5 ms·

I don't get it, what about renting dedicated servers at a company like iweb or softlayer? much cheaper than colocation for startups, you don't have to worry abo

by mtw 16y ago

I don't get it, what about renting dedicated servers at a company like iweb or softlayer? much cheaper than colocation for startups, you don't have to worry about networking and hardware. and also much cheaper than cloud hosting. (of course, it doesn't give you all the fancy features of cloud hosting such as flexible pricing and automated provisioning)

squanderingtime 16y ago
It was more of a comparison of the two extreme ends of the spectrum. Total hardware control vs. no hardware control. You're absolutely right that companies like iweb and softlayer offer great intermediate approaches. Personally, I have some great experience with softlayer but didn't want to make the article that long by including a third option/analysis :-). Even still though, comparable hardware on softlayer's pricing looks like it's about $659/month. After 3 months it approaches a similar (but not identical) cost to the colo option.
lsc 16y ago
are dedicated servers that much cheaper than 'cloud'? last time I looked they were fairly comparable. genuinely interested; I'm considering getting in to the 'instant provisioned dedicated server' market myself; there's no technical reason why dedicated servers need to take more than, oh, about sixty seconds longer than a virtual server to set up.
- squanderingtime 16y ago
  It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. If you only need a resource for a day, then relatively speaking, it's cheaper. However, if you pay the rental fee every day for a year, it gets more and more expensive than an outright purchase. The comparison largely depends on the time scale you look at. The main reasons I'm aware of that provisioning dedicated servers take longer is because you have to deal with data center logistics. Which rack does it go in? Which VLANs does it need to be in? What bandwidth is the customer paying for and how will we route the uplink? If the customer has other machines can we put these new ones in the same rack without overloading the PDU? There's a lot of hidden work that goes into data center management.
  - lsc 16y ago
    >It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. Sorry, I guess i wasn't clear. I meant renting a dedicated server, which I thought was comparable in cost to 'the cloud' - buying, of course, is more expensive in the short term and cheaper in the long term. Personally, I think a /whole lot/ of the pain of owning (small amounts) of hardware is that most of the co-location vendors spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 'extract maximum value' (meaning, they fuck around on getting you a price, trying to get the max value you will accept.) I'm considering getting back in to the co-location business[1] in part because of this, and in part because it would let me scale to the point that it would help amortize out all the time I have to spend negotiating. Man, I just spent three hours today talking to the owner of my data center, and he /still/ didn't give me a price. "tell me what you get from the other guy" - I mean, he's a nice guy, and I didn't really mind hanging out with him, I probably even got a little bit of useful information, but three hours of two guys, both whom can probably bill out at $100+/hr, and we still didn't arrive on a price for an operation as small as mine? (approx. 150a of 120v power and accompanying rackspace; 5 cabnets or so. This didn't even include bandwidth.) [1]http://prgmr.com/colocation.html http://prgmr.com/colocation.html
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- mtw 16y ago
  dedicated servers are always cheaper (at least 2x or 3x cheaper in iWeb's case) but they will bill you monthly, there's no option to bill per hour which is popular in cloud hosting. Also one problem is they are hard to scale up or down programmatically I think best option is to have 80% of your infrastructure at iweb or softlayer and plan to have 20% in scalable cloud hosting for peak traffics btw they all use the same software in backend (Xen or other virtualization technology), it's just the middleware and billing that makes them different for end users like you.
- benologist 16y ago
  Dedicateds give huge bang for your buck - we have a pair at Hivelocity.net. One's got dual xeons w/ 12gb of ram and 4x500gb in raid 10 for like $320 a month, which works out to 42 cents an hour. The other's a single xeon w/ 8gb of ram and 2x500gb raid 1 for $160 which works out to 22 cents an hour. Both come with 10tb of bandwidth a month and are exclusively used by us, nobody is messing with our disk io or anything else. I don't know how they compare with AWS' compute units etc but if you have an ongoing need for the hardware and you're going to be paying those hourly fees (and all the others) every day of every month then I suspect it's going to be a lot cheaper than AWS.
  - lsb 16y ago
    For 17GB of RAM and two 3.25GHz xeons and 400GB local storage, it's 18c/hr for a spot instance. Make your make payment $1/hr and you're set. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
    - benologist 16y ago
      During times when there's competition for spot instances that's going to be more money for less ram, less cpu, shitty disk IO (esp vs. our blazing raid10), and no included bandwidth. And at any time we might not be bidding enough to actually keep them...
    - ericd 16y ago
      I'm not seeing this? The only thing with 17 gigs that I see is the High Mem xtra large, and that's 0.50/hour. The xeons he's talking about are quad core, each, for a total of 8, vs. 2 cores of 3.25 ECU each for the high mem xtras.
      - vetman35 16y ago
        "SPOT INSTANCE" is $0.2460 per hour right now. "ON DEMAND" is $0.50 per hour. Login to your AWS Management Console to see the current SPOT INSTANCE price.
ktsmith 16y ago
If you need a lot of memory or disk space dedicated servers are not any cheaper, and often more expensive than cloud solutions. Hivelocity seems to be the only one with reasonably priced large memory dedicated servers, but they have a single facility in Tampa Florida as far as I'm aware which might be a problem for some businesses. If you need a lot of memory and disk space colocation usually has the best bang for the buck but you are also losing the ability to have new servers brought on quickly which can be a huge issue if you have a failure.

