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After all the talk about how much cheaper dedicated hosting can be compared to AWS, I looked into dedicated hosting recently. It didn't seem as great as the com

After all the talk about how much cheaper dedicated hosting can be compared to AWS, I looked into dedicated hosting recently. It didn't seem as great as the comments here led me to believe. Rackspace for example starts at $499/month for a server with 4GB of RAM. On AWS I can get a c1.xlarge instance with 7GB of RAM for $435/month, and that's with paying the on-demand price 24x7. Ok, that doesn't include EBS and bandwidth. So let's throw in 1TB of outbound data (less than the 2TB that Rackspace includes, but still more than I'd ever use in a month) and a 150GB EBS volume with 1000 provision IOPS. Let's also use the 1 year heavy utilization price while we're at it. Now I'm looking $342/month with $1800 upfront, which amortizes to $492/month. With AWS I also don't need to stick with paying 24x7 for infrastructure. I don't need to keep my CI infrastructure running on nights and weekends for example, and with AWS I have the flexibility to turn that into cost savings. So I don't see the order of magnitude price difference. So maybe I shouldn't be looking at Rackspace? Hetzner keeps coming up on here, but I don't need a server in Europe. Maybe OVH? Hmm, the comments on Hacker News don't exactly inspire confidence in OVH for something more than a personal server to screw around with. I need to run infrastructure for my business. Do I start hunting for bargain hosting providers on WebHostingTalk? Ok, back to AWS it is for me. EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above.

