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Are European hosting providers cheaper because they’re simpler, or because they’re European? I don’t see anything analogous for cheap dedicated servers in the U

Are European hosting providers cheaper because they’re simpler, or because they’re European? I don’t see anything analogous for cheap dedicated servers in the US market. Wages, consumer prices, real estate, etc. are all lower so it makes sense that French and German companies charge less than Amazon. Collocation can be a great deal at scale, but I don’t see a way to cheaply rent a handful of servers for substantially less than Amazon would charge. VPS providers maybe, but even the quintessential cheap American VPS (DigitalOcean) has a bunch of cloud features these days. The last big dedicated provide I know of was Softlayer, which is now $2100/mo for a 242GB and 56 core dedicated box under IBM Cloud. Amazon’s m5 is around the same capacity at $3700/mo.

fxtentacle 7y ago
I believe it's cheaper connectivity, due to the network monopoly in the US. For European hosting providers, traffic tends to be cheap or free. For Amazon, you'll pay through the nose for egress traffic. And when we tried to rent a Verizon 1gbit dedicated line to our Boston office, they quoted us $15k monthly. In Germany, we paid first €199 then €499 for a dedicated 1gbit fiber line from 1&1.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Even before network charges, though. An Amazon m5.12xlarge with a 1-year reservation is $1,075/mo, about the same as OVHCloud's top-end HG3 in the US at $975. Both are 28 cores / 56 vCPUs and 192GB RAM.
thaeli 7y ago
I have some servers at Wholesale Internet - they're located in Kansas City. Good counterpart to Hetzner or SoYouStart; with these low end dedicated hosts you end up being multi-provider to have geographically redundant datacenters anyway, but if you can build within those restrictions (often you can't have a private network so you're doing host to host VPN, for instance) it's a cheap way to get beefy servers and unmetered bandwidth. Wholesale lists with a transfer limit on their price page but on the server config page you can upgrade to an unmetered Gbit port. And the low end boxes have an unmetered 100mbit port already. My experience has been that they really don't mind you heavily using that bandwidth either.. did have a point a few years ago where they were bandwidth limited until more fiber could be turned up in their datacenters, but you're going to occasionally have that sort of thing with any single datacenter provider. All in all, I'm very satisfied with them for their specific niche of CONUS cheap dedicated servers. SoYouStart wins for use cases where being located in France or Canada is acceptable, largely because they have basic DDoS protection on their bandwidth and I host some game related servers - anything gaming related and you will get DDoS attacks semi-regularly. And game servers can't run behind CloudFlare which is my other go to for basic DDoS protection.

fxtentacle 7y ago

I believe it's cheaper connectivity, due to the network monopoly in the US. For European hosting providers, traffic tends to be cheap or free. For Amazon, you'll pay through the nose for egress traffic. And when we tried to rent a Verizon 1gbit dedicated line to our Boston office, they quoted us $15k monthly. In Germany, we paid first €199 then €499 for a dedicated 1gbit fiber line from 1&1.

closeparen 7y ago
Even before network charges, though. An Amazon m5.12xlarge with a 1-year reservation is $1,075/mo, about the same as OVHCloud's top-end HG3 in the US at $975. Both are 28 cores / 56 vCPUs and 192GB RAM.

thaeli 7y ago

I have some servers at Wholesale Internet - they're located in Kansas City. Good counterpart to Hetzner or SoYouStart; with these low end dedicated hosts you end up being multi-provider to have geographically redundant datacenters anyway, but if you can build within those restrictions (often you can't have a private network so you're doing host to host VPN, for instance) it's a cheap way to get beefy servers and unmetered bandwidth. Wholesale lists with a transfer limit on their price page but on the server config page you can upgrade to an unmetered Gbit port. And the low end boxes have an unmetered 100mbit port already. My experience has been that they really don't mind you heavily using that bandwidth either.. did have a point a few years ago where they were bandwidth limited until more fiber could be turned up in their datacenters, but you're going to occasionally have that sort of thing with any single datacenter provider. All in all, I'm very satisfied with them for their specific niche of CONUS cheap dedicated servers. SoYouStart wins for use cases where being located in France or Canada is acceptable, largely because they have basic DDoS protection on their bandwidth and I host some game related servers - anything gaming related and you will get DDoS attacks semi-regularly. And game servers can't run behind CloudFlare which is my other go to for basic DDoS protection.