k)
Write      | 280.17 MB/s  (70.0k) | 2.33 GB/s    (36.5k)
Total      | 559.61 MB/s (139.9k) | 4.66 GB/s    (72.8k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 2.46 GB/s     (4.8k) | 2.43 GB/s     (2.3k)
Write      | 2.59 GB/s     (5.0k) | 2.60 GB/s     (2.5k)
Total      | 5.05 GB/s     (9.8k) | 5.04 GB/s     (4.9k)

Slabs are also cheap, at $1.25/month for 250GB. I wish I could share I/O tests of the plain disk, but I have my Slab fully encrypted (LUKS) so the numbers are lower than they are supposed to be. IMHO, they are very good anyway!

curl -sL yabs.sh | bash -s -- -ig
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 43.79 MB/s   (10.9k) | 74.73 MB/s    (1.1k)
Write      | 43.86 MB/s   (10.9k) | 75.12 MB/s    (1.1k)
Total      | 87.65 MB/s   (21.9k) | 149.86 MB/s   (2.3k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 183.94 MB/s    (359) | 219.69 MB/s    (214)
Write      | 193.71 MB/s    (378) | 234.32 MB/s    (228)
Total      | 377.66 MB/s    (737) | 454.02 MB/s    (442)

If you need sequential read/write "dd" tests of the Slab, please let me know. I won't run further benchmarks on the Slice, though, because I do not want to stop my services unless it is necessary. You can find several of them on LET, though.

Their bandwidth is unmetered, yet you can not use their 1gbit/s uplink all the time. Rule of thumb (as far as I remember. I do not use a lot of bandwidth) is 100mbit/s 24/7 for the 4GB/$15 Slice, and you halve/double it going down/up in their pricing. I find it fair, and it exceeds my needs anyway.

On their support mechanisms. This is where BuyVM shines. First, their official ticket support system is useful and rather quick to fix issues. I received twice an IP with bad reputation, and they swapped them within minutes.

Then there is Discord. Despite their fair warning that Discord can cause cancer, as long as you stay away from the "misc" channels (or don't. Who am I to judge), people in there are supportive and non-judgmental. This includes both users and staff. Francisco hangs in there quite often and pretty much answers any inquiry, from issue reports, to feature suggestions and chitchats. You can pretty much see that, beyond the memes, he takes a lot of pride in his products and wants them to just perform the best. He also often asks users for what might be the next best thing to add to BuyVM.

Speaking of which, I find their pace of innovation to be schizophrenic and, at the same time, fair for the price. Latest additions in the last months include Cloudflare magic transit for their DDOS protected IPs, which costs a lot of money but is offered at $3.00 per IP, 5 free snapshots of any Slice and scheduled backups for ridiculously cheap pricing, custom ISOs for installing, copy/paste in the Web console (which is WAY more useful than it sounds), and BGP sessions to announce own networks.

No review should omit points for improvement. And there are, plenty of them. Some of them are my humble opinion and might not apply to most users. In no particular order:

Pricing does not scale up a lot, meaning that the least you pay, the higher is the value, IMHO. Everyone has their breaking point, but to me, the price/performance ratio of their first 3 Slices ($2.00, $3.50, $7.00) is way higher than the one of the three successive Slices ($15.00, $30.00, $45.00). Reason is that, especially after the $30.00/month mark, you start finding dedicated servers with perhaps older CPUs and lower characteristics (e.g., a single SSD). On the other hand, many features are included for zero price increase (e.g., snapshots, anycast) or with really low pricing (e.g., backups, DDOS protected IPs., Slabs). Another issue for some users is that pricing is non-flexible for Slices. For example, you can't have a 8GB ram Slice for less than $30/month if you needed, say, less storage.

Peering and transit could be improved, and it is not balanced between datacenters. LV is nicely connected (but too far away from where I am), followed by NY and then LU. The latter seems to be using Cogent only, which does not work very well in Europe. I was getting better transfer speeds from LV to Europe than from LU to..Europe. And I do not even live that far away from Luxembourg.
Speaking of LU, I feel that the datacenter is a bit of a second class citizen. This even taking into account the corona issues (right now, it is completely understandable that there is little going on there, as BuyVM people are not located in Europe). I am dying to have my data in LU, but this will only happen when LU receives Ryzen (and I heard that this might be coming by the end of the year), NVMe, Slabs, and better connectivity.

Edit: As a side note, NY also seems to use Cogent for Europe, but for some reason, it performs well, whereas LU does not. Maybe it is a matter of congestion at peak times.

The "single core" speed of Ryzen is good, but underwhelming on benchmarks (I see scores around 800-900 for Geekbench 5, whereas it is more typical to see scores around 1200-1300). Of course I brought this to the attention of Francisco, who transparently told me that he disabled most of AMD 4ghz+ turbo burst mode (sorry, I have no idea how AMD calls it) because of thermal throttling issues. On the one hand, this looks underwhelming, especially seeing bench results shared on LET/LES. On the other hand, two things: first, the VPS has never let me down. It just flies. I would have not noticed underwhelming CPU performance if I did not run benchmarks. Second, I do not know to which extent the turbo mode actively works for "normal" usage (normal as opposed to benchmarking stuff), so I do not know if and how other hosts that show higher single thread scores actually provide that performance on a daily basis. It might be better to have predictable good performance rather than mediocre performance with spikes of excellent performance. Nevertheless, Francisco promised me he would look at it and consider tweaking some settings.

Final one, and I will just say it: I find their overall ordering process lacking in many ways, potentially irritating for current customers, too. Having to wait for the 1st or the 7th of the month to snatch a VPS sucks, especially when there is a need to scale or offload. To be fair, this issue is almost non-existent currently for NY, because of the new nodes. Related to this issue is when their anti-fraud system kicks in. I completely understand their needs to protect themselves, but it is infuriating to wait weeks before finding the Slice you really needed, purchasing it, and find out that the order got rejected, even if you are a current customer who pays their bills, just because you forgot to disable your VPN, or whatever. Even if you open a ticket immediately after the issue shows up, their response will be that you need to order from scratch. And this might mean that you need to wait weeks. Again.
I think that existing customers should somehow get whitelisted.

Overall, I highly recommend the service and to at least try out their $3.00/month Slice and a Slab. They might do wonders. I also recommend trying out BuyVM for their exceptional support and their community. I am fairly sure that when Francisco reads this, the pride he takes in his service will result in some improvement one day or another.

Feel free to ask further questions about my experience!

(Following some recent discussion in another thread here)

For now I'll just summarize my assessment from last couple years in a few of their USA locations: solid systems, great uptime, modest specs, okay-ish network (depending on what you need it for - it is colocrossing after all) ... Also reasonable to deal with in terms of support.

So all things considered I've been pleasantly surprised. I'm guessing that the CPU limits (etc) are actually fine for some medium-load webserver duty (such as this forum) - but probably less so for more sustained usage patterns such as transcoding.

tl;dr: could be a good option for many but not all lowend applications - and proven to be worthy of consideration (in my own limited experience at least).

Questions, suggestions, critical comments, horror stories, and/or kudos and benchmarks welcome.

Also feel free to mention any good alternatives in the general price range