We have 3 servers in the KS series:
KS-2G ATOM powered with 2G of RAM, 500GB, 100Mbps 2.99e/mois.
KS-4G 4GB of RAM, 2x500GB software raid 9.99e/mois
KS-16G Core i5 with 16G, VT and 2x1TB 19.99e/mois
Even if it can't do serious web hosting of any kind, that's 500GB of storage for $4/month. Great solution for offsite backups, bearing in mind of course that there's no redundancy.
Pretty certain, like most hosts, they won't allow the storage to be used for remote backups. The 500GB is usually only for data/files being served/processed by the server.
I've been using a 1TB one for over a year as a backup, nothing was against this in the contract. Mind you, there's a 5TB per month traffic cap, after which the bandwidth is limited from 100Mbps down to 10Mbps.
The other responses to this have been woefully speculative at best, plain wrong in others. The short answer is to rent one for a month and benchmark your particular application.
I was surprised to discover that with a workload composed entirely of XML parsing using Python+lxml, an OVH 1.8ghz Atom N2800 beat hands down my mid-2010 2.4ghz Macbook Pro. This isn't a crazy result either. For instance, while the Macbook is equipped with dual cores, each core supports only one hardware thread, and thus is blocked while waiting to complete a load from RAM (a common occurrence when dealing with giant cache-unfriendly DOM trees that don't benefit from the Core 2's much increased L2).
In contrast the N2800 has 2 cores with 2 hardware threads each (hyperthreading), so each core can progress while its buddy thread is stalled. In my particular workload this was enough to beat by a significant margin a much faster, expensive and power-hungry processor.
Core2s have significantly better memory bandwidth, because they're dual-channel. They stream memory significantly more efficiently than N2800 Atoms. When a Core2 Duo has a memory stall, it can start executing other instructions out of order to compensate. Typically, out-of-order cores seem to do more for efficiency than hyperthreading.
If Apple screwed up by only giving a single DIMM (it happens on lower-end hardware, but I'd be pissed if I learned that an expensive Macbook were improperly configured memory-wise)... maybe the Atom would have a chance. But a properly-configured dual-channel RAM Core2 Duo, as old as it is, still would stream data faster from RAM than an Atom could. Almost twice as fast in fact.
If the N2800 does perform better on this workload, I'd be definitely interested in seeing the exact numbers... if you don't mind.
I actually do own a Hyperthreaded Atom (N570) and Core2 Duo (some old crap desktop version) myself. So... I'd be able to repeat the experiment :-p
All the bandwidth in the world shouldn't matter if the underlying technology has the same latency and the memory bus is serving a fixed number of small requests in parallel, right? Overall processing speed in an uncached memory bound application is limited by the latency of the storage tech (somewhere around 10 million "requests"/sec assuming 100ns access time, and assuming the app did absolutely nothing except randomly access memory).
In my case I had 1 software thread per thread, I'm not sure if over-subscription would make any difference. Also, out of ordering processing is only possible in the absence of data dependencies (I have no idea how to even go about measuring this). Also tree structures are no different to random walks from the hardware's perspective, i.e. the hardware has no useful predictive ability to prefetch data in this case.
The main point was that it's so cheap to test, there's little value in speculating about architecture specifics few are qualified to understand, assuming they're publicly documented in the first place
Fair enough. But given my experience with Atoms... the potential of hitting CPU bottlenecks is definitely higher on Atoms than on other computers. The significantly smaller cache and lower clock certainly don't help either.
You're right in that its extremely easy to test, even to buy yourself an atom at home. Netbooks are regularly under $300, Clovertrail Atom Tablets are ~$400. Older Atom 330-based Netbooks are probably even cheaper. Its not like you're trying to test out the performance of a 64-core Quad Opteron or something.
And of course, the ability to just rent one for 3 months at a time from Kimsufi for less than $20 is always available.
The Atom is Intel's weakest chip. It is designed for super-low power consumption, which means that they cost very little money to run. (so usually, data-centers like running them, because they don't use much electricity. Naturally, the savings are typically passed onto the consumer).
The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad. It is still fully x86 compatible, its just slow. Roughly... the speed of a Pentium 4 or so.
Current generation Atoms are 32-bit only, which means 4GB maximum RAM (not an issue for smaller webservers with only 2GB).
Atoms tend to be best for I/O limited tasks. If you do video streaming for instance, the vast majority of your CPU power is going to be "wasted" on waiting for the Hard Drives and the Network. So the Atom makes a good, cheap CPU for that kind of task.
For tasks with tons of computations, (ie: game servers), the Atom is woefully inadequate.
> The Atom is Intel's line of chips designed to compete against the iPad
The Atom came out in 2008, two years before the iPad, and come from a lineage started in 2003. It was designed for the now dead netbook category that required low power consumption.
64-bit versions have been available since 2010, both versions used by OVH are x86-64. There are also server-specific versions with support for ECC memory, though they doesn't seem to be using them.
iPad's CPU/GPU uses ~5W of power. These Atoms use ~8W of power.
