

Ask YC: Recommendations on a good server? - iamdave

I'm in the purchasing phase of my startup where I'm looking for equipment.  Most people are saying to just rent space, but I very much like the flexibility and freedom of operating my own server.  Financially, I can support the move by leaps and bounds because of my connections with certain people at a local ISP.  Plus, I think it'd be great to have an extra server to test products on, roll out some sort of virtualization options and let the other hackers conduct experiments on before we go live.<p>My question is: who do you recommend for purchasing a good server machine?
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patrickg-zill
If you are colocating the box, I recommend either HP servers with iLO or Sun
machines like the v20z or x2100 etc. that have a nice Lights Out Management
(LOM) feature.

With either the HP or Sun systems you can even do virtual media, where you
boot the remote system off an ISO image or a CD/DVD disk stored on your laptop
or desktop system,

It will save you a huge amount of time and effort the first time you are miles
away from the machine and there is some kind of issue that you need to
diagnose.

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SwellJoe
I'll concur on Sun. Their hardware has come down a lot, and it is _nice_.

I dunno HP gear too well. I've dealt with a lot of Dell systems, and they
aren't bad at all. Get the remote console card, and you'll be pretty well set
for emergency problem solving.

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yourabi
I would go for Sun servers. Sign up for the Sun Startup Essential program and
get a certain percent off (40%) some hardware.

But really. Use Amazon AWS. Buying hardware is very 1999

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babul
The nice thing about AWS is it takes away many of the hassles of scaling up
quickly and headaches of hardware failure, but it is actually cheaper to own
and run your own server for a early stage startup as hardware costs are
generally covered in the first year (there are many comparisons, Google it).

Plus if you have a good relationship with an ISP (free/low-cost hosting and
bandwidth), I would go with that.

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ezmobius
get supermicro hardware. siliconmechanics.com is a pretty good provider of
pre-assembled supermicro hardware. We use supermicro servers for all of our
clusters at engineyard.com

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comatose_kid
I'll add to the supermicro recommendation - I bought from ASA Computers and
was happy with the service.

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danielrhodes
If you want to keep costs cheap, I would recommend not buying a new one and
instead looking around for a bankruptcy auction. I managed to get 3 pretty
decent servers for $400/ea. from a startup that was going out of business.

Other than that, I recommend HP. Dell is cheaper, but you get what you pay
for, especially if you are managing it remotely.

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SwellJoe
I'd recommend you not buy your hardware, and instead let someone else be your
hardware guy--the competition is so fierce in the hosting industry, and they
buy in such huge quantities, that you can't come out cheaper (even if nothing
ever goes wrong with your system). But, if you've got some bandwidth fairy
looking out for you, and colo is pretty much free, then I guess you can't
resist.

But nobody else should be going into the hardware business, if you're building
a software company. Seriously.

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anotherjesse
seriously recommend using serverbeach or softlayer - userscripts.org gets 4M
pageviews/mo (including RSS and bots I get 50K dynamic req/hour) on a $200 box
from serverbeach.

softlayer is like serverbeach but a little more expensive. they are more
automated though - so if you expect to add more hardware, it only a few hours
for new boxes to come online.

that said, they are both monthly and have setup fees (not horribly expensive
but not like AWS where you can get a server for a few hours)

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SwellJoe
We've got boxes at both, and are happy. We also have boxes at theplanet.com.
Also happy there.

SoftLayer occasionally has stupidly good deals, if you watch out for them.
Usually on bigger hardware, though, so if you're looking for sub-$100 it's not
the place. But on really big boxes, they have some incredible deals. We rented
a quad core, 4GB RAM box, with 2x250GB drives for under $200/month just a
couple of months ago.

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sunkencity
I've gone with dell servers, which are sort of fine (cheap at least), but I
guess HP with ILO is way better. The Dell lights out management is overpriced
and crappier. One way or another is's very nice if you later can add exactly
similar machines to take any Linux hardware surprises put of the way (if
that's what you're running).

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bluelu
If you can run your server in Europe, I would recommend hetzner.de. At least
twice as cheap as the amazon web service.

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kashif
You may be better able to apply that money - don't buy the server just for
kicks.

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comforteagle
Seriously, call serverbeach or get an AWS account.

