

Low End Dedicated Servers - jacquesm
http://www.lowenddedi.net/

======
timdorr
I find this a bit confusing. I run a hosting company myself (unbelievably
shameless plug: <http://asmallorange.com> ) and the overhead in maintaining
smaller and underpowered servers is relatively massive. On top of the
financial aspect, there's also the matter of reliability and performance. Why
run your stuff on inadequate, antiquated hardware?

If you're looking at this end of the spectrum, just go with a VPS/Cloud
system. You'll be paying about the same amount, maybe less. And you get
drastically improved reliability if your provider is using failover and isn't
using crap hardware.

Basically, would you rather take a business class seat on a jet or charter a
50 year old plane being piloted by a drunk hobo to fly somewhere?

~~~
lsc
eh, sounds like this guy is selling atom boards, which are relatively modern.
Now, they don't use ECC ram (and I fail to understand why he doesn't throw in
2GiB ram rather than one; if he put int 2GiB, he'd be competitive with my 2GiB
VPSs.) and they are slow, cheap hardware, but speaking as someone who sells
VPSs for a living, for some things, having a box to yourself is much better
than a vps, even if the cost per performance is higher.

Now, my experience with the atoms (and why I'm not selling 'em) is that they
use more power than you expect; 50w each or so, down from 75w each for a
core2duo with 8GiB ram. So I'm guessing this person is also in a region where
power is cheaper than it is for me. (I am in the SF bay area, and thus I pay
enough for power that margins on a power-hungry atom system would be rather
small.)

You can get the operations overhead per machine down with a good
pxeboot/automated provisioning system. some larger places I've worked,
provisioning 5,000 machines was a relaxed afternoon of work. Yeah, physical
servers are a bit more work than virtuals, but they don't have to be that much
more work, if you have a good system.

That said, getting a VPS on modern dual-socket 8 or 12 core boxes with ecc ram
usually gives you more bang for your buck, if the security tradeoffs are worth
it.

~~~
eleitl
> Now, they don't use ECC ram

Right, which is why I wouldn't use them for production, other than firewall.
I've just oredered a
[http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-H.cfm?typ=H)
kit for 199 EUR sans VAT, add about 35 EUR for 2 GByte Kingston ValueRAM, a
port riser for 10 EUR and a dual-port Intel NIC (e.g. E1G42ETBLK) for about
100 EUR, a little flash DoM with pfSense and you've got a nice firewall.

~~~
lsc
why are you okay with non-ecc in your firewall? not all traffic is
checksummed, corrupted packets are bad as anything.

~~~
eleitl
It's a question of price and low power. I'm currently running two mini-ITX C3
systems in parallel, which don't have ECC either.

I'm hoping most of the traffic will just remain on the Intel NIC (I'm running
a transparent bridge), which is server-grade, so it will itself be not a
source of corruption. The rest will be caught by checksums, hopefully.

------
blhack
Has anybody here ever heard of/used joe's datacenter?
<http://www.joesdatacenter.com/dedicated_server.php>

They offer some insanely cheap servers, which makes me pretty skeptical. Does
anyone know anything about them?

(I'm not affiliated with joes DC, but thinking about switching from slicehost)

~~~
eleitl
> They offer some insanely cheap servers

I've looked at their prices, and I wouldn't call them insanely cheap. I'm with
Hetzner (both rented and an empty rack with own hardware) and the prices are
about the same.

------
JeremyChase
An unmentioned benefit of a dedicated server is that you aren't forced to use
Linux. Many support FreeBSD, and a few will allow you to run anything you can
install; OpenBSD, NetBSD, x86 Solaris, or even Windows.

~~~
lamnk
AFAIK you can run FreeBSD and of course Windows on KVM

The only requirement is your CPU's full virtualization support. A lot of CPU
recently are capaple of hardware virtualization, except low end processors.

~~~
lsc
you can under HVM mode in xen, too. Full virtualization, though, in it's
current state, is inferior to paravirtualization. Significantly so. This may
change as hardware advances, but right now, you are much better off going with
something that can run paravirtualized.

