

High RAM servers - why so expensive? - FiReaNG3L

A few years ago, I could understand why a 16GB server was 800$ per month - RAM was crazy expensive, and the 16GB server would be worth much money; it made financial sense to pay that much per month.<p>Nowadays, RAM is getting cheaper by the month. If you don't need ECC RAM, 16GB is stupidly cheap. Even if you do, it's not as expensive as it used to be.<p>So can anyone explain to me why servers with a lot of RAM are still &#62; 800$ per month? At that cost, I could pay for the whole server in ~ 2-3 months.<p>I understand that there management costs to the 800$ (replace hardware when it fails, data center related costs (power etc), pay for personel, etc) but it doesn't make sense - a 70$/mo 1GB server has the same requirements. Adding RAM to a box doesn't change anything in the equation, except the price of said RAM.<p>If someone knows of a business leasing dedicated servers with 8-16GB for a reasonable cost, please tell me!
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vaksel
Because someone who needs a 16GB server, can afford it. And this way the
company makes a ton of money for nothing.

But yeah its bullshit to ask for $400/month to upgrade 2GB to 16GB.

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anotherjesse
At Softlayer 16GB is $350/mo more than 2GB, _but_ they almost always have a
special double/double for the same price (double the HDDs and double the RAM).
So I just bought a 16GB server for userscripts.org for the 8GB price
($150/mo).

<http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html>

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bprater
I continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are
doing something right.

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tdavis
I've yet to find anything they're doing _wrong_. Honestly a truly amazing
hosting company.

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lsc
It's not quite as simple as just adding more ram to the single-socket box that
you get when you order a dedi with 1G ram.

see, ram gets more expensive the higher density you go, 2gb modules are pretty
cheap, 4gb modules are about twice as much per gigabyte, 8gb modules twice as
much again, per gigabyte. (It's slightly more complicated... quad-rank ram,
for instance, is basically a way of fitting more ram modules in the same
number of slots. Most motherboards don't support it, and those that do don't
support very many of them.)

If you can find a single-socket core2 or opteron board with more than 4 ram
slots, let me know. this puts an 8GB limit on economical single-socket boxes.

dual-socket boxes, on the other hand, I can get supermicro dual-socket opteron
boards with 16 ram slots.

Of course, you can get 1.9Ghz low-power quad-core opterons for around $256
each, so it's still not as expensive as people seem to think. I'm just saying
you can't just cram more ram into the box they use when you order a 1GB box.

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DenisM
If you are a hoster you must differentiate your offering and charge more to
some customers and less to others. Usually what they do is they add bigger
markup to things which are expensive to provide becuase it's the high-end
anyway, and smaller markup to the lower end where customers are more price-
sensitive.

Now, sometimes landscape changes and things that were expensive to procure
become cheap. Hosters however are stuck in the old model, and while they
realize that RAM costs nothing anymore there are not many different candidates
for price discrimination and the old thing still works, kind of.

In other words it's the same reason why Apple charges a lot of moeny for 4Gb
RAM config in Macbooks - gotta make the money.

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invisible
I would suggest if you need a dedicated server then you should just buy one
and find a cheap colo. I pay $200/month for a local company that has redundant
power and almost 0% downtime with great fiber.

They charge that much because there's a demand for it and people will pay.
Dedicated servers are a smaller market, so no one is eager to charge less than
X amount for renting a server.

However, 8GB-16GB of RAM is a lot and also makes the motherboard a lot more
expensive (and Windows slightly more if it's a Windows box, 64bit). If you can
put together your own machine it doesn't need to be super expensive.

~~~
vaksel
except they charge you for the processor on top of the cost for RAM.

Probably a business opportunity here, sell high RAM machines at a smaller
markup. You could probably sell a 96GB RAM server for half the cost, of what
others charge and still make a hefty profit

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tocomment
VPS hosting too! I'm still paying 20/mo for 360MB RAM just as I was almost two
years ago. What's the deal with that?

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tocomment
To clarify, the plan is 20/mo which include 360MB RAM. I'm just saying it's
odd the plan hasn't gone done in price in 2 years.

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tasaro
the price hasn't gone down in two years, but the resources have more than
tripled. . .

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tocomment
I think I signed up for 360MB two years ago at the same price. Have other
resources increased? Bandwidth? CPU?

Don't get the wrong idea, I love the service, and the prices are still very
competitive, it just seems strange in general that prices aren't falling
faster. My own VPS experience is the only concrete example I have so that's
why I mention it.

