7 ms·

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were a

by there 15y ago

as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting. colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI support, it could sometimes take up to a half hour to have a datacenter tech be able to put a remote console online when there were problems. at the end of it, i had a bunch of servers that were worthless on the resale market due to their age. VPSes were never a serious option for the reasons stated in this article. it's impossible to track down performance problems when a dozen other VPS customers on the same server are taxing the CPUs and disks. i do use one that i pay $10/month for just to run a network monitor for some off-network perspective. they can be useful for single-task servers that don't need a lot of processing power like dns servers. with dedicated servers, though, you can signup on a website and within a few hours have a complete server with modern CPUs, disks, and lots of memory assembled, tested, and connected to the internet with a remote console waiting for an o/s installation. when hardware goes bad, the server provider has lots of spare parts waiting around to be swapped in for free. and the best part of all, when you're ready to upgrade or move to a different provider, you just cancel the account and let the provider worry about what to do with the old hardware. i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.

jbarham 15y ago
> i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. With who?
- LogicX 15y ago
  I have that exact setup with Voxel.net for $180/mo. Just bought a 8core 16GB, 120GB SSD & 1TB HDD /w 1gbit/sec connection for $141/mo from Incero.com
  - larrys 15y ago
    Curious about incero.com. Seems like a 1 man company essentially renting rackspace from Netriplex. How comfortable are you with that as a point of failure? I'm also uneasy with people that put up a page like this which basically makes it seem (unless you read the first sentence carefully) that you are in the secure hands of a much larger organization. http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc Thoughts? (Note all blog posts are by "Gordon") I have less issues of course if the idea is redundancy.
    - LogicX 15y ago
      Yes -- I should've prefaced that this is a combination performance test, staging server, hot failover and evaluation of the company. They appear to have been in business for about 3 years (whois info + archive.org), and have positive reviews on WebHostingTalk: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1120499&highlight=incero http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1120499&h... Info in that post seems to indicate more employees: Real office location in Austin, TX Experienced owners; over 8 years experience in the web industry, over 50 years combined business experience I haven't even gotten my incero server yet (just ordered it Friday evening); but I am impressed by their offering - such as IPMI/KVM, which is often not offered by fly-by-night hosters (and not offered by EC2 in the form of out of band access). I also happen to be in a unique situation of not needing 100% uptime for my startup - a few minutes of downtime to switch to a hot failover is a non-issue; so if Incero proves competent to me, I'll still give them serious consideration for production hosting (again, with proper hot-failover backup elsewhere); despite potentially being a one-man-show. Difficult to say which is the lesser of two evils: * Being the customer of a small business, having to potentially wait for response * Being one insignificant customer among millions when there's a datacenter meltdown at AWS, with no phone number to call, and no neck to strangle until you get back up -- at the end of a long list of small customers. I only casually mentioned Incero here, vs. Voxel in many other replies, as I believe voxel is the more appropriate choice for most startups.
      - dangrossman 15y ago
- there 15y ago
  http://m5hosting.com http://m5hosting.com and http://singlehop.com http://singlehop.com are two that i'd recommend. one thing to watch out for with dedicated hosting providers is that the networks are sometimes not so great. you may get a great deal on hardware and tons of bandwidth, but if it drops packets all the time, it's not worth it. make sure they segment you off onto a vlan (see http://jcs.org/mitm http://jcs.org/mitm for why), make sure they are well peered, make sure they actually have staff at or near the datacenter they're running things from, and make sure they have the ability to block certain traffic from reaching you if you need them to (see http://jcs.org/sip http://jcs.org/sip for why) so it doesn't count towards your bandwidth total.
- mrud 15y ago
  There are plenty of options. Have a look at https://www.snelserver.com/ https://www.snelserver.com/ (they just sponsored a server for a project i am affiliated with) or Hetzner - http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... 1and1 also has some nice offerings. If you go this route you can just choose to run virtualization yourself with VMware ESXI or kvm and libvirt
statictype 15y ago
i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?
- charliesome 15y ago
  No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.
  - statictype 15y ago
    Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?
    - LogicX 15y ago
      Reddit and Netflix have entirely different models at their 'web-scale' They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep. Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time. This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.
      - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
        Also, reddit used to have different budgets for servers (lots) and people (very little), so anything that reduced system administration was a win.
      - philwelch 15y ago
        Also, they probably get much better rates from Amazon than you or I.
snowmaker 15y ago
One more vote for dedicated hosting. It's a sweet spot for people who need anywhere from a handful to hundreds of servers. You have to get very large or have unusual requirements before colocation makes economic sense.
mseebach 15y ago
Off-topic piece of advice: Not capitalizing your sentences severely degrades the readability of your post.
dawgr 15y ago
The problem is the "o/s installation" part, while I can install Ubuntu which is fairly easy these days, I'm not a sysadmin and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to configure it properly. Do you recommend any book that'd teach me how to set up a dedicated server from start to finish, including all those little details of OS configuration?
- hahainternet 15y ago
  I am a sysadmin, and frankly no book will teach you sufficiently. Either you use Linux all day every day for some time, or hire someone to consult with you. That's my opinion anyway from years of consulting with people :)
  - dawgr 15y ago
    I'm usually on Fedora, but I barely have to touch anything.

by there 15y ago

jbarham 15y ago

> i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. With who?

