BuyVM

What BuyVM actually is

BuyVM is the consumer brand of Frantech Solutions, a Las Vegas hosting company that has been selling virtual servers since 2010 and has become the reference point for a specific kind of buyer: people who know what a VPS is, want unmetered bandwidth and honest specs, and refuse to pay cloud-provider margins for them. The product is KVM — real virtualization, custom kernels, ISOs, Docker, full disk encryption — sold as "Dedicated KVM Slices" on 3.5 GHz+ Intel hardware with pure SSD storage and no overselling on the larger plans. In our VPS providers comparison it is the value benchmark we hold cheap hosts against.

The line-up is short and readable. Slice 512: 1 fair-share core, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth, one IPv4 address, $24/year. Slice 1024: 1 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, $3.50/month. Slice 2048: 2 GB, 40 GB, $7/month. Slice 4096: 4 GB, 80 GB, $15/month, and this is where CPU becomes dedicated rather than fair-share. High-volume plans scale linearly from 2 cores/8 GB/160 GB at $30/month up to 7 cores/28 GB/560 GB at $105/month, all with unmetered 1000 Mbps ports. Every plan includes a free DirectAdmin license (restricted to BuyVM IPs), five free snapshots per location, and the Stallion control panel that Frantech built in-house rather than renting someone else's.

The add-on that draws most of the traffic is Block Storage Slabs: 256 GB of HDD-backed block storage for $1.25/month, so 1 TB for $5/month and 10 TB for $50/month. Slabs attach to a KVM slice in the same facility over a 40 Gbit+ InfiniBand RDMA fabric with NVMe read/write buffers, and they migrate hot between your servers inside a facility without reboots. Up to eight slabs per server, 10 TB maximum per slab, upgradeable but never downgradable. Frantech publishes a comparison table claiming the slab costs 95% less than OVH ($90/TB/month), Vultr ($100), and Amazon EBS ($131.50) per terabyte — vendor numbers, but the direction matches what we see across the block storage market. This is the cheapest serious block storage we track, and it is why people build media servers and backup targets on BuyVM.

Pricing: what you really pay

The bill is small and the traps are few. Servers are monthly or yearly (Slice 512 is annual-only at $24); there is no hourly billing and no free tier. Automatic nightly backups are a paid add-on at 10% of the instance base price ($0.50/month minimum on the two smallest slices), keeping seven days of restores. DDoS-filtered IPv4 addresses cost $3/month per IP and can be ordered at checkout. Additional IPv4 addresses and other extras are priced in the same straightforward manner. Downgrades are not offered — only upgrades — which Frantech explains bluntly: drive shrink failures lose data, and they would rather not.

What you do not get billed for is bandwidth: every slice is unmetered on a 1 Gbps port, and that is the single most common reason people move here from hosts that meter egress. Combined with $5/TB storage, the shape of the economics is clear. A 4 GB slice with a 1 TB slab costs $20/month and can serve serious traffic; the comparable line items at the big clouds are multiples of that before egress. Payment via the Frantech client area (my.frantech.ca), which is also where tickets, rDNS, and PTR records get managed — there is no separate enterprise portal to learn, and for this audience that is a feature. Stock shortages are a real, recurring caveat — popular configurations sell out, and the culture around the brand treats securing a slot as part of the experience.

Performance & infrastructure

BuyVM operates from three locations per its own FAQ: Las Vegas, Nevada; New York, New York; and Roost, Luxembourg. Note that our database previously listed Singapore and third-party reviews mention Miami — neither appears in the vendor's current location list or datacenter pages, so we treat the three published locations as the fact and flag the rest as unresolved. Hardware is 3.5 GHz+ Intel with pure SSD storage on the slice line, SATA on the older KVM 128/256 budget line, and the InfiniBand-backed slab fabric for bulk storage. Full disk encryption is supported out of the box on KVM, and OS templates deploy in seconds; custom ISOs cover BSD and whatever else you bring.