~~~
tasaro
2 years ago $19.95 got you 100MB RAM, 4GB disk, 50GB transfer and a slower
technology/CPU. Now you get 360/12/200 with Xen and SMP --
<http://tinyurl.com/7jvrx4>

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easp
A few things other people don't seem to be mentioning:

1\. RAM prices can be quite volatile, while hosting prices generally are not.
Hosts may have taken lower margins back when their RAM costs were higher that
they are now trying to recoup. At the very least, they aren't in a hurry to
cut prices right now because their costs could go back up again if the economy
picks up and RAM prices head upward.

2\. Hosting is basically a subscription business model. Subscriber acquisition
costs are balanced against total lifetime value of the average subscriber. A
host may take a lower margin, or even a loss, in the first stretch of a
hosting relationship and treat that as part of the SAC in anticipation of
their margins improve over time thanks to declining costs due Moore's law.

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mtw
typically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon
quad cores (7300 or 7400 series), or the equivalent AMDs. One 7400 processor
is sold from $1200, so just the cost of processors is $4800 for the web
hosting provider. Add to the accessories (which are not commodity), a 2U case
(or 4U), and you've got at minimum $8000 server apiece.

so yes, RAM is cheap, but RAM is just a fractional cost. at $8000, a web
hoster needs to compute in costs of stocks, loan costs, so $800/mo is a
reasonable price.

if you're really low on budget and need 16Gb (I guess it's for virtualization
?), look for "7310 hosting" in google, and then boost the RAM to 16Gb. You
should be able to find one at around $650

~~~
wmf
_typically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon
quad cores, or the equivalent AMDs._

That's a bad idea; you should probably run away from any host that wants to
sell you such an inefficient configuration. 16GB is 8 2GB DIMMs; putting that
in a 2-socket server is no problem. Even 16 2GB DIMMs should be no problem.

~~~
mtw
well yes, and no. i guess it depends on your needs and the applications you
run on the server. if you do virtualization, a 2 socket server should be ok. I
was thinking of HPC or datamining

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lsc
Most companies charge more because they can. the same reason why if you buy
the base dell you get a really good deal, but if you load up the dell with ram
you end up paying a lot more than if you bought the parts yourself. The idea
is that most businesses want to charge people with money more.

I'll rent you a 32GB server for $512/month, if you want. I'll have an extra
later today. dual quad-core opteron (1.9Ghz) with 32GB of registered ecc ddr2
and 2x1TB sata disks. It's one of those supermicro 1u twin dohickies. shoot me
an email and arrange things. lsc@prgmr.com I can arrange for a serial console
but no rebooter.

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grandalf
Take slicehost or S3. To give you more RAM means that someone else has to need
more CPU to make their virtualization strategy work. I think once Amazon got
enough volume it could begin offering high CPU and high RAM instances without
diminishing overall utilization efficiency.

But Amazon still charges quite a premium for high RAM.. probably b/c due to IO
rate limits low RAM also results in less CPU burn for many workloads than
would exist if there were plenty of memory available.

~~~
grandalf
correction: ec2...

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gravitycop
_Nowadays, RAM is getting cheaper by the month._

Not any more.

<http://news.google.com/news?q=dram+prices>

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timcederman
16GB of RAM is cheap to purchase if you're buying in 1GB or 2GB DIMMs, but try
and buy 4GB DIMMs and it starts getting really expensive.

eg, $50 for 2x2GB vs $250 for 1x4GB.

~~~
wmf
But a decent motherboard has 16 slots, so 32GB or less should be cheap; it
should only get expensive above that.

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quellhorst
You could lease servers from dell, then host them at a good colo. I have had
very good luck with <http://colo4dallas.com/>

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babul
If you can, why not buy your own servers and have it co-located. The hardware
often pays for itself after a few months compared to leasing.

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johnrob
I'd rather have 10 of the cheap boxes, at 70/mo, than one 16GB at 800/mo.

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bjclark
Which will work for some things, but not say, a database server that needs
16gigs of in memory tables.

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snewe
Rackspace 4gb --> 8gb = $100/month

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Raphael
I would guess they're cramming ever more people on to one box.