asb 13y ago
Looking from Rackspace to OVH is really going straight from one extreme to another. Softlayer is a more sensible middle-ground (though note their list prices are high, you'll almost always be able to get 2x RAM or similar).
- cstejerean 13y ago
  Thank you for the recommendation, it's definitely a better deal than Rackspace for my needs, but not compelling enough for me to switch from AWS at the moment.
Udo 13y ago
I think you picked the most expensive dedicated hosting provider in existence. Have a look at SoftLayer, Hetzner, Incero, or one of the other alternatives. Also, at these prices, it's not unreasonable to just order any old Dell server for $600 and put it into a colo rack somewhere. For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs: Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core 16 GB DDR 3 RAM 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm Support is extremely fast and competent, I'm really happy. To try and mirror that package with any kind of Amazon (or Rackspace it seems) offering would be prohibitively costly.
- cstejerean 13y ago
  I did look at SoftLayer and it's still not significantly cheaper than AWS. Hetzner doesn't seem to have servers in the US, so I've already ruled them out. Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
  - Udo 13y ago
    There are probably a lot of alternatives that other people know more about than I do. Just to address a concern with Hetzner: connectivity is really good there. Last time I was in the US, I got better roundtrip times from my German server than I got from MediaTemple gs in California (though they also have some very nice features). Of course there is no going around light speed the limitation, but I'd say for a lot of projects a European server +CloudFlare is totally sufficient. In the end, it's all a tradeoff between different factors ;)
  - justinsb 13y ago
    I've tried Incero, Softlayer, Hetzner & OVH. I'd recommend Hetzner & OVH, and Softlayer if budget is less of an issue.
    - MrDOS 13y ago
      OVH has a history of suspending service at the drop of a hat. I'd avoid them for anything business-critical.
banachtarski 13y ago
Look at softlayer. I'm moving the whole company off AWS.
- jjoe 13y ago
  IBM closed on Softlayer a few days ago. Not many people expect Softlayer to continue thriving the way it did over the years. But at the rate Softlayer grew it was apparent they were eyeing a quick exit (not too common in the dedi business). Now it's IBM running the show at SL...
bhouston 13y ago
OVH is really cheap as well: http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/ http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/
- cstejerean 13y ago
  Yeah, I've already ruled out OVH if you read the last part of my comment. The comments on Hacker News about OVH didn't really inspire confidence in OVH for more than hosting side projects, and that's not my use case. Are you using OVH for hosting Exocortex? I checked your website and it seems to be hosted on Linode.
  - debian3 13y ago
    OVH is not bad, most people that they cut out are people who are new, they rent 10 servers or more, start spam, then they get cut and they go on forums to complains. Since OVH is a lower cost provider, they attrack more customer like this. On the other end, Softlayer is very reliable, I have 4 servers with them and I had nearly no problems, they have the best network as well (I got fewer network outage with Softlayer then Rackspace). Rackspace is better if you need something managed, but they are expensive.
thecombjelly 13y ago
Also checkout M5 hosting[1][2]. They have excellent customer support and I've had no issues since I started using them a few months ago. I currently have a dedicated freebsd server, for $209/month: Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3]. [1] http://www.m5hosting.com http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php
druiid 13y ago
To be honest, you chose looking at the most expensive dedicated hosting provider. Also, they're just not-that-great. Their service and support staff are wonderful, but as soon as you actually need to do anything complex... good luck getting an engineer on the phone. It used to take us three or more calls to get someone higher level on the phone and we were paying five-figure type sums to them each month. Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.
benologist 13y ago
Try Hivelocity: http://hivelocity.net/ http://hivelocity.net/. They're great and cheap.
x0x0 13y ago
in case you are unaware, first, see the perf difference in my previous post, and second, the public pricing on softlayer is a price ceiling. If you are buying multiple machines, even perhaps as few as 4 or 5 a month, you can probably negotiate a nice discount and certainly if you are renting 10-20/mo. Of course they will happily sell for the price on the site.
papsosouid 13y ago
Same here. These "amazon is so expensive and so slow" posts show up here constantly, and every time I try to get information on alternatives, and nobody has anything. A single dedicated server running in some warehouse is not a replacement for AWS. I need S3, or I need a bunch of storage devices in multiple datacenters automatically keeping the files I put on them synced. Which hosting provider is doing that again? Where is my EBS with a dedicated server warehouse? I need block device that is durable, and can be quickly and easily detached from one server and attached to another. Even the cheapest redundant iSCSI SAN setup is very expensive. I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  > I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb ...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price. Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial. My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances. The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.) Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.
nobodysfool 13y ago
4 CPU and 7GB ram on Windows Azure is $268/month if you use Windows, and $179/month if you are using Linux. Add $120 for 1TB outbound traffic, and you are looking at $388/month Windows and $299 for Linux.
MichaelApproved 13y ago
Don't forget to include all the free bandwidth that comes with dedicated hosting plans. With EC2, that's extra and can really make a difference to a lot of companies. And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage. And, better customer service too.
chetanahuja 13y ago
Why is nobody mentioning digital ocean ? https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing $80/month 8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer
- seferphier 13y ago
  this is pretty awesome.
23david 13y ago
If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of AWS is pretty much unmatched. The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month. But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.
adambard 13y ago
If you just want to swing numbers around, for $500/month you can get a bare-metal Xeon with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1.6 TB of storage from Storm on Demand: https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsignup https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsig... The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.
- crucifiction 13y ago
  Yes, and when that box has a hardware problem you will serve a whole fuckton of nothing.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lobster_johnson 13y ago
> A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399 No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade. By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.
dangrossman 13y ago
> EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above. You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay. You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.
- mwsherman 13y ago
  ^ An important point. I emailed SoftLayer sales when setting up Alikewise and got a much better price, around $300/mo. This is probably still overpaying for my needs, but substantially cheaper than buying via their web interface. Another thing I haven’t done is renegotiate in the last 2 years. Moore’s law and all, I suspect I wouldn’t save $$ but would get more horespower for the same price.
lamnk 13y ago
If you need raw performance, have a look at WebNX, they are specialized in high end dedicated servers, boxes with Xeon E5 and 64GB RAM are in the range $150-$200. I find Softlayer or Rackspace quite overpriced. There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.
adventured 13y ago
Your comparison is bogus. I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water. How does this sound? Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239 Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead. That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark. Back to AWS? Not a chance.
toble 13y ago
As others have said, Rackspace is very high end. There are lots of well regarded providers in the middle that offer excellent customer service.

asb 13y ago

Looking from Rackspace to OVH is really going straight from one extreme to another. Softlayer is a more sensible middle-ground (though note their list prices are high, you'll almost always be able to get 2x RAM or similar).

cstejerean 13y ago
Thank you for the recommendation, it's definitely a better deal than Rackspace for my needs, but not compelling enough for me to switch from AWS at the moment.