Regardless of the 'ordering', the Atom line of processors are designed for the <10W form factor. True, Atoms existed before the iPad, but they are in fact designed to compete in that power-range. The analogy works very well: the iPad 4th generation A6x processor is just slightly slower than the newest Clovertrail Atoms. The older Atoms (like the 330) probably are a bit slower than an iPad.
So yes, perhaps I misspoke earlier. Nonetheless, I stand behind the analogy. Intel Atoms are Intel's version of the iPad A6x. They use roughly the same power and give roughly the same performance... but Atoms give you full x86 compatibility.
Perhaps a more appropriate way to say it... is that the Atom is designed to be a competitor to low-power ARM chips in general. Intel is making strides in making extremely slow, but power efficient chips. And in Performance/Watt, they're roughly on the same scale.
Yes, meaning they were made to compete with ARM makes more sense, not the ipad (non-existent att) specifically. It was Intel's bet on mobile. The cortex processors used in the iOS line have only caught up recently regarding performance.
The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks. That was seen as the probable breakout market, though it was short-lived.
So Intel wanted a fairly power efficient chip, but they also wanted to ensure that it didn't cannibalize their own sales, so they intentionally crippled it from a performance perspective, not least by always building it on the last or second-last process. This is an aspect of the Atom that is missed by so many, sure that Intel was caught with their pants down by ARM: Intel's biggest fear wasn't ARM, but that their pricey high-end CPUs would get replaced by their low cost variants. They still fight with this paranoia to this day.
The Atom was neither inspired by the iPad (obviously given that it far preceded it) or even ARM. At best you could say Intel had some concern about Transmeta, leading to some of the early Atom work.
This isn't a minor error of "ordering". These were critical mistakes in your retelling of history.
I'm well aware of that fact, and I am also aware of the fact that BayTrail Atoms are correcting this mistake. (Finally, 22nm Atoms for realz this time.)
I have admitted my mistake with an addendum, although I cannot edit my earlier post anymore. What more do you want?
> The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks.
This is incorrect. The Atom CPU was initially meant for smartphones, but the first models way overshooted the available power envelope. Netbooks were created by Asus when Intel offered a lot of cheap, slow chips for sale that were good for little else, and they created a new, shortlived segment. No-one at Intel thought about netbooks when designing Atom.
Didn't we already cover this? It is revisionist fiction, built around the notion that Intel was so outclassed by ARM, when really Intel was just short-sighted about how important smartphones would become.
The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor (I have a little file server running a dual-core Atom, the processor being air cooled while the chipset has a fan. As a humorous aside, altogether that micro-PC uses about the same power as my new i7 Mac Mini under standard loads), b) completely built for traditional PC uses. Do you need IDE on your smartphone, for instance? How about an A20 line?
The "glut of inventory" notion is not realistic. It doesn't work that way.
Intel had no intentions in the smartphone industry at the time. If they did, not only would they have actually made a decent chipset (they happen to be the most advanced chipmaker in the world, with the world's best fabs), they would have made a prototype (which is what all manufacturers do when they try to enter a market - a proof of concept). There were absolutely none until later Atom variants.
People forget it now, but it was initiatives like One Laptop Per Child that initiated the netbook craze -- that program talking about ultra-inexpensive laptops, leading to a lot of people saying "You know...I too would like an inexpensive laptop that I could just bang around and leave in the car and..." (Slashdot was full of people trying to repurpose such devices), and with that an industry was born.
Yup, OLPC was what "woke up" Intel, making them begin to build Atoms. Frankly, Intel had the foresight to start the Atom project to hedge their bets a little bit.
They never "really" tried to compete in the smartphone market (which is ~2W), the Atom was instead always targeted at ~10W. (IIRC, Intel's real focus at that time were Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage, CULV processors at the 18W envelope. Today... known as Ultrabooks). However, as Smartphones became the next hot thing, it is now obvious that Intel has to scale the Atom down even further. And unfortunately, the netbook market imploded.
Its not all wasted however, IMO, netbooks "became" tablets. From a CPU perspective, there is little difference between Netbooks and Tablets. You want low-power consumption between 5W to 10W, and lower costs. In fact, as netbooks were "dying out", they slowly became tablets. See AsusTab Smart for example, it basically is a Netbook without a keyboard, but built with a touchscreen. (same price range as Netbooks of old, but just in tablet form).
Anyway, Intel hasn't forgotten the Smartphone market either. Thus the Atoms that worked closer to the 2W SoC benchmark... Medfield, Clovertrail, and soon to be Bay Trail Atoms. Clovertrail is winning a few benchmarks here and there, and Bay Trail will be built on Intel's latest process for once. So it looks like Intel is finally taking the smartphone market seriously. But only the last generation or so are actual attempts at a Smartphone chip... and even then, there isn't a single Atom out there that is built on Intel's latest 22nm process. That will only come from the future Bay Trail Atoms.