~~~
lamnk
_Full virtualization, though, in it's current state, is inferior to
paravirtualization_

Do you have benchmarks to back it up ? Is performance the reason to choose Xen
over KVM and other virtualization technologies for your hosting company ?

Some benchmarks after quick google:

<http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/XenVsKVM>

~~~
lsc
reliability even more than performance. KVM was not even close to production
ready in '05. HVM mode under xen was also crap. I expect 3 year uptime;
running some 'qemu with hardware support' (which really is what both xen hvm
and quemu are) just could not deliver that at the time.

Also emulated devices leave a much larger attack surface from the domU -> dom0
host.

I am sure that KVM has improved a whole lot in the last few years, but most of
the people using it seem to be using it for 'primarily use box as hardware,
spin up a virtual to test something' (this, I think, is why the kernel guys
like it so much... that is what they need, and KVM is _much_ better than Xen
if that is your use case.) I really need a 'dedicated virtualization server' -
the hardware only exists to service virtuals.

If I had some time, I'd do some benchmarks; I'd be interested to see what the
backends the kernelnewbies bench uses... for example using tap: or phy: is
sometimes an order of magnitude less bad than using file:// (of course,
sometimes you get caching going in the dom0, and file:/ looks faster, but it's
still a really bad idea.)

I did start with FreeBSD jails, but switched to xen after I found just what a
bad idea sharing pagecache is.

------
BrandonM
It doesn't really make sense to me to pay more than $50 a month for something
like this. For under $120 you can get an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ (2.2 GHz dual
core) and a solid matching motherboard on Newegg. Throw in some old hard
drives RAIDed together (I personally had about 2 TB laying around that I RAID
1+0'd together) and you have a server that will fill all of your needs WAY
into the future. Once your service starts catching on and you need better than
95% uptime, convert your residential cable Internet service (what, like $40/mo
or so?) into a $100 (?) business line (better upload speed and reliability),
and you are good to go.

With hardware and bandwidth being so cheap these days, why are we still so
hung up on VPS solutions? Personally-hosted solutions are much more manageable
and the costs are quite similar.

~~~
lamnk
Bandwidth is only cheap if you commit to buy large amount of traffic, like a
10Gb uplink. It's still expensive from single server level.

Take a look at EC2, i think income from bandwidth charge is the main source of
profit. The base price of an instance only covers electricity, maintaince and
initial hardware cost IMO.

~~~
patrickgzill
What do you consider cheap for bandwidth?

Is $3.99 per mbps with a minimum commit of 10Mbps expensive? A 10Mbps would
give you approximately 1250GB of traffic in a real-world scenario. See:
<http://uberbandwidth.com/pricing.asp>

~~~
lamnk
_What do you consider cheap for bandwidth?_

Depend on servers usage. $399 per month for a 100mpbs line is not expensive if
you have for example a streaming server. But my sites consum about 1TB a month
in total, so why pay for more when my need is only 5Mpbs ? (10Mbps gives you
3TB up and 3TB down if it's full duplex)

As technology advances bandwidth price will definitely go down. My point is
that as of now bandwidth cost still represents a significant share of a
server's total cost. 100Mpbs becomes cheap when you have a bunch of servers,
like 15+. That's why low end dedicated servers and VPSs still have a market,
hosting companies can buy wholesale bandwidth/hardware for cheap and then
resell, though the margin is not that good.

------
fendale
Some of these servers seem very cheap when compared to Linode or Slicehost ...
I wonder what the catch is? Not so good support? Response to failure?