Udo 13y ago

I think you picked the most expensive dedicated hosting provider in existence. Have a look at SoftLayer, Hetzner, Incero, or one of the other alternatives. Also, at these prices, it's not unreasonable to just order any old Dell server for $600 and put it into a colo rack somewhere. For reference, the dedicated server I rent for my private projects comes in at €49/month and it has these specs: Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core 16 GB DDR 3 RAM 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD; 7200 rpm Support is extremely fast and competent, I'm really happy. To try and mirror that package with any kind of Amazon (or Rackspace it seems) offering would be prohibitively costly.

cstejerean 13y ago
I did look at SoftLayer and it's still not significantly cheaper than AWS. Hetzner doesn't seem to have servers in the US, so I've already ruled them out. Incero seems cheap, but that's the only thing I've seen about Incero. I consider Incero to be in the bargain hunting on WebHostingTalk category of providers. I'm not entirely comfortable hosting mission critical infrastructure there yet.
- Udo 13y ago
  There are probably a lot of alternatives that other people know more about than I do. Just to address a concern with Hetzner: connectivity is really good there. Last time I was in the US, I got better roundtrip times from my German server than I got from MediaTemple gs in California (though they also have some very nice features). Of course there is no going around light speed the limitation, but I'd say for a lot of projects a European server +CloudFlare is totally sufficient. In the end, it's all a tradeoff between different factors ;)
- justinsb 13y ago
  I've tried Incero, Softlayer, Hetzner & OVH. I'd recommend Hetzner & OVH, and Softlayer if budget is less of an issue.
  - MrDOS 13y ago
    OVH has a history of suspending service at the drop of a hat. I'd avoid them for anything business-critical.

banachtarski 13y ago

Look at softlayer. I'm moving the whole company off AWS.

jjoe 13y ago
IBM closed on Softlayer a few days ago. Not many people expect Softlayer to continue thriving the way it did over the years. But at the rate Softlayer grew it was apparent they were eyeing a quick exit (not too common in the dedi business). Now it's IBM running the show at SL...

bhouston 13y ago

OVH is really cheap as well: http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/ http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/dedicated-servers/

cstejerean 13y ago
Yeah, I've already ruled out OVH if you read the last part of my comment. The comments on Hacker News about OVH didn't really inspire confidence in OVH for more than hosting side projects, and that's not my use case. Are you using OVH for hosting Exocortex? I checked your website and it seems to be hosted on Linode.
- debian3 13y ago
  OVH is not bad, most people that they cut out are people who are new, they rent 10 servers or more, start spam, then they get cut and they go on forums to complains. Since OVH is a lower cost provider, they attrack more customer like this. On the other end, Softlayer is very reliable, I have 4 servers with them and I had nearly no problems, they have the best network as well (I got fewer network outage with Softlayer then Rackspace). Rackspace is better if you need something managed, but they are expensive.

thecombjelly 13y ago

Also checkout M5 hosting[1][2]. They have excellent customer support and I've had no issues since I started using them a few months ago. I currently have a dedicated freebsd server, for $209/month: Xeon X3450 Quad Core, 32GB ECC RAM, 2x 500GB HD, and 2TB/month bandwidth plus a whole bunch of extra IPs allowing me to run numerous jails for hosting all sorts of sites and dev-environments. Very good machine for the price. You can still pick one up [3]. [1] http://www.m5hosting.com http://www.m5hosting.com [2] They are also working on a an amazon AWS competitor service. [3] http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php http://www.m5hosting.com/buynow.php

druiid 13y ago

To be honest, you chose looking at the most expensive dedicated hosting provider. Also, they're just not-that-great. Their service and support staff are wonderful, but as soon as you actually need to do anything complex... good luck getting an engineer on the phone. It used to take us three or more calls to get someone higher level on the phone and we were paying five-figure type sums to them each month. Also, we got DoS attacks all the time on their network and not one since we moved to our own hardware... Obviously take this with a grain of salt, but take the other comments to heart and actually look into other dedicated provider pricing. You might be surprised.

benologist 13y ago

Try Hivelocity: http://hivelocity.net/ http://hivelocity.net/. They're great and cheap.

x0x0 13y ago

in case you are unaware, first, see the perf difference in my previous post, and second, the public pricing on softlayer is a price ceiling. If you are buying multiple machines, even perhaps as few as 4 or 5 a month, you can probably negotiate a nice discount and certainly if you are renting 10-20/mo. Of course they will happily sell for the price on the site.

