

Ask HN: Are dedicated servers a better deal than VPS/Cloud options? - potatofish

Just looking at Softlayer's dedicated machines, it seems they offer a better deal on these than if you go with their Cloud computing offerings. What is the advantage to using clouds/VPS then?
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pedoh
Suppose you have a website that has completely constant traffic. You can
therefore anticipate exactly how much computing power you need, and a
dedicated machine or two will suit your needs well.

Now suppose that same site (hosted on two dedicated machines) gets a sudden
increase in traffic, beyond the capabilities of your two machines. Instead of
reserving another dedicated machines, spool up a cloud instance (or two) to
help handle the traffic, and once the traffic returns to normal, release the
cloud instance(s).

Here's another possibility. Suppose you need 100 machines to crunch data for
an hour. Launch 100 cloud server for that hour at their rate and you pay 100 x
$0.15 = $10.50 for the hour instead of 100 x whatever they'll charge for a
month of dedicated machine usage.

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corin_
As pedoh said, the advantage of cloud options is the ability to scale
flexibly.

VPS, however, is actually more aligned to dedicated servers. Sure, because
their hardware limits are manually imposed by virtualisation software, you can
scale them, but generally that's designed for when you decide a server
upgrade/downgrade is required, rather than on an ongoing basis to meet
fluxtuating needs.

Essentially, the key difference between VPS and dedi is that VPS offers a
cheaper solution if you want the flexibility of your own server without the
cost of hardware that you don't need - as you can get cheap VPSs that give you
full root access for $15/20 a month, a deal you'll never find with any
dedicated server, regardless of its specifications.

(For my company's websites, we have ~20 quad core dedicated servers because we
are able to handle a steady growth of traffic without the need of cloud
servers, and we want complete control over them in a way that we wouldn't have
with VPS servers. I have 5 VPS servers for personal use however, which lets me
spread their power across four data centres in two continents, with various
different uses for each of them, without the bill that a similar dedicated
server setup would cost, as I don't really need huge amounts of CPU/RAM in
each)

~~~
pedoh
One issue I would caution about VPSes is that because there can be more than
one VPS on a physical server, there has to be contention for resources. The
vast majority of the time this may not (and hopefully will not) be an issue,
but imagine that one VPS starts hammering disk. The disk has a performance
limit, and therefore the resource can be starved. The managing server will do
its best to prevent one VPS from affecting another, but it can and does
happen. If the physical server has a huge RAID array of disks this problem
will be lessened greatly; likewise if it has 8 cores instead of one. If it's
not standard practice for a hosting provider to tell customers what hardware
your VPS is running on and how many other VPSes can be on the machine, it
should be.

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ilcesco
While a VPS or a Cloud solution may provide you greater flexibility for the
reasons explained by pedoh, in my personal experience dedicated servers are
better served in terms of bandwidth and throughput stability. At the current
state-of-the-art however, I'd choose VPS over dedicated anytime (as long as
it's cheaper).

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alnayyir
I can't speak to your needs, but my company will be using a dedicated server
for backup, but linode for the front-end.

~~~
Travis
We're going to do the same thing. Of course, that "dedicated" server will
probably be on site and be multi-use. I'll probably actually just virtualize
my production environment within it. It's not so much the virtual / dedicated
issue behind that; it's the desire to control my backups. (Although linode's
new backup feature seems pretty brain dead simple).

