A while ago Niall at net Productions emailed me about low end boxes — not cheap $7 virtual servers, but under $50 dedicated servers. I know for a while I had been posting some low end dedicated servers on this blog, but very quickly I lost interest on those as I in fact have never owned a dedicated box (although many virtual private servers). So instead of posting those low end dedicated servers here again, Niall, who is a Python developers building quite a few Plone sites, decided to set up another site specifically for the low end dedicated servers — LowEndDedi.net.
Providers listed under the low end dedis database must “cost less than US$50 dollars, €35 euro, £30 sterling or AUD$60 Australian dollars per month”.
If low end dedicated servers are your thing (they usually have a bit more RAM and lots more disk space than equivalent VPS, but are on crappy hardware), check Niall’s site out!
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Is it worth pay a dedicated server with crap hardware, when you can get EC2 for almost the same price?
For example, if you take a small Reserved Instances for 3 years pre-pay, it will cost $350 for 3 years, that would be $0.03/hour = 0.03*24*31 ~ $22 month.
Plus the storage/bandwidth for the month that would cost.
10GB data in = $1
100GB data out = $17
40GB storage = $6
Monthly total = $22 + $1 + $17 + $6 =
$46 for a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron (or 2007 Xeon processor) with 1.7GB RAM 32bits.
Plus, it is much better against hardware failure, network problems and easier to automatic scaling.
Amazon EC2 would be targeting a completely different crowd I think. It’s a high end pay as you go VPS that has API access to do automation. It is actually not that cheap — the price you see here is 3 year prepay, which is a stupid length of contract to sign up to in ever changing hosting market.
Also I personally would not get a low end dedicated server for its processing power (most of them have very little). You get cheap (and yeah crappy SATA non redundant) storage in the range of 250-500GB. And cheap bandwidth 1+TB that people are expecting from dedicated servers these days. There ought to be some applications that can take advantage of these.
The site was slow / non responsive last night and is only just a bit better today. The box might be doing other things as well :)
IMHO a $50 Linode VPS is way more useful than a $50 low end dedi.
Neves said:
“Is it worth pay a dedicated server with crap hardware, when you can get EC2 for almost the same price?”
No it’s a totally different segment as LowEndBox Admin said – configuring a fully scalable multi-user Plone installation takes weeks of time, so while one could design a migratable system I’d doubt it would work well with buildout and all. What’s one is doing is throwing lots of little stones to make lots of little waves rather than one big stone.
Besides the biggest limiting factors for most servers are memory bandwidth and disc bandwidth. CPU is fairly irrelevant despite what people like to think.
Joseph B wrote:
“The site was slow / non responsive last night and is only just a bit better today. The box might be doing other things as well”
I think that night I was adding the automatic inline currency conversion. It required several restarts of the reverse proxy cache as I was routing Google Finance through the caching system such that Google Finance now appears as if it’s on lowendedi.net :). The reverse proxy cache is extremely important to responsiveness as it’s only a Celeron D 220 underneath there :)
Also, currently OVH is serving the world, and OVH’s capacity outside Europe sucks. We’ll shortly be adding a US VPS actually as one of our load balancing nodes.
“IMHO a $50 Linode VPS is way more useful than a $50 low end dedi.”
Absolutely, which is why any VPS with more than 2Gb of RAM and meets the other criteria is also included in the database :)
Cheers,
Niall
FYI thanks to the above posters – you made me go check the load times of the site and it turns out that I had misconfigured the compression of css and javascript – the site now loads into a cold browser in about one third of its original time.
Cheers,
Niall
Hey Niall, the site is running a bit quicker now for me, so good work.
OVH EU is about 350ms from Adelaide where I am so it can make a bit of a difference with interactive pages.
Also in the database would it be worth adding a bandwidth column?
Good luck with the site!
Wow, 350ms. I live in the sticks in Ireland so I am lumbered with a 70ms lag before I even hit the local telephone exchange, but I’m not as bad as my sister who has to put up with a 160ms lag (she’s very, very rural).
Glad to know it’s better for you – I certainly see the difference here. Regarding the network transfer column (I think you meant that not bandwidth), the reason why that’s missing is because I couldn’t think of any easy way to summarise the information into a column – which is why it’s a text field. The differences between offerings in this department are large e.g. companies such as OVH give you XTb to transit networks A, B, C but YTb to networks M, N, and O. Other companies do silly stuff like the first 2Tb at NIC speed, next 1Tb at 10Mbit, after that 1Mbit. Also, the options for buying extra bandwidth vary a LOT, with some providers charging truly extortionate amounts for extra or else requiring you to buy a really big extra block which you probably don’t need all of.
Now someday I’ll write a custom Collection Plone datatype which can display something better than Plone’s bog standard one, but for now what we have is okay I think. There’s certainly a lot of questions on Google saying “where can I find a cheap dedicated server?” and until now there was no site with a list at all. Thanks to lowendbox for such a great idea!
Cheers,
Niall