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High RAM servers - why so expensive?
A few years ago, I could understand why a 16GB server was 800$ per month - RAM was crazy expensive, and the 16GB server would be worth much money; it made financial sense to pay that much per month.
Nowadays, RAM is getting cheaper by the month. If you don't need ECC RAM, 16GB is stupidly cheap. Even if you do, it's not as expensive as it used to be.
So can anyone explain to me why servers with a lot of RAM are still > 800$ per month? At that cost, I could pay for the whole server in ~ 2-3 months.
I understand that there management costs to the 800$ (replace hardware when it fails, data center related costs (power etc), pay for personel, etc) but it doesn't make sense - a 70$/mo 1GB server has the same requirements. Adding RAM to a box doesn't change anything in the equation, except the price of said RAM.
If someone knows of a business leasing dedicated servers with 8-16GB for a reasonable cost, please tell me!
- quellhorst 18y agoYou could lease servers from dell, then host them at a good colo. I have had very good luck with http://colo4dallas.com/ http://colo4dallas.com/
- invisible 18y agoI would suggest if you need a dedicated server then you should just buy one and find a cheap colo. I pay $200/month for a local company that has redundant power and almost 0% downtime with great fiber. They charge that much because there's a demand for it and people will pay. Dedicated servers are a smaller market, so no one is eager to charge less than X amount for renting a server. However, 8GB-16GB of RAM is a lot and also makes the motherboard a lot more expensive (and Windows slightly more if it's a Windows box, 64bit). If you can put together your own machine it doesn't need to be super expensive.
- vaksel 18y agoexcept they charge you for the processor on top of the cost for RAM. Probably a business opportunity here, sell high RAM machines at a smaller markup. You could probably sell a 96GB RAM server for half the cost, of what others charge and still make a hefty profit
- tocomment 18y agoVPS hosting too! I'm still paying 20/mo for 360MB RAM just as I was almost two years ago. What's the deal with that?
- lallysingh 18y ago.. you're getting ripped off? Can you change vendors?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- bretthoerner 18y agoMy guess is lallysingh believes that tocomment is paying $20/month just for a RAM upgrade, and not for a full VPS that happens to have 360MB of RAM (he was unclear, but I assume he's on Linode like you). I can't think of a better deal at that cost.
- vaksel 18y agoEmail them and tell them to upgrade you. Most companies will do it, since they don't want to lose a customer like you who can overpay for 2 years w/o complaining.
- tocomment 18y agoTo clarify, the plan is 20/mo which include 360MB RAM. I'm just saying it's odd the plan hasn't gone done in price in 2 years.
- vaksel 18y agoBecause someone who needs a 16GB server, can afford it. And this way the company makes a ton of money for nothing. But yeah its bullshit to ask for $400/month to upgrade 2GB to 16GB.
- anotherjesse 18y agoAt Softlayer 16GB is $350/mo more than 2GB, _but_ they almost always have a special double/double for the same price (double the HDDs and double the RAM). So I just bought a 16GB server for userscripts.org for the 8GB price ($150/mo). http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html
- bprater 18y agoI continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are doing something right.
- tdavis 18y agoI've yet to find anything they're doing wrong. Honestly a truly amazing hosting company.
- FiReaNG3L 18y agoNow that sound like a good deal
- tlrobinson 18y agoOn top of their specials, you can also negotiate better deals with them.
- anotherjesse 18y agoYou can but it helps to know their online offers. About a year ago I spent many hours talking with a rep who came back with the same boxes and prices we could have configured with their online system. Last week I spent a couple hours chatting with a rep for userscripts.org's new box and he did better than the online prices. I think the difference last year I approached with general requirements, so they spent all their time speccing out multiple systems and figuring out what was the best fit. My second experience I knew what I wanted, so I was able to ask for deals based on specific hardware choices.
- DenisM 18y agoIf you are a hoster you must differentiate your offering and charge more to some customers and less to others. Usually what they do is they add bigger markup to things which are expensive to provide becuase it's the high-end anyway, and smaller markup to the lower end where customers are more price-sensitive. Now, sometimes landscape changes and things that were expensive to procure become cheap. Hosters however are stuck in the old model, and while they realize that RAM costs nothing anymore there are not many different candidates for price discrimination and the old thing still works, kind of. In other words it's the same reason why Apple charges a lot of moeny for 4Gb RAM config in Macbooks - gotta make the money.
- Raphael 18y agoI would guess they're cramming ever more people on to one box.
- johnrob 18y agoI'd rather have 10 of the cheap boxes, at 70/mo, than one 16GB at 800/mo.
- bjclark 18y agoWhich will work for some things, but not say, a database server that needs 16gigs of in memory tables.
