People and Cheap Virtual Servers

So you see a great deal on a Virtual Private Server… Yes! I shoul snag one up you think this is going to be some fun, so naturally you purchase it and after waiting what seems the longest 20 minutes of your life you get your welcome email with all of your information. Now hmm immediatly I am going to say I wonder what kinda juice she has!

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=16k count=16k conv=fdatasync

Now you get some decent results and some not so decent results, did you ever stop to think there are 30 other people doing exactly what your doing. Yes disk i/o is going to be horrid when you have 30 people stress testing a machine, and not to mention a stress test is designed to benchmark the maximum performance of the machine, so if 30 people are taxing shared resources to the max what do you think is going to come of it?