Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

12 points by rcorin 11 years ago | 19 comments

We've video/image processing apps and need powerful hardware with uptime guarantees. Dedicated servers are the most cost effective, no virtual or Amazon SWS. What do you use? Currently we have servers that cost around 100$/mo for a Xeon 1270 with 16gb ram, but the uptime is not that great, downtimes are frequent. We know plenty of more expensive solutions (for instance for metadata & cdn we use Softlayer which is expensive and more reliable), but we need cheaper options. thanks!

Someone1234 11 years ago |

Uptime guarantees are rarely worth the paper they're printed on. Most will give you some lame credit if they exceed the very generous amount of downtime they allow (e.g. 99% = just under 4 days a year downtime).

The only way to get real uptime is to have dedicated on-site support. Which is to say "someone to yell at" when the system(s) go down. But that type of service is quite expensive indeed (add an extra 0 to what you're currently paying minimum).

For $100 you're going to get shoddy support and some downtime. All you can really do is buy $100 systems with different vendors so that if one vendor is offline you can push the workload to the other two.

But then of course you need to design your infrastructure to move workloads around, and that within itself is a lot of work...

rcorin 11 years ago | |

Agreed, we do have several vendors and do distribute the workload as much as possible. In our experience when a server goes down the whole data center has problems, so even if it's more inconvenient the best is to really have an assortment of vendors.

msantos 11 years ago |

Europe: http://www.hetzner.de/uk/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver and http://www.1and1.co.uk

scalesolved 11 years ago | |

I actually found Hetzner super reliable, I used it in a previous role and it was great value for money. I have a blog post about setting up and using Hetzner, might be useful! http://scalabilitysolved.com/build-a-kick-ass-couchbase-stac...

acelik 11 years ago | |

Hetzner has a response time of at least 24 hours where you'd have a lot shorter times in companies like Digital Ocean. We use Hetzner, DO and Azure. Looks like they are all similar in terms of uptime. Yet, if you have problem with your server then Hetzner usually takes longer time to recover.

hackerboos 11 years ago | |

I'd avoid Hetzner. A competitor/malicious user can take down your site by DDoS'ing it for a short time.

rcorin 11 years ago | | |

And this is not true of the others? I've not seen guarantees against that in any of the other vendors...

snatcher 11 years ago |

We are using Hetzner. Xeon 1270 with 32GB RAM costs €69/mo http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/px60

Their SLA is 99.9%

MrSlo 11 years ago |

OVH is pretty cheap, promises a 99.95% SLA. http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/enterprise/

ramtatatam 11 years ago |

I'm using Linode and I'm happy with it, check out their pricing. https://www.linode.com/pricing

rcorin 11 years ago |

forgot to mention our current providers: ioflood for US, and serverloft for EU.

freerk 11 years ago |

Cheap root server providers, mostly in Germany if nothing mentioned otherwise, all with own infrastructure (no resellers) and my personal experience. Note that prices mentioned in Germany are almost all the time incl. VAT, so you might be able so save 19% on those prices.

https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver - Hands down my favorite. Very powerful hardware for the price, very professional, good network

https://www.webtropia.com/en/ - extremly cheap, many different offers, good quality, good option if price is very important

https://www.hosteurope.de/en/Server/ - The "Root Servers" they sell are actually VMs. High price but good quality

https://www.strato-hosting.co.uk/server/dedicated/ - Belongs to Deutsche Telekom, big company, I never used their dedicated servers (the VMs are crap though)

http://www.server4you.com/dedicated-server/ - cheap, big company, quality is ok. Other brands are Serverloft, Plusserver, unmetered.com

https://www.1and1.com/server-dedicated-tariff - big company, good network, not that cheap

http://www.euserv.com/en/dedicated-server/index.php - many different offers, good support, good value

https://english.keyweb.de/products/server/dedicated-server/ - never used the dedicated servers, VMs are crap

https://www.ip-projects.de/produkte/premium-rootserver/ - no personal experience

https://contabo.de/?show=server - Small company, good offers, good support

https://www.manitu.de/root-server/ - Small company, very good support

http://www.seflow.net/dedicati/ - ITALY, small company, very cheap, good

https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server - FRANCE, very big company, very cheap, good network

https://www.digicube.fr/index/comparatif - FRANCE, extremly cheap, network not that good

http://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/ - FRANCE and CANADA, very cheap, good quality, very good dDOS protection. Other brand of OVH is SoyouStart

https://www.leaseweb.com/bare-metal-server/all-servers - NETHERLANDS, very big company, very professional, kind of expensive, DCs in different countries