- mtw 18y agotypically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon quad cores (7300 or 7400 series), or the equivalent AMDs. One 7400 processor is sold from $1200, so just the cost of processors is $4800 for the web hosting provider. Add to the accessories (which are not commodity), a 2U case (or 4U), and you've got at minimum $8000 server apiece. so yes, RAM is cheap, but RAM is just a fractional cost. at $8000, a web hoster needs to compute in costs of stocks, loan costs, so $800/mo is a reasonable price. if you're really low on budget and need 16Gb (I guess it's for virtualization ?), look for "7310 hosting" in google, and then boost the RAM to 16Gb. You should be able to find one at around $650
- wmf 18y agotypically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon quad cores, or the equivalent AMDs. That's a bad idea; you should probably run away from any host that wants to sell you such an inefficient configuration. 16GB is 8 2GB DIMMs; putting that in a 2-socket server is no problem. Even 16 2GB DIMMs should be no problem.
- mtw 18y agowell yes, and no. i guess it depends on your needs and the applications you run on the server. if you do virtualization, a 2 socket server should be ok. I was thinking of HPC or datamining
- lsc 18y agothere are many cheap quad and dual-core Xeons and Opterons. I use 1.9Ghz low-power quad-core Opterons, which cost around $256 each. You pay a large premium (in power or money or both) for the last few clock cycles. If you need more ram than CPU, which is usually the case for me, you can save quite a lot.
- babul 18y agoIf you can, why not buy your own servers and have it co-located. The hardware often pays for itself after a few months compared to leasing.
- snewe 18y agoRackspace 4gb --> 8gb = $100/month
- timcederman 18y ago16GB of RAM is cheap to purchase if you're buying in 1GB or 2GB DIMMs, but try and buy 4GB DIMMs and it starts getting really expensive. eg, $50 for 2x2GB vs $250 for 1x4GB.
- wmf 18y agoBut a decent motherboard has 16 slots, so 32GB or less should be cheap; it should only get expensive above that.
- grandalf 18y agoTake slicehost or S3. To give you more RAM means that someone else has to need more CPU to make their virtualization strategy work. I think once Amazon got enough volume it could begin offering high CPU and high RAM instances without diminishing overall utilization efficiency. But Amazon still charges quite a premium for high RAM.. probably b/c due to IO rate limits low RAM also results in less CPU burn for many workloads than would exist if there were plenty of memory available.
- grandalf 18y agocorrection: ec2...
- gravitycop 18y agoNowadays, RAM is getting cheaper by the month. Not any more. http://news.google.com/news?q=dram+prices http://news.google.com/news?q=dram+prices
- lsc 18y agoMost companies charge more because they can. the same reason why if you buy the base dell you get a really good deal, but if you load up the dell with ram you end up paying a lot more than if you bought the parts yourself. The idea is that most businesses want to charge people with money more. I'll rent you a 32GB server for $512/month, if you want. I'll have an extra later today. dual quad-core opteron (1.9Ghz) with 32GB of registered ecc ddr2 and 2x1TB sata disks. It's one of those supermicro 1u twin dohickies. shoot me an email and arrange things. lsc@prgmr.com I can arrange for a serial console but no rebooter.
- lsc 18y agoIt's not quite as simple as just adding more ram to the single-socket box that you get when you order a dedi with 1G ram. see, ram gets more expensive the higher density you go, 2gb modules are pretty cheap, 4gb modules are about twice as much per gigabyte, 8gb modules twice as much again, per gigabyte. (It's slightly more complicated... quad-rank ram, for instance, is basically a way of fitting more ram modules in the same number of slots. Most motherboards don't support it, and those that do don't support very many of them.) If you can find a single-socket core2 or opteron board with more than 4 ram slots, let me know. this puts an 8GB limit on economical single-socket boxes. dual-socket boxes, on the other hand, I can get supermicro dual-socket opteron boards with 16 ram slots. Of course, you can get 1.9Ghz low-power quad-core opterons for around $256 each, so it's still not as expensive as people seem to think. I'm just saying you can't just cram more ram into the box they use when you order a 1GB box.
- easp 18y agoA few things other people don't seem to be mentioning: 1. RAM prices can be quite volatile, while hosting prices generally are not. Hosts may have taken lower margins back when their RAM costs were higher that they are now trying to recoup. At the very least, they aren't in a hurry to cut prices right now because their costs could go back up again if the economy picks up and RAM prices head upward. 2. Hosting is basically a subscription business model. Subscriber acquisition costs are balanced against total lifetime value of the average subscriber. A host may take a lower margin, or even a loss, in the first stretch of a hosting relationship and treat that as part of the SAC in anticipation of their margins improve over time thanks to declining costs due Moore's law.