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What's your opinion on old-school dedicated server hosting providers? They would handle all the hardware side for you, with an experience close to a virtual mac

What's your opinion on old-school dedicated server hosting providers? They would handle all the hardware side for you, with an experience close to a virtual machine provider. No need to worry about the details of owning & running actual racks in a DC.

danpalmer 3y ago
I worked for 7 years for a company that was mostly bare-metal rented hardware. The service provider handled half of this stuff, but not everything. Off the top of my head... - Networking was still an issue. We didn't get much control over the network we were on, I think we were on a vlan, but we weren't in control of it. We needed quite a robust firewall setup on all our machines. All machines were on the internet, again not something we could control. - Hardware did become varied over time. We had to do things like creating a new database primary and using the old machine that was now too slow for a read replica. Eventually we found that the read replica was slower than just reading from the primary! - One machine kept eating SSDs, they had a life expectancy of about 3 months in that machine. Neither us or the provider ever figured out why. The replacement process was a hassle and required a lot of manual work on both ends (even though it was in a RAID array designed for hot swapability). - Once the provider gave us a machine with a BMC, but didn't tell us about the BMC or give us any credentials for it. The BMC was on the internet with default creds, it got owned, the machine got owned, and we were running a Monero miner for someone for a while. Thankfully no other damage, but that could have been company ending if we hadn't lucked out on a few details. - The DC had bad peering with an ISP (could have been a customer ISP, or maybe our office, can't remember). That caused a bunch of hassle. Again, not our fault, but definitely our problem. Hard to get someone interested in fixing it. - The provider got acquired by another bigger DC provider. All the experienced staff left, and service dropped off a cliff. This got us to finally move to the cloud. - Hardware lead times are rarely less than a few days, often weeks or months. You have to capacity plan far out, and often make trade-offs like taking a spec you don't want (over and more expensive, or under and less useful) to get hardware when you need it. We might have been able to get the provider to do more for us here, but anything they did was operated at the level of email and someone on their end manually configuring things. It was error prone, it was slow, it was unpredictable. None of this is any criticism of the provider, they were good at what they did, but this is just the inevitable outcome of that model as far as I can tell.

danpalmer 3y ago

I worked for 7 years for a company that was mostly bare-metal rented hardware. The service provider handled half of this stuff, but not everything. Off the top of my head... - Networking was still an issue. We didn't get much control over the network we were on, I think we were on a vlan, but we weren't in control of it. We needed quite a robust firewall setup on all our machines. All machines were on the internet, again not something we could control. - Hardware did become varied over time. We had to do things like creating a new database primary and using the old machine that was now too slow for a read replica. Eventually we found that the read replica was slower than just reading from the primary! - One machine kept eating SSDs, they had a life expectancy of about 3 months in that machine. Neither us or the provider ever figured out why. The replacement process was a hassle and required a lot of manual work on both ends (even though it was in a RAID array designed for hot swapability). - Once the provider gave us a machine with a BMC, but didn't tell us about the BMC or give us any credentials for it. The BMC was on the internet with default creds, it got owned, the machine got owned, and we were running a Monero miner for someone for a while. Thankfully no other damage, but that could have been company ending if we hadn't lucked out on a few details. - The DC had bad peering with an ISP (could have been a customer ISP, or maybe our office, can't remember). That caused a bunch of hassle. Again, not our fault, but definitely our problem. Hard to get someone interested in fixing it. - The provider got acquired by another bigger DC provider. All the experienced staff left, and service dropped off a cliff. This got us to finally move to the cloud. - Hardware lead times are rarely less than a few days, often weeks or months. You have to capacity plan far out, and often make trade-offs like taking a spec you don't want (over and more expensive, or under and less useful) to get hardware when you need it. We might have been able to get the provider to do more for us here, but anything they did was operated at the level of email and someone on their end manually configuring things. It was error prone, it was slow, it was unpredictable. None of this is any criticism of the provider, they were good at what they did, but this is just the inevitable outcome of that model as far as I can tell.