€1,99 dedicated server

[DomainBop]

The 1.99 dedicated servers are back today...hurry if you want one because they'll be gone within a few hours

https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-kidechire

 

[HBAndrei]

And... they're all gone! There were only 42 in stock to begin with.

 

[kcaj]

And... they're all gone! There were only 42 in stock to begin with.

When 42 is displayed they actually mean > 42.

 

[wlanboy]

And out again.
At least they have humor...

Availability
"Victim of its success

 

[willie]

They have scaleway.com (online.net ARM brand) dedis for 2.99 euro monthly or 0.6 eurocents hourly.  They are quad core ARM servers (cpu about equivalent to a raspberry pi model 2) with 2GB of ram and 50GB SSD SAN (expandable at 1 euro/month per additional 50GB).  You can play with them with no registration (half hour session) at instantcloud.io.  I've been playing with them and they're fun.  Based on informal tests I'd guess the cpubenchmark equivalent in the 1000 range, so >2x faster than the Via Nano if you count all 4 cores, but about 1/10th the speed of a current faster server like an E3.  If you have a parallel workload you can spin up 100's of them through an API.  So while these cost a bit more than the promo Via server, they're more attractive and interesting imho.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

They have scaleway.com (online.net ARM brand) dedis for 2.99 euro monthly or 0.6 eurocents hourly.  They are quad core ARM servers (cpu about equivalent to a raspberry pi model 2) with 2GB of ram and 50GB SSD.  You can play with them with no registration (half hour session) at instantcloud.io.  I've been playing with them and they're fun.  Based on informal tests I'd guess the cpubenchmark equivalent in the 1000 range, so >2x faster than the Via Nano if you count all 4 cores, but about 1/10th the speed of a current faster server like an E3.

To add on.  The only difference between this Online.net Via Nanos and Scaleway is that the Nanos have 160 GB HDD space.  I remember from the beta you can allocate more storage via a SAN to the Scaleway (someone with actual experience please correct me).  So I mean yeah it's a little more (one euro more), but I definitely think Scaleway is better bang for the bucks than the Nano. 

I don't understand the appeal of the Nano.  I don't understand why people even want that outdated hardware.  

 

[willie]

Yeah, I updated my post to mention the SAN expandability while you were writing that.  They also have an S3-like object store for it at 0.02/GB/mo but they're currently not accepting new users for it while they deal with some unclear capacity or scaling issues (existing users can keep using it).  Hopefully it will be back soon.

The Via can run x86 software including x86-64 while the Scaleway C1 is 32-bit ARM.  Probably not that big a deal most of the time, but might occasionally be relevant.  It's a safe bet that Scaleway is working on a 64-bit ARM server.

 

[DomainBop]

I don't understand the appeal of the Nano.  I don't understand why people even want that outdated hardware.  

1.99 for 160GB HD space plus 100GB backup space (and a 1 Gbps unmetered connection) make it worth the price if you're looking for a cheap storage box.  They also make excellent utility boxes: DNS servers, monitoring servers, testing,  etc.  Their reliability is much better than any of the LET openvz "top providers" I ever tried.

The processor on the Nano sucks though (see below). 

Geekbench:

1867 Scaleway ARMv7:   http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2568898

 637 VIA Nano U2250:  http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2552568

Unixbench

731 Scaleway ARMv7 http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2015/09/19/OPBSdHVEm8IXGi6g

452 VIA Nano U2250 http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2015/09/19/KThfbT93xPEhM8km

 

[drmike]

I don't understand the appeal of the Nano.  I don't understand why people even want that outdated hardware.  

It's about price point and availability.

The Nano is x86 compatible.  These ARM offerings are not.

VIA was always a notorious CPU slacker with CPU speeds that were seemingly way off vs. more standard Intel CPUs.  It was alright gear for right use back then.  Low power consumption for the time.

The Nano U2250 CPU Marks at 377.  First seen there in Q1 2011.   So it's a  real old CPU.

 

[KuJoe]

The Nano U2250 CPU Marks at 377.

