BuyVM
Cult-favorite LowEndTalk-tier KVM with free 3.5Tbps DDoS, free DirectAdmin/Windows licenses, and Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB — operated by Frantech in Las Vegas / NJ / Miami / Luxembourg
Pick when you want unmetered 1Gbps + cheap bulk storage for self-hosted Plex/Jellyfin, IRC bouncers, mail relays (after port 25 unblock), or privacy-first projects out of Luxembourg. Avoid for production traffic that needs always-available stock, a real money-back window, or formal SLA credits.
Overview
BuyVM is a hobbyist/sysadmin-favorite VPS brand operated by Frantech Solutions out of Las Vegas, Nevada — founded by Francisco Dias and serving the LowEndTalk community since 2010. It runs four owned/colocated facilities (Las Vegas NV, Piscataway NJ, Miami FL, Roost Luxembourg) on AMD Ryzen 3900X KVM nodes, with KVM Slices priced from $2/mo (512MB / 1 vCPU @ 3.9GHz+ / 10GB NVMe / unmetered 1Gbps / 1 IPv4 + /48 IPv6) up to $120/mo (32GB / 8 vCPU / 640GB NVMe). The pitch is value-density: 100% NVMe, unmetered gigabit, free DirectAdmin license, free Windows Server license, 5 free snapshots, and Voxility-backed DDoS-protected IPs at $3/mo — plus the signature Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB up to 10TB attached over an InfiniBand RDMA fabric. The trade-offs are chronic out-of-stock cycles, no formal SLA credits, only a 3-day refund window (and only on PayPal/CC), and an outbound-mail policy that hard-drops ports 25/465/587/2525 unless you ticket for unblock.
Trust score breakdown
Stallion control panel covers the basics (start/stop/reboot, VNC, reinstall, snapshots, IPv6/Anycast/rDNS, real-time resource graphs) and ships with 100+ OS templates plus blogging/cPanel/OpenVPN/file-share quick installs. Workflow assumes some Linux comfort — there is no managed marketplace, no guided onboarding, no integrated DNS/firewall UI. Free DirectAdmin license materially lowers the barrier for traditional shared-hosting refugees. Acceptable for hobbyists; not the right fit for first-time VPS users.
Ryzen 3900X + 100% NVMe + unmetered 1Gbps ports + 40Gbit InfiniBand fabric for slab storage is a strong hardware story for the price tier. VPSBenchmarks and YABS runs are consistently competitive against same-priced budget peers. The Luxembourg DC has documented peak-time bandwidth contention; US locations stay clean. Bimodal node experience (some slices land on contended hosts) keeps this short of a top-tier score.
BuyVM advertises 99.9% uptime with no formal SLA credit framework. Long-tenured users (5-8 year customers) report multi-year stretches with minimal downtime, but recent (2025-2026) LowEndTalk threads document multi-hour outages with delayed ticket responses, and the Luxembourg location has had documented bandwidth-saturation episodes at peak. Production-critical traffic should not run single-region on BuyVM; multi-region failover or pairing with a managed provider is the community's standard guidance.
Best-case support is excellent — sub-5-minute ticket replies, founder/staff engaging on Discord and LowEndTalk, port-25 unblock requests handled smoothly. Worst-case support is a documented blind spot: customer reports of 24+ hour ticket silence on server-unreachable issues and snapshot failures, with status-page/reality mismatches. No live chat, no phone. Slightly above the budget-VPS median because of the active community presence, but not in the same tier as RackNerd's chat-led model.
Pricing pages, ToS, AUP, and wiki are all clear and stable; the 3-day refund window and per-payment-method refund eligibility are documented up front (rare in budget tier). Counterweights are the chronic out-of-stock cycles (which the company doesn't communicate proactively) and incident communication (status page sometimes stale during real outages). Stronger than Contabo, weaker than DigitalOcean/Hetzner.
$2/mo for 512MB / 1 vCPU @ 3.9GHz / 10GB NVMe / unmetered 1Gbps with free DirectAdmin and free Windows licenses is a top-tier offer. The Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB (up to 10TB) over InfiniBand RDMA is a unique pricing primitive — no major cloud or budget peer offers anything comparable for storage-heavy workloads. The 3-day-only refund window and DDoS-as-paid-add-on are the value drags.
