

ServerBeach Dedicated Server Sale - $99 Quad, $199 Octo - ericd
http://www.serverbeach.com/servers/specialoffers_quad_core_dedicated_servers.php/

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joss82
There is cheaper hosting here: <http://www.kimsufi.com/ks/>

49€/month for a Q6600 quad-core.

and 99€ for a octo-core and 12gigs of ram.

I'm using their quad core at the moment for 6 months and nothing bad happened.
Didn't try their tech support, though.

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jusob
There are a lot of great prices in Europe (OVH in France, Heitzner in
Germany), but not in the US to my knowledge. I've tried to run a server in
Germany (Heitzner). The latency + newtwork issues (dropped packets) was not
worth the price difference if your audience is in the US.

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lsc
Nice, it looks like I can get 2x1TB drives (gotta have my software raid) and
8GiB ram for around $250/month with that code. nice. (I mean, it's still
cheaper to own, and obviously, I'm equipped to deal with my own hardware, but
that's a relatively reasonable price as far as renting hardware goes.)

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ericd
I haven't used ServerBeach, but I'm sorely tempted to switch some of my VM's
to one. Thoughts? Experiences?

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alt219
I've used ServerBeach for five years (as well as RackSpace, Slicehost, and
Linode). Generally positive experience; they have occasional downtime as you
might expect, but it hasn't impacted my sites to any significant degree. Their
self-service tools are decent. Good support, good user forums. I'm about to
upgrade one of my servers there and plan on using them for the foreseeable
future.

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lsb
For about the same monthly cost, Amazon has a dual-core machine with >3x the
memory, 7.5 vs 2GB.

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ericd
How did you come to that conclusion? From what I'm seeing, the large instance
is $0.34/hour, or $244/month. It looks like for a bit less ($199), one can get
a 2x quad-core xeon with 6 gigs memory with the other deal.

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lsc
moreover, you should expect to pay more for a physical server. It's more
expensive to run a physical server than a slice of a virtual (at least until
the physical servers start getting bigger than 32 or 64GiB)

Physical servers provide more value to the user, too; if you split a disk to 8
VMs, in times of contention, each vm gets significantly less than 1/8th of the
disk's maximum performance. See, sharing the disk means that during times of
contention, what would otherwise be sequential access become random access,
and disk, especially cheap sata disk, is not any good at random access.

I wrote a bit about it here
[http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/03/forward-
looking...](http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/03/forward-looking-
statements.html) when I was trying to track down a problem that pinboard was
complaining about. (turns out the problem was actually a debian xen bug and
not actually the problem I was describing. But what I say above is still true;
virtualization is not any good at all for disk I/O)

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patrickgzill
No RAID, and I am guessing, no ECC RAM.

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ericd
True on both counts, though they offer RAID for a fee (40-100/mo for
controller, then drives). Instead I'm planning on going SSD for 60/mo more +
aggressive backups (bad idea?)

I'm planning on using this for things where performance matters a lot more
than 100% data integrity.

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lsc
SSD is not raid. get a second drive; you should be able to setup software raid
without their help, and for a mirror, there shouldn't be much performance
difference between software and hardware raid.

ECC ram is a larger problem, at least in my mind. having wrong data without
knowing it is about the worst thing possible. ECC at least has the courtesy to
crash my box when it gets an error it can't correct.

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ericd
Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror".

As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely
important for the main app that will be sitting on this box, so a cosmic ray
here or there isn't a big deal, but persistent unknown errors would be a
problem.

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lsc
if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not
unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have
you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots
of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written
gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that
point, on a new box.)

That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without
ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules
without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was
an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough
to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting
it back on the 'available box' queue.

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ericd
Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large
"available queue" of these things...

I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory
tests? :-)

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lsc
there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a
bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you.

At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the
pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I
worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and
very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles.

I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host
dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't
feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such
pricing.

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carl_
spam?

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ericd
Not meant to be, I just thought this was an unusually low price and was
considering biting. I posted it partly to share with everyone else here
running an internet business, partly to get a potential reality check from the
comments, and to see if anyone had disparaging things to say about
ServerBeach.