by mtw 16y ago

squanderingtime 16y ago

It was more of a comparison of the two extreme ends of the spectrum. Total hardware control vs. no hardware control. You're absolutely right that companies like iweb and softlayer offer great intermediate approaches. Personally, I have some great experience with softlayer but didn't want to make the article that long by including a third option/analysis :-). Even still though, comparable hardware on softlayer's pricing looks like it's about $659/month. After 3 months it approaches a similar (but not identical) cost to the colo option.

lsc 16y ago

are dedicated servers that much cheaper than 'cloud'? last time I looked they were fairly comparable. genuinely interested; I'm considering getting in to the 'instant provisioned dedicated server' market myself; there's no technical reason why dedicated servers need to take more than, oh, about sixty seconds longer than a virtual server to set up.

squanderingtime 16y ago
It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. If you only need a resource for a day, then relatively speaking, it's cheaper. However, if you pay the rental fee every day for a year, it gets more and more expensive than an outright purchase. The comparison largely depends on the time scale you look at. The main reasons I'm aware of that provisioning dedicated servers take longer is because you have to deal with data center logistics. Which rack does it go in? Which VLANs does it need to be in? What bandwidth is the customer paying for and how will we route the uplink? If the customer has other machines can we put these new ones in the same rack without overloading the PDU? There's a lot of hidden work that goes into data center management.
- lsc 16y ago
  >It's a classic lease vs. buy argument. Sorry, I guess i wasn't clear. I meant renting a dedicated server, which I thought was comparable in cost to 'the cloud' - buying, of course, is more expensive in the short term and cheaper in the long term. Personally, I think a /whole lot/ of the pain of owning (small amounts) of hardware is that most of the co-location vendors spend inordinate amounts of time trying to 'extract maximum value' (meaning, they fuck around on getting you a price, trying to get the max value you will accept.) I'm considering getting back in to the co-location business[1] in part because of this, and in part because it would let me scale to the point that it would help amortize out all the time I have to spend negotiating. Man, I just spent three hours today talking to the owner of my data center, and he /still/ didn't give me a price. "tell me what you get from the other guy" - I mean, he's a nice guy, and I didn't really mind hanging out with him, I probably even got a little bit of useful information, but three hours of two guys, both whom can probably bill out at $100+/hr, and we still didn't arrive on a price for an operation as small as mine? (approx. 150a of 120v power and accompanying rackspace; 5 cabnets or so. This didn't even include bandwidth.) [1]http://prgmr.com/colocation.html http://prgmr.com/colocation.html
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mtw 16y ago
dedicated servers are always cheaper (at least 2x or 3x cheaper in iWeb's case) but they will bill you monthly, there's no option to bill per hour which is popular in cloud hosting. Also one problem is they are hard to scale up or down programmatically I think best option is to have 80% of your infrastructure at iweb or softlayer and plan to have 20% in scalable cloud hosting for peak traffics btw they all use the same software in backend (Xen or other virtualization technology), it's just the middleware and billing that makes them different for end users like you.
benologist 16y ago
Dedicateds give huge bang for your buck - we have a pair at Hivelocity.net. One's got dual xeons w/ 12gb of ram and 4x500gb in raid 10 for like $320 a month, which works out to 42 cents an hour. The other's a single xeon w/ 8gb of ram and 2x500gb raid 1 for $160 which works out to 22 cents an hour. Both come with 10tb of bandwidth a month and are exclusively used by us, nobody is messing with our disk io or anything else. I don't know how they compare with AWS' compute units etc but if you have an ongoing need for the hardware and you're going to be paying those hourly fees (and all the others) every day of every month then I suspect it's going to be a lot cheaper than AWS.
- lsb 16y ago
  For 17GB of RAM and two 3.25GHz xeons and 400GB local storage, it's 18c/hr for a spot instance. Make your make payment $1/hr and you're set. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
  - benologist 16y ago
    During times when there's competition for spot instances that's going to be more money for less ram, less cpu, shitty disk IO (esp vs. our blazing raid10), and no included bandwidth. And at any time we might not be bidding enough to actually keep them...
  - ericd 16y ago
    I'm not seeing this? The only thing with 17 gigs that I see is the High Mem xtra large, and that's 0.50/hour. The xeons he's talking about are quad core, each, for a total of 8, vs. 2 cores of 3.25 ECU each for the high mem xtras.
    - vetman35 16y ago
      "SPOT INSTANCE" is $0.2460 per hour right now. "ON DEMAND" is $0.50 per hour. Login to your AWS Management Console to see the current SPOT INSTANCE price.

ktsmith 16y ago

If you need a lot of memory or disk space dedicated servers are not any cheaper, and often more expensive than cloud solutions. Hivelocity seems to be the only one with reasonably priced large memory dedicated servers, but they have a single facility in Tampa Florida as far as I'm aware which might be a problem for some businesses. If you need a lot of memory and disk space colocation usually has the best bang for the buck but you are also losing the ability to have new servers brought on quickly which can be a huge issue if you have a failure.