That's more than double the C7-M ULV which I used in my primary workstation for close to 3 years without any issues (switching between Windows XP and Fedora 13 XFCE). I think I'll be ordering one of those SC Gen2 boxes shortly and dropping some VPSs.

 

[drmike]

The Nano U2250 CPU Marks at 377.

That's more than double the C7-M ULV which I used in my primary workstation for close to 3 years without any issues (switching between Windows XP and Fedora 13 XFCE). I think I'll be ordering one of those SC Gen2 boxes shortly and dropping some VPSs.

I still have a VIA C7 around here and a collection of mini itx boards

Scaleway boxes look interesting, but I am waiting until it matures a good bit.  ARM distros are doing well / better, but still a PITA for a lot of things.   Fine for generic web stacks per se.  I use more ARM stuff these days than Intel (Odroid as gateway, Mikrotik, Ubiquiti, Raspberry Pi, PogoPlugs, Synology NAS, Android tablet, Android phone, Android TV box).... yeah I have a cheap ARM addiction

 

[mikeyur]

The Nano U2250 CPU Marks at 377.

That's more than double the C7-M ULV which I used in my primary workstation for close to 3 years without any issues (switching between Windows XP and Fedora 13 XFCE). I think I'll be ordering one of those SC Gen2 boxes shortly and dropping some VPSs.

I've got a couple 2 Eur/mo specials mostly idling (SC Gen2 w/ 160GB drive). If you can deal with the smaller drive I'd be happy to give you one - wouldn't be opposed to trade for SD account credit either

 

[KuJoe]

The Nano U2250 CPU Marks at 377.

That's more than double the C7-M ULV which I used in my primary workstation for close to 3 years without any issues (switching between Windows XP and Fedora 13 XFCE). I think I'll be ordering one of those SC Gen2 boxes shortly and dropping some VPSs.

I've got a couple 2 Eur/mo specials mostly idling (SC Gen2 w/ 160GB drive). If you can deal with the smaller drive I'd be happy to give you one - wouldn't be opposed to trade for SD account credit either

Thanks but the 500GB drive is what's appealing for me at that price point.

 

[willie]

1.99 for 160GB HD space plus 100GB backup space (and a 1 Gbps unmetered connection) make it worth the price if you're looking for a cheap storage box.  They also make excellent utility boxes: DNS servers, monitoring servers, testing,  etc.  Their reliability is much better than any of the LET openvz "top providers" I ever tried.

Given that there's no RAID and they are likely to be older drives, it doesn't seem wise to use these as storage unless there's separate backup someplace.  By comparison for about the same cost you can get two 128MB Ramnode OpenVZ's with 80GB RAID-10 storage at ~$15/year each (I have two in separate locations and they've been solid).  Or if you can use more space, Hetzner auction servers (i7-2600 with 16GB ram and 2x 3000GB drives) are currently around 32 euro/month ex VAT.  I have an i7-3770 with them and besides the disk space, it's been nice to have a powerful computing box for occasional data crunching, video conversion, etc.  For backups, OVH/Runabove cloud storage looks interesting: .01 euro/GB/month for triply replicated storage, free inbound transit, .01/GB outbound.  So if you're mostly sending data in and only rarely retrieving it, this seems good.  Hetzner also has RAID backup space in the < .01/GB range (2000, 5000, and 10000GB plans) with no transit fees (access through Hetzner network only) but with a setup fee = 1 month of your plan.

I've been somewhat obsessed with Scaleway the past couple weeks.  .02e/GB for pure SSD local storage with 2000 iops/sec is crazy low even with no raid.  And their cloud storage (once it's available again) is .02e/gb with no bandwidth costs, though I don't know if it's also SSD (claims triple replication so presumably HDD).  I'm liking the idea of spinning up 100 of them for 0.60e/hour and doing an overnight computation (10 hours) for 6 euro that would take 100 hours on my Hetzner box.

There is also Hubic (10TB for 50 euro/year, what?) but it's a bit suspicious because of the low cost and low bandwidth spec (10Mbit/sec so it would take months to fill or retrieve the 10TB).  People do claim to be seeing much higher transfer speeds from French OVH servers to Hubic, and nanovz.com's French vps's are at OVH.  But who knows if the fast transfers might stop?