> The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor
To add some numbers:
The most popular first generation Atom, the N270, had a TDP of 2.5 W. The accompanying chipset and I/O controllers however had a combined TDP of 9.3 W.
Some lines of Atoms since mid-2010 or so have supported x86_64. The Sxxxx "server" atoms released at the end of 2012 are all 64-bit-enabled, for example, although they can still only take 8GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/products/series/71265
I agree that this is mainly interesting if you're I/O-limited. Most benchmarks show a "regular" recent-gen Intel CPU performing around 5x-10x the Atom, so if you're CPU-limited, even a low-end VPS that gives you an average of 1/4 share of a core will probably outperform sole tenancy on an Atom core. But a high-contention VPS in most cases will give you much worse I/O performance. Also, the storage space and bandwidth quota here are much better than with a comparably priced VPS.
Thanks for pointing that out. It seems odd to me that a system that only supports single-channel DDR2 RAM would be 64-bit however. With so little RAM, the benefits of 64-bit computing are basically void.
Yeah, that's an issue with conservative garbage collectors. When memory actually in use is a large fraction of the address space, then random values can look like pointers too often. When valid_memory << address_space, on the other hand, most non-pointer values won't alias a valid pointer.
The specific issue with Go was significantly mitigated in Go 1.1 by making much more of the GC precise rather than conservative. Here's a comment from about a month ago on the current state: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909#c59
If you web application could run ok (for the number of visitors) in a netbook with mechanical disk, then an Atom is ok.
Note that I've seen people running gnome on a netbook.
Still, I see this, and I think more about: "backups", "configuration management", "shell access", "VPN to other more powerful dedicated servers in OVH", "personal storage", "scheduled tasks", "monitoring systems", "status pages", etc...
The price is nothing, I still ask myself if it's rentable because "it's an Atom" and changes the power bill, or this is more a unprofitable product to attract you to other products.
Lets say 3€ * 12m = 36€ year, It takes some years to recover the hardware costs (without count electricity bills, company salaries, connectivity, taxes, etc).
> The price is nothing, I still ask myself if it's rentable because "it's an Atom" and changes the power bill, or this is more a unprofitable product to attract you to other products.
pretty sure it's the latter. Even if there is minimal human effort on part of OVH involved that probably leads to unprofitability. For example a RAM stick breaks and has to be switched out, I guess it takes a systems engineer in the NOC at least 30 minutes to locate the server, disconnect it, replace the stick, mount the server again, make sure it is running fine. Assuming that employee get's paid 20 GBP, that is a 10 pound cost plus replacement RAM which is...I dont know...let's say 20 GBP, recouping that kind of money would take about a year (I know very dirty napkin calculations).
I bet they have a handful of these gimmick servers and they are going to sell out very soon. Comparable to the Raspberry Pi colocation edis offers ( http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ ) try to order and you will find that they are sold out.
>For example a RAM stick breaks and has to be switched out, I guess it takes a systems engineer in the NOC at least 30 minutes to locate the server, disconnect it, replace the stick, mount the server
These servers run without cases, using water cooling. Hardware failure automatically notifies the NOC with the location of the failed hardware and replacement parts are already waiting on the desk.
>handful of these gimmick servers
OVH is one of the largest ISPs in the world, and is well known for disruptive pricing and services, such as 100/100 Mbps broadband to the home for $20/month.
Don't get me wrong, this is an awesome offer but because I believe that these may be not available for a long time I am currently in the check out process, ordering one of these for a year even though I don't have an immediate use.
Edit: Order placed, eagerly awaiting my Isgenug (that is what they are called for the German market) :)
The reason this works is because only a few would face hardware issues, so while there would be a few unprofitable accounts as a result of hardware issues, the majority would be just fine. It's the same reason stores accept returns and don't go broke because of it; only a few customers actually return a purchase.
The Atom range are intended to be low power draw CPUs for use in things like netbooks and server environments where I/O and bandwidth are going to be the bottleneck not CPU.
As such their suitability depends greatly on your particular application.
They aren't so good for high concurrency for instance, but if you are using a mainly event driven server where concurrency isn't a massive issue you'll not notice that limitation.
At this price, the most cost effective option is going to be to rant one for a month or few and give it a try. In fact at that price if the machine works for you it is an absolute bargain, you could pay more for a much smaller VPS where you are competing with others for I/O bandwidth. I have a machine at OVH currently for a few bits and bobs - for my use pattern I might be better off cancelling it and getting a few of these instead for the same price.
But I bet nginx could still crank out static files from them.
Translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...
3 euros is $4 USD and 20 euros is $26.50 USDThey are also on the UK site:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml
That $26.50 server is currently $40 in the US (CA)
http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/kimsufi2.xml
The real deal here IMHO is the i5 for $26.50, that cpu can run laps around the atom and can run in "turbo" mode near 3.5ghz all day.