LogicX 15y ago
I have that exact setup with Voxel.net for $180/mo. Just bought a 8core 16GB, 120GB SSD & 1TB HDD /w 1gbit/sec connection for $141/mo from Incero.com
- larrys 15y ago
  Curious about incero.com. Seems like a 1 man company essentially renting rackspace from Netriplex. How comfortable are you with that as a point of failure? I'm also uneasy with people that put up a page like this which basically makes it seem (unless you read the first sentence carefully) that you are in the secure hands of a much larger organization. http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network http://www.incero.com/datacenter-network http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc http://www.linkedin.com/company/incero-llc Thoughts? (Note all blog posts are by "Gordon") I have less issues of course if the idea is redundancy.
  - LogicX 15y ago
    Yes -- I should've prefaced that this is a combination performance test, staging server, hot failover and evaluation of the company. They appear to have been in business for about 3 years (whois info + archive.org), and have positive reviews on WebHostingTalk: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1120499&highlight=incero http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1120499&h... Info in that post seems to indicate more employees: Real office location in Austin, TX Experienced owners; over 8 years experience in the web industry, over 50 years combined business experience I haven't even gotten my incero server yet (just ordered it Friday evening); but I am impressed by their offering - such as IPMI/KVM, which is often not offered by fly-by-night hosters (and not offered by EC2 in the form of out of band access). I also happen to be in a unique situation of not needing 100% uptime for my startup - a few minutes of downtime to switch to a hot failover is a non-issue; so if Incero proves competent to me, I'll still give them serious consideration for production hosting (again, with proper hot-failover backup elsewhere); despite potentially being a one-man-show. Difficult to say which is the lesser of two evils: * Being the customer of a small business, having to potentially wait for response * Being one insignificant customer among millions when there's a datacenter meltdown at AWS, with no phone number to call, and no neck to strangle until you get back up -- at the end of a long list of small customers. I only casually mentioned Incero here, vs. Voxel in many other replies, as I believe voxel is the more appropriate choice for most startups.
    - dangrossman 15y ago
there 15y ago
http://m5hosting.com http://m5hosting.com and http://singlehop.com http://singlehop.com are two that i'd recommend. one thing to watch out for with dedicated hosting providers is that the networks are sometimes not so great. you may get a great deal on hardware and tons of bandwidth, but if it drops packets all the time, it's not worth it. make sure they segment you off onto a vlan (see http://jcs.org/mitm http://jcs.org/mitm for why), make sure they are well peered, make sure they actually have staff at or near the datacenter they're running things from, and make sure they have the ability to block certain traffic from reaching you if you need them to (see http://jcs.org/sip http://jcs.org/sip for why) so it doesn't count towards your bandwidth total.
mrud 15y ago
There are plenty of options. Have a look at https://www.snelserver.com/ https://www.snelserver.com/ (they just sponsored a server for a project i am affiliated with) or Hetzner - http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... 1and1 also has some nice offerings. If you go this route you can just choose to run virtualization yourself with VMware ESXI or kvm and libvirt

statictype 15y ago

i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month. This seems ridiculously cheap compared to something with comparable RAM/CPU on EC2. Is there a catch?

charliesome 15y ago
No catch, you've just discovered how ridiculously expensive EC2 is.
- statictype 15y ago
  Then why do so many startups (and even established businesses like reddit and Netflix) use EC2?
  - LogicX 15y ago
    Reddit and Netflix have entirely different models at their 'web-scale' They actually DO need to be able to scale servers up and down based on demand-usage, time of day, growth patterns, etc. For them, the extra EC2 cost is negated by being able to spin up an extra 400 instances in the evenings, and turn them back down after everyone goes to sleep. Under the dedicated server model they'd ALWAYS need to have an extra 400 dedicateds to handle that peak load (and in fact would need to have far more to handle additional spikes, projected growth, etc.) Those dedicated servers would sit idle, costing them money most of the time. This is the difference between 'web-scale' and your typical startup's usage pattern.
    - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
      Also, reddit used to have different budgets for servers (lots) and people (very little), so anything that reduced system administration was a win.
    - philwelch 15y ago
      Also, they probably get much better rates from Amazon than you or I.

snowmaker 15y ago

One more vote for dedicated hosting. It's a sweet spot for people who need anywhere from a handful to hundreds of servers. You have to get very large or have unusual requirements before colocation makes economic sense.

mseebach 15y ago

Off-topic piece of advice: Not capitalizing your sentences severely degrades the readability of your post.

dawgr 15y ago

The problem is the "o/s installation" part, while I can install Ubuntu which is fairly easy these days, I'm not a sysadmin and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to configure it properly. Do you recommend any book that'd teach me how to set up a dedicated server from start to finish, including all those little details of OS configuration?

hahainternet 15y ago
I am a sysadmin, and frankly no book will teach you sufficiently. Either you use Linux all day every day for some time, or hire someone to consult with you. That's my opinion anyway from years of consulting with people :)
- dawgr 15y ago
  I'm usually on Fedora, but I barely have to touch anything.