Eg picking one at random - celeron processor, 2GB ram, 500GB disk - 25 euro a
month. Or with the same provider goto 4GB Ram and Quad Core for 40 euro.

~~~
mdasen
EDIT: it turns out that the OVH deal isn't so wonderful. That's if you commit
to a term. The month to month price is more expensive than advertised.

First, Slicehost hasn't changed their prices since they opened up shop over
three years ago. Hardware costs have come down a lot since then so their
margins are growing fat.

Second, that provider that you mentioned happens to be the best deal on the
list.

Third, if you read their information on it, you see things like "Unusable due
to very high and unpredictable storage access latency." Specifically stating
that latency "sits at around 90ms." and that peak speed is 8MB/sec. That's one
of the OVH offerings. The one you specifically mention seems sketchy: they
will only sell to you if you have a mailing address within their area. So, no
US sales at all and if you live outside of Ireland, you have to use their site
for your country. Odd at best.

Fourth, Slicehost has RAID to protect from hardware failure and these servers
usually just have one drive which means a hardware failure means restoring
from a backup with downtime.

Fifth, OpenVZ isn't the same as a Xen host and, apparently, can easily be
oversold ala shared hosting. Many of the good deals there are OpenVZ VPSs.

Most of the others aren't such amazing deals. A 768MB server with a Celeron
for $40 isn't such a bargain today. I mean, clearly it's a good deal, but not
amazing when compared to what's out there in the VPS space. And they do link
to lowendbox.com which has VPSs cheaper than Slicehost/Linode. And just like
this site, those VPS providers aren't the cream of the crop like Slicehost and
Linode.

\--

Really, there are VPS providers that are nice and cheap now-a-days. I'm
currently using ChunkHost which has a free beta program for a 512MB VPS which
costs $19 (about half the price of Slicehost and $37 for 1GB and $66 for 2GB).
I'm sure there are more that I don't have experience with. Slicehost is now
the Rackspace of VPSs (literally) and charges prices accordingly. It isn't a
terrible deal.

It'll be hard for low-end dedicated servers to compete with VPSs because of
the cost of rackspace and power. I mean, if you have a 5 year old Pentium 4
box that you want to repurpose as a server (and a lot of low-end dedicated
hosts used to do this with desktop hardware), you're talking about using 150
watts or more and 4U of rackspace for one customer. Compare that to getting a
SuperMicro twin 1U and putting 2 quad core 32GB servers in 1U and yes,
probably using more power, but not 64x more power - probably in the range of
5x more power - and you can see how it just can't compete.

I mean, now you have at least 10 servers in 1U using half the power and 1/40th
the space. At best, you now have 64 servers each using less than a tenth the
power and 1/256th the space.

Really, the site even says it: "So why on earth would a person want such a
crappy dedicated server? In most cases you don't - go get a Virtual Private
Server instead." There are a few reasons to get a dedicated box which they
note, but not a ton.

\--

On the high-end dedicated side, dedicated boxes still look pretty good because
VPS providers want high margins. SoftLayer will sell me a box loaded with RAM
and bandwidth for a lot cheaper than most VPS providers will. But that's on
the high end. And there's little reason for VPS providers to want larger
clients. Why would you give a volume discount? If 16 people are willing to pay
$40/mo for 512MB, why sell 8GB for less than $320/mo? Clearly there are some
billing efficiencies and support efficiencies to justify a slightly lower
price, but RAM is RAM and doesn't cost less if you slice it up less.

So, that's the real position for dedicated boxes in this economy: when you're
going to be using the majority of a VPS box. Otherwise, the power and space
efficiencies of VPSs usually win out.

~~~
fendale
Great reply ... I had a look at Chunkhost, but it looks like they are in beta
only right now, and I am not in the USA :-(

Looks slightly better value than Linode - a bit more generous on the RAM and
disk side.

------
boundlessdreamz
I use hetzner.de and they have been awesome.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix/Produktmatrix)

~~~
anApple
We too.

It's really cheap (but only on the price! :-)

And the advertised prices have 19% sales tax included, so it's even cheaper
for companies :-)

~~~
eleitl
We three.

They used to have a killer of a deal (empty 19" rack for 99 EUR/month,
inclusive 19% VAT) they unfortunately no longer offer.

------
jeromec
I love how technology costs always come down over time. Server4You has $39 USD
actual dedicated with .75 RAM - not bad. Although, I always shy away from AMD
processors, maybe because of the horribly slow experience I had on a friend's
Gateway computer back in the day. Is this just me?

~~~
fnid
I've seen good performance from AMD. I'd blame performance on gateway before
i'd blame it on AMD.