Plans
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Transfer | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KVM Slice 512MB | 1 | 0.50 GB | 10 GB NVMe | — | $2.00 |
| KVM Slice 1GB | 1 | 1.00 GB | 20 GB NVMe | — | $3.50 |
| KVM Slice 2GB | 1 | 2.00 GB | 40 GB NVMe | — | $7.00 |
| KVM Slice 4GB | 2 | 4.00 GB | 80 GB NVMe | — | $15.00 |
| KVM Slice 8GB | 2 | 8.00 GB | 160 GB NVMe | — | $30.00 |
| KVM Slice 16GB | 4 | 16.00 GB | 320 GB NVMe | — | $60.00 |
| KVM Slice 32GB | 8 | 32.00 GB | 640 GB NVMe | — | $120.00 |
$2-$120/mo KVM Slices on monthly OR annual billing (no advertised annual discount); add-on Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB up to 10TB; DDoS-protected IPs $3/mo each
Performance & infrastructure
- Storage
- 100% NVMe SSD on KVM Slices; spinning disk on separate Storage VPS line and Slabs
- Network
- Unmetered 1 Gbps port per slice; 10Gbit WAN backbone; 40Gbit InfiniBand RDMA fabric for Slabs
- DDoS protection
- Paid add-on
- IPv6
- Included
- Uptime SLA
- 99.9% advertised (no formal SLA credit framework)
- Control panel
- Stallion (custom in-house, SolusVM API-compatible); free DirectAdmin license bundled per slice
- Root access
- Yes
- Management
- Unmanaged
Capabilities at a glance
SMTP port 25 (outbound mail)
UNBLOCK ON REQUESTBuyVM hard-drops outbound traffic on ports 25, 465, 587, and 2525 by default — applied stateless on the network edge. Unblock is available on request via Billing/Sales ticket; community reports show successful unblocks resolved in under 5 minutes for established accounts, but BuyVM has historically been cautious and may decline new accounts with no payment history. If you're running mail-from-VPS or transactional email, plan to ticket immediately after provisioning, or route everything via SendGrid/Postmark/Mailgun on port 587 with auth.
SourceDatacenter locations
Support
Response SLA: Median ticket reply 15-30 minutes for unmanaged issues; sub-5-minute responses common during US business hours; escalations on holidays / overnight can stretch to several hours
No live chat. No phone. The official channel is the WHMCS ticket system; the community channel is the BuyVM Discord and #buyvm IRC where Francisco Dias and longtime staff regularly engage with users. Trustpilot ~925 reviews trending positive overall but with a non-trivial cluster of complaints about ticket silence on edge-case issues (snapshot failures, server-unreachable scenarios). Premium-managed support is not offered.
OS & apps
Supported OS
One-click apps
What to watch out for in pricing
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Chronic out-of-stock — buying often requires waiting for a restock. BuyVM's KVM Slices and Block Storage Slabs frequently show 'Out of Stock' across all four locations. The community runs unofficial trackers like buyvmstock.com and Discord stock-notification bots because demand consistently exceeds capacity. Plan for ordering windows to be unpredictable; don't promise a launch date contingent on getting BuyVM stock at a specific moment.
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DDoS protection is per-IP add-on, not bundled. Voxility/Path.net 3.5Tbps+ filtering is excellent but costs $3/mo per protected IPv4. Unprotected IPs receive standard upstream-network mitigation only. Budget $3/mo on top of the slice price if you need attack-resistant production.
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Refunds capped at 3 days and only on PayPal / credit card. BuyVM's ToS limits refunds to 3 days from the initial order, and only on PayPal or credit card payments. Crypto (CoinPayments) and Alipay payments are explicitly non-refundable. Cancellation after 3 days converts unused time to non-cashable account credit. Treat any annual prepay as fully committed.
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Block Storage Slabs ($1.25/256GB) are the value play, not the slice disk. The signature pricing innovation is the Block Storage Slabs add-on: $1.25/mo per 256GB chunk, up to a 10TB slab at $50/mo, attached to a Slice over a 40Gbit InfiniBand RDMA fabric. Up to 8 slabs per slice; detach/reattach within the same DC without reboot. For Plex/Jellyfin, archival, and large-file workloads this is the cheapest credible option in the market.
