Review of VPS hosts in Korea
Popular providers like DO, Linode and Vultr all have presence in Japan… but not in Korea, the country with the fastest internet connection on the planet, which is a shame.
And due to the language barrier, it’s pretty hard to find info on Korea-hosted VPS on the internet. This post aims to solve that
Straight to the point –
Cafe24
Probably the most popular host in Korea. They host websites, wordpress installation, bare metal server and of course… VPS. Here’s the price
Pros
- You get 8 cores regardless of the plan
- VMWare Virtualization
- One dedicated IPv4 address
- The best price you’ll get of any reputable provider
- Select between Linux / Windows (costs more)
- Pretty fast disk (twice as fast as Vultr)
Cons
- Setup fee 22$
- Pretty limited bandwith, 300GB per month at the worst case
- Crappy CPU, the cores are really slow (I think they are second-gen Xeons), with most of the CPU extensions disabled… so they are only good for one thing: serving web pages (and no, they can’t do THAT thing you are thinking about when you read “8 cores” 😉
- Of course you must speak Korean to register or contact support
- Require a Korean ID
You can register for them here
Somagu (mud fish)
Cheapest provider I could find that have servers in Korea. Pretty simple interface. Prices
Pros
- Korean hosted
- English support
- Automatic activation
- Cheapest of anything you can find in Korea
- Don’t require a Korean ID
Cons
- You get to share IP
- Your shared IP is used by Chinese spammers… you’ll see a lot of IP change request in the support forum. I don’t know why but for some reason Chinese spammers love themselves a Korean address
You can find them here
iwinv
Price
Pros
- Cheap
- Free IP
Cons
- Korean only
- Requires Korean ID
- Limited bandwidth
You can find them here
Amazon lightsail (Seoul region)
Recently made available in Seoul, cheaper than EC2, a good choice if you are already tied into the Amazon ecosystem
Pro
- Reputable
- Easy to use
- All in English
- Don’t require a Korean ID
- Generous bandwidth
Cons
- More expensive compared to other options
Amazon EC 2
Pro
- Like lightsail
- Much more versatile
Cons
- Way way too expensive, unless you are a corporate user
You know where to find them
PHP school
Cons
- Pretty slow… can’t open their homepage at the time of writing
Find them here
Naver cloud
Pros
- English support
- Reputable company
- No bandwidth limit
Cons
- Expensive like EC2
You can find them here