Maybe I'll make another post about cheap storage.

 

[lbft]

Given that there's no RAID and they are likely to be older drives, it doesn't seem wise to use these as storage unless there's separate backup someplace.

They come with 100GB of FTP backup space in a geographically separate datacentre too.

 

[willie]

Oh yes, good point about the backup space, I was going to include mention but forgot.  Do the servers really have 1 gbit to the outside world for realsies?  The current (6 euro) version of that server has 200 mbit on a 1 gbit port, similar to the Scaleways and other of their low end servers.

Meanwhile I've also gotten interested in delimiter.com's slot hosting product.  For $10/month you get a KVM VPS with dedicated 1 core, 1GB ram, and a 3.5" SATA slot, so you ship them a drive (any capacity you want) and they put it in the slot for you.  For $20/mo you can get a double sized KVM with 2 slots so you can run RAID.  I think I might do this with a pair of 2TB drives I have sitting around here, but 5TB drives are currently $140-ish so I'd probably upgrade at some point.  They charge $25 to pull a drive out and ship it back to you (you pay shipping costs).  Seems like a good poor man's colo.

 

[lbft]

Their stated speeds aren't hard limits - you can burst to the full gig, but if you use a lot more than that continuously they may tell you to stop it or cancel your service. The 2 euro servers didn't have the 200mbit thing, the guaranteed bandwidth line was blank on their description page. I think I heard somewhere (don't quote me on this) that there may be only a shared gigabit uplink to the switches groups of those servers are on, something that I wouldn't expect to be the case with the Scaleway servers (since they've got to access their disks over the network too).

 

[willie]

The Scaleway local SSDs appear to be on the same racks as the servers connecting to them, and maybe in the same chassis, it's not real clear.  It doesn't seem to be a conventional SAN someplace else in the room.  They mention they have 912 servers in each rack, which is 24 times 38.  So that makes me guess they have 38U of servers with 24 per 1U, plus 4U of SSD's and network stuff in each rack.

 

[lbft]

I don't know where they're physically located, I don't have numbers but it certainly 'feels' like local SSD storage in normal use. But I was just pointing out that, since they use the ethernet interface, and as you pointed out they have greater density than the Vias (it's 12 per 2U chassis, but in this video they say 252 per rack which would mean a full 42U of them with no other gear), it's unlikely that the Scaleways have that same network bottleneck.

It certainly seems to me that the Scaleway hardware is an evolution of the idea behind the Via gear. That was either custom or highly specialised Dell hardware with an unusual x86 processor (as far as I can guess, the XS11-VX8 was built (nonexclusively) for them by Dell DCS - who do custom data centre hardware - since basically the only mentions of it on the web in English at least are DCS press releases, articles written about DCS press releases and stuff about Online, and Online do have pictures of Dell prototype hardware). But the big downside is the need to have a 2.5" disk for each server - they're pretty much at the upper limit on the density you can pack in, given that you're not really constrained by heat.

Which is why the Scaleways are different - storage moved off the individual nodes to pack them in tighter, ARM processors are excellent in terms of heat to cope with the higher density, and (my speculation is) better networking since there's higher demand on the network from the storage, there's higher bandwidth needed per server in ~2014 than there was in ~2009, and more servers crammed in means that uplink issues would be more likely to impact customers.

 

[Dylan]

Their stated speeds aren't hard limits - you can burst to the full gig, but if you use a lot more than that continuously they may tell you to stop it or cancel your service.

Just to clarify, I was the recipient of one of their guaranteed bandwidth alert messages and that's not exactly how they handle it. They ask you to either limit your bandwidth usage yourself or subscribe to their €79.99/month "higher bandwidth" add-on. If you won't do either, they'll limit the server to your guaranteed bandwidth themselves.

The way they handle it is pretty generous, honestly. Even if you're uncooperative they won't cancel your server... they'll just limit your port.

I do wish they'd be more upfront about what "guaranteed bandwidth" means, but that's a whole other subject.