papsosouid 13y ago

Same here. These "amazon is so expensive and so slow" posts show up here constantly, and every time I try to get information on alternatives, and nobody has anything. A single dedicated server running in some warehouse is not a replacement for AWS. I need S3, or I need a bunch of storage devices in multiple datacenters automatically keeping the files I put on them synced. Which hosting provider is doing that again? Where is my EBS with a dedicated server warehouse? I need block device that is durable, and can be quickly and easily detached from one server and attached to another. Even the cheapest redundant iSCSI SAN setup is very expensive. I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".

lobster_johnson 13y ago
> I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb ...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price. Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial. My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances. The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.) Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.

nobodysfool 13y ago

4 CPU and 7GB ram on Windows Azure is $268/month if you use Windows, and $179/month if you are using Linux. Add $120 for 1TB outbound traffic, and you are looking at $388/month Windows and $299 for Linux.

MichaelApproved 13y ago

Don't forget to include all the free bandwidth that comes with dedicated hosting plans. With EC2, that's extra and can really make a difference to a lot of companies. And, with dedicated hardware, you have faster storage with traditional HDD and even SSD. Both those options are faster than EC2 storage. And, better customer service too.

chetanahuja 13y ago

Why is nobody mentioning digital ocean ? https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing $80/month 8GB Memory 4 Cores 80GB SSD Disk 5TB Transfer

seferphier 13y ago
this is pretty awesome.

23david 13y ago

If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of AWS is pretty much unmatched. The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month. But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.

adambard 13y ago

If you just want to swing numbers around, for $500/month you can get a bare-metal Xeon with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, and 1.6 TB of storage from Storm on Demand: https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsignup https://www.stormondemand.com/servers/baremetal.html#showsig... The startup I'm at has looked at using AWS and repeatedly decided against it based on cost. It's simply much more expensive compared to dedicated hardware when you need a single high-performance box -- and you should be able to serve a whole fuckton of traffic an 8-cpu 32GB box if you try.

crucifiction 13y ago
Yes, and when that box has a hardware problem you will serve a whole fuckton of nothing.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lobster_johnson 13y ago

> A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399 No, it starts at $219. You can add more RAM to any of their hardware options. So the cheapest 1CPU-box is $159 plus $60/mo for the RAM upgrade. By the way, Hetzner is very good, and the connectivity to the US is great. Visitors would not notice the extra couple of routing hops.

dangrossman 13y ago

> EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions to look at Softlayer. A server with 1 CPU and 8GB of RAM starts at $399, which is better than Rackspace, but not exactly orders of magnitude cheaper than the c1.xlarge I mentioned above. You need to negotiate. The advertised prices are starting points for talking to sales, not what you really have to pay. You can get a 2011-gen quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM for $250/mo or thereabouts at Softlayer.

mwsherman 13y ago
^ An important point. I emailed SoftLayer sales when setting up Alikewise and got a much better price, around $300/mo. This is probably still overpaying for my needs, but substantially cheaper than buying via their web interface. Another thing I haven’t done is renegotiate in the last 2 years. Moore’s law and all, I suspect I wouldn’t save $$ but would get more horespower for the same price.

lamnk 13y ago

If you need raw performance, have a look at WebNX, they are specialized in high end dedicated servers, boxes with Xeon E5 and 64GB RAM are in the range $150-$200. I find Softlayer or Rackspace quite overpriced. There are many other smaller hosting companies that offer good services and pricing. You just need to do some researchs.

adventured 13y ago

Your comparison is bogus. I've used a very reputable host by the name of WebNX out of Los Angeles for a long time. They blow your referenced prices out of the water. How does this sound? Intel Xeon 1230 v3; 32gb ram; 4x 1TB 7,200 rpm enterprise hdd w/ hardware raid 10; 20tb of outbound bandwidth; unmetered inbound bandwidth; $239 Or swap out the 4x drives for 512 ssd and 1tb 7200rpm, for $199 instead. That v3 1230 pushes 9500 on passmark. Back to AWS? Not a chance.

toble 13y ago

As others have said, Rackspace is very high end. There are lots of well regarded providers in the middle that offer excellent customer service.