DDoS protection is an add-on but a serious one: $3/month per IP buys always-on filtering rated at 3.5+ Tbps and 700+ million packets per second, pooled per location across protected customers, delivered through Path.net. Frantech's published mitigation story includes a 200 Gbit / 57.6 Mpps attack against a Minecraft community that stayed online without nullroutes, and the attack-type list covers volumetric, TCP/UDP floods, amplification (NTP, DNS, SSDP, SNMP), and resource-exhaustion vectors including Slowloris-style attacks. The SLA is 99.9% uptime, explicitly excluding downtime from application-layer floods — the kind of honest exclusion we prefer to a marketing number with no terms attached.

Reliability reputation is where a 16-year-old independent host earns its following: long uptime records reported by users, in-house tooling that actually works, and support that is frequently cited as the best in the low-cost segment. That is community evidence rather than published metrics, and we label it as such — but it is a lot of community evidence. Frantech's operating style is part of the product: a small team, direct communication, and a founder-visible presence on hosting forums where roadmap items and outages get discussed in public instead of through status-page euphemisms. We count that openness as a support advantage while noting it is reputation, not a contractual commitment.

Where it falls short

Stock. BuyVM's most popular slices and locations sell out regularly, and there is no instant elastic scaling story — you get what is provisioned. There is no API-driven autoscaling, no object storage product (Frantech states an object store may come "down the line" but does not exist today, which is why our database correctly marks S3 compatibility as absent), and no managed service tier: this is a self-managed KVM box, and DirectAdmin being free does not make your server someone else's problem.

The platform tooling is deliberately minimal. Stallion handles reboots, ISOs, networking, snapshots, and slab migration well, but there is no marketplace of one-click apps, no Kubernetes integrations, and no native backup-to-object-store pipeline — the seven-day backup add-on is it. IPv6 is available (a routed /64 per VPS, with larger routed subnets on request per community documentation) but is not emphasized in the marketing, and buyers who need guaranteed IPv4 availability should note that IPs beyond the included one are a paid resource.

The 99.9% SLA is modest by cloud standards and excludes application-layer floods; there are no service credits published on the DDoS page the way Bunny's SLA lists them — the terms live in the TOS. And the same small-company quality that makes support personal makes the surface area small: three locations, one virtualization stack, and a support team that will not be your compliance department.

Who should pick this

Our pick for experienced users who want maximum server per dollar: self-hosters, community operators, media and download servers, VPN and proxy boxes, small SaaS backends, and anyone whose workload is bandwidth- and storage-hungry. If you have outgrown metered VPS pricing or need a 10 TB volume for the price of a modest cloud line item, BuyVM is where we would point you first — provided you can get stock and you can run the box yourself.

We would not pick it for teams that need managed operations, multiple global regions, or contractual enterprise support, and not for anyone who needs to scale up and down hourly. If your architecture is object-storage-native, BuyVM's slabs solve raw capacity but you will be building the S3 layer yourself.

Key takeaways

• KVM slices from $2/month (512 MB/10 GB, $24/year) to $105/month (7 cores/28 GB/560 GB) with unmetered 1 Gbps bandwidth.
• Block Storage Slabs at $1.25 per 256 GB ($5/TB/month), hot-migratable within a facility over an InfiniBand fabric — the cheapest block storage we track.
• DDoS-filtered IPs at $3/month per IP with 3.5+ Tbps pooled filtering; a 99.9% SLA that honestly excludes application-layer floods.
• Locations: Las Vegas, New York, and Roost (Luxembourg) — no Singapore despite older listings; stock shortages are routine.
• Five free snapshots per location; nightly backups are a paid add-on at 10% of base price; free DirectAdmin license.
• Our value pick in VPS providers for self-managed, bandwidth-heavy workloads.

Sources

• https://buyvm.net/
• https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices/
• https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/
• https://buyvm.net/ddos-protection/
• https://vpsrated.com/provider/buyvm-vds
• https://wiki.ircnow.org/index.php?n=Buyvm.Ipv6