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Backups add-on is 10% of slice price (minimum $0.50/mo on 512MB / 1GB tiers). Automated backups are sold as a per-VPS add-on at 10% of the slice's monthly price, with a $0.50/mo floor for the 512MB and 1GB plans. Five snapshots per location are already included free. This is on top of, not instead of, the snapshot allowance.
Known pitfalls
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Stock is chronically scarce — set a notifier before counting on availability
BuyVM's KVM Slices and Block Storage Slabs frequently show 'Out of Stock' across all four DCs, with restocks happening in unpredictable batches (community-tracked at buyvmstock.com and via Discord notifier bots). If you wait until launch day to buy capacity, you may not be able to. The recommended workflow is: subscribe to a stock notifier first, buy when available, then plan your migration.
Source -
3-day refund window only — and only on PayPal/credit-card payments
Unlike most competitors with 7/14/30-day money-back, BuyVM allows refunds only within 3 days of the initial order, exclusively on PayPal or credit card. Crypto and Alipay are non-refundable. Cancellation after 3 days converts unused time to account credit that can never be cashed out. Test thoroughly inside 72 hours or treat the prepay as fully committed.
Source -
Outbound mail ports are hard-blocked by default — must ticket to unblock
Ports 25, 465, 587, and 2525 are stateless-dropped on the network edge. Unblocks are usually granted via a Billing/Sales ticket once your account is in good standing, and community reports show same-day turnaround in many cases — but new accounts with no payment history occasionally have requests declined. If you are deploying a mail server (Mail-in-a-Box, Mailcow, Postfix relay), file the unblock ticket immediately and don't deploy to production until you have written confirmation.
Source -
DDoS protection is paid per IP, not bundled — unprotected IPs see only upstream filtering
Despite a 3.5Tbps+ Voxility/Path.net upstream, the protection only routes through that filter for IPs you explicitly purchase at $3/mo each. Unprotected IPs are subject to upstream-only mitigation, which means a targeted application-layer attack can take down a $2 slice. Budget the $3/mo protection upgrade if you run anything attack-attractive (game servers, IRC, controversial speech).
Source -
Sporadic multi-hour outages with delayed ticket response — not single-region production
Long-tenured customers (5-8 years) report stable service overall, but recent LowEndTalk threads (late 2025 / early 2026) document multi-hour outages with status-page lag and 24+ hour ticket silence on edge-case issues. The Miami DC had a 12-hour bandwidth-degraded incident, and a December 2025 LV slice-unreachable thread is still open. Use BuyVM for hobby, dev/staging, storage, and self-hosting; mirror customer-facing production to a managed peer with formal SLA credits.
Source
Community pulse
BuyVM has one of the strongest tribal communities in the LowEndTalk/budget-VPS world — Trustpilot ~925 reviews trending positive, Discord/IRC actively staffed by Frantech personnel, and recurring multi-year customer reviews who quote BuyVM as the platonic ideal of value-density hosting (free DirectAdmin + free Windows + Block Storage Slabs at $1.25/256GB). The signature praise points are the storage pricing primitive, unmetered 1Gbps, the privacy-friendly Luxembourg DC, and Francisco Dias / staff personally engaging on community channels. The recurring drag points are chronic out-of-stock cycles, the 3-day refund window, periodic Luxembourg bandwidth congestion, and a small but visible cluster of 'ticket went unanswered for 24+ hours during outage' complaints in 2025-2026. The community recommendation is consistent: use BuyVM for self-hosted Plex/Jellyfin (Slabs), IRC bouncers, mail relays (after port-25 unblock), VPNs, dev/staging, and privacy-conscious hosting — and pair with a managed peer for customer-facing production traffic that needs formal SLA credits.
- Frantech Solutions Reviews on Trustpilot (~925 reviews) · Trustpilot · 2026
- BuyVM / Frantech review. I've been a customer for 8+ years and have been kept happy. · LowEndTalk · 2024
- BuyVM Always Out of Stock · LowEndTalk · 2024
- BuyVM server unreachable with no response from support for over 24 hours · LowEndTalk · 2025
- BuyVM Review 2026: Pros, Cons & Better Alternatives · VPS SOS · 2026
- My review of some providers I've used (BuyVM/RamNode/LiteServer/Hetzner/OVH) · LowEndTalk · 2024
Last full audit: April 27, 2026
Founded 2010 — 16 years in business · Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA