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Why not compare slicehost with a real provider? Take the servers at hetzner.de, they don't charge much more than a VPS but you et much more power. The only rea

by miracle 17y ago

Why not compare slicehost with a real provider? Take the servers at hetzner.de, they don't charge much more than a VPS but you et much more power. The only real advantage of a VPS when you grow is when they offer you tools to automatically deploy new instances (like amazon ec2). Otherwise you should be switching to dedicated servers.

asb 17y ago
If you're spending less than $150-200 it seems to be hard to beat a VPS. Certainly there are cheap dedicated servers to be had, but I don't believe you'll get such a high quality network and standard of support as with Linode/Slicehost. $150-200 seems enough to get a decent dedicated server with a respected host such as Softlayer, or 10tb.com who resell Softlayer servers at crazy prices. That said, I have heard a number of people recommend Hetzner.
- miracle 17y ago
  I can only recommend hetzner. We got > 10 servers there and are very happy. In June, they will have their new datacenter ready with new server offers. If all goes well, I will order another > 30 servers for our data processing.
lsc 17y ago
If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a month.
- leej 17y ago
  so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated servers are very high. lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be true comparing to others. is there any drawback?
  - lsc 17y ago
    EC2 kicked my ass when they started their public beta. that's right, something like $70 a month for 1.7GiB was cheaper than I was. I upgraded to new hardware and lowered prices. Under Xen if there is available CPU, any user can burst to it. I use the credit scheduler, which means you spend scheduler credits to get that CPU. You gain scheduler credits by not using as much CPU. Your weight determines how fast your credits accumulate, so a domain with twice as much weight, assuming contention, gets twice as much cpu as another domain. I weight my domains based on the amount of ram they have, so a 64Mb domain has 1/4th the weight of a 256MiB domain. The ceiling on how much CPU you can use when nobody else wants it is set by the number of vcpus you have. I give you one, and in this example, slicehost gives you 4. this is in an effort to make the jokers who run mprime all day (I'm looking at you) from dragging down the service for everyone else. And they don't. I see some users who regularly use as much cpu as they are allowed, and it doesn't cause problems for my more restraned users. my standard system has 32GiB ram and 2 quad-core 1.9Ghz opterons. (I have one with 64GiB and 2 2.1Ghz shanghais, but most of that ram is being used as cache for my experimental ZFS domain, so it shouldn't have more contention than the 32GiB servers) As for the number of domains, depends on how many users sign up for what plan. 62 domains are on the system that the user who ran this test is on.
  - lsc 17y ago
    as for dedicated servers, the big question in my mind is "why don't they give you more ram?" there's no reason to run a single socket with less than 8GiB and a dual socket with less than 32GiB (well, not no reason, but in the general case. Ram speeds up disk, usually, which is horribly slow, even if you buy expensive disk.) I've found an interesting model for renting servers; I charge a kinda hefty setup fee (like $500 for a core2quad with 2 disk and 8GiB ram. within a couple hundred of the parts cost) but then charge $70/month ongoing. (for one of my 8 core 32GB ram systems, with some disks thrown in, it was $1200 up front and $175/month) It does lock the customer in, which is not providing value, but on the other hand, if they stay for a while, it's much cheaper than market rates, and I'm ok with it because the customer has covered most of my capital outlay. I think the thing is that most of us small operators are leery of capital outlays that take many months to repay, and I think the large operators actually pay more for the hardware. No, I'm serious. every large company I've worked at bought pre-built servers from HP or Dell or whatever, and they always ended up paying a large premium over what I would pay buying parts (when they are on sale) for servers that did the same thing. I think part of it was that salesmen are professionals, and part of it was that in a large corporation, the guy making the buy decision, well, it's not his money. He's more concerned with making a decision that looks right than a decision that is right. On the other hand after making an especially bad mistake I once said "Hey, that was my Porsche."

by miracle 17y ago

asb 17y ago

If you're spending less than $150-200 it seems to be hard to beat a VPS. Certainly there are cheap dedicated servers to be had, but I don't believe you'll get such a high quality network and standard of support as with Linode/Slicehost. $150-200 seems enough to get a decent dedicated server with a respected host such as Softlayer, or 10tb.com who resell Softlayer servers at crazy prices. That said, I have heard a number of people recommend Hetzner.

miracle 17y ago
I can only recommend hetzner. We got > 10 servers there and are very happy. In June, they will have their new datacenter ready with new server offers. If all goes well, I will order another > 30 servers for our data processing.

lsc 17y ago

If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a month.

leej 17y ago
so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated servers are very high. lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be true comparing to others. is there any drawback?
- lsc 17y ago
  EC2 kicked my ass when they started their public beta. that's right, something like $70 a month for 1.7GiB was cheaper than I was. I upgraded to new hardware and lowered prices. Under Xen if there is available CPU, any user can burst to it. I use the credit scheduler, which means you spend scheduler credits to get that CPU. You gain scheduler credits by not using as much CPU. Your weight determines how fast your credits accumulate, so a domain with twice as much weight, assuming contention, gets twice as much cpu as another domain. I weight my domains based on the amount of ram they have, so a 64Mb domain has 1/4th the weight of a 256MiB domain. The ceiling on how much CPU you can use when nobody else wants it is set by the number of vcpus you have. I give you one, and in this example, slicehost gives you 4. this is in an effort to make the jokers who run mprime all day (I'm looking at you) from dragging down the service for everyone else. And they don't. I see some users who regularly use as much cpu as they are allowed, and it doesn't cause problems for my more restraned users. my standard system has 32GiB ram and 2 quad-core 1.9Ghz opterons. (I have one with 64GiB and 2 2.1Ghz shanghais, but most of that ram is being used as cache for my experimental ZFS domain, so it shouldn't have more contention than the 32GiB servers) As for the number of domains, depends on how many users sign up for what plan. 62 domains are on the system that the user who ran this test is on.
- lsc 17y ago
  as for dedicated servers, the big question in my mind is "why don't they give you more ram?" there's no reason to run a single socket with less than 8GiB and a dual socket with less than 32GiB (well, not no reason, but in the general case. Ram speeds up disk, usually, which is horribly slow, even if you buy expensive disk.) I've found an interesting model for renting servers; I charge a kinda hefty setup fee (like $500 for a core2quad with 2 disk and 8GiB ram. within a couple hundred of the parts cost) but then charge $70/month ongoing. (for one of my 8 core 32GB ram systems, with some disks thrown in, it was $1200 up front and $175/month) It does lock the customer in, which is not providing value, but on the other hand, if they stay for a while, it's much cheaper than market rates, and I'm ok with it because the customer has covered most of my capital outlay. I think the thing is that most of us small operators are leery of capital outlays that take many months to repay, and I think the large operators actually pay more for the hardware. No, I'm serious. every large company I've worked at bought pre-built servers from HP or Dell or whatever, and they always ended up paying a large premium over what I would pay buying parts (when they are on sale) for servers that did the same thing. I think part of it was that salesmen are professionals, and part of it was that in a large corporation, the guy making the buy decision, well, it's not his money. He's more concerned with making a decision that looks right than a decision that is right. On the other hand after making an especially bad mistake I once said "Hey, that was my Porsche."