wdq
Quade
[SIZE=10.5pt]For the past year I have been ordering VPS's of various different sizes to run many different things including game servers, and websites. One comment that I see a lot is that if you have a lot of VPS's then you are probably better off getting a low end dedicated server.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10.5pt]So naturally, I tried out dedicated servers a couple of times in the past, but sadly I really wasn’t impressed. I'm not going to name either of the providers, but last fall I ordered a dedicated server from a provider and found it randomly dropping packets, and sometimes even shutting down. Earlier this year I tried a dedicated server from another provider, but found the Intel Atom processor to be too slow, and I really didn't have a very great connection to their network in Europe, so that really didn't work out very well.
Because of the issues I had with previous dedicated servers, I narrowed my search down to a dedicated server that supported IPMI, or some sort of remote control functionality, and one that was in the United States with a solid network.[/SIZE]
In April I saw an offer on LowEndBox. Quick Packet was offering a dedicated server for $50 per month. That dedicated server had pretty good specs when compared to my previous dedicated servers; it also had IPMI, and was fairly cheap. Since the offer interested me I took a look at the comments. I found quite a few people talking about how good the provider was, and how good the offer was. I didn't end up ordering the server because it sold out very quickly. Even when more stock became available I managed to convince myself that having a bunch of VPS's was better than the dedicated server.
In June I started to need just a little bit more resources. I had a friend who wanted me to host his game server, and I wanted to host another game server of my own. I went ahead and setup a new VPS for that friend, and decided to wait a little while before I created my new game server.
A month later in July I saw a new thread on vpsBoard where Quick Packet was offering that same dedicated server at that same discount. This time I ended up opening a few pre sales tickets, and then a day or so later I ordered the dedicated server.
Here's the initial configuration that cost me $53.99 per month. Essentially it is stock with additional IPv4 addresses.
A few things made me hesitant to switch over to this dedicated server. First off was the processor, which was six years old. Older processors can be kind of hit or miss, and when running multiple game servers the processor is pretty important. The hard drive was another thing I questioned. A single hard drive is quite a bit slower, and quite a bit less reliable than a RAID 10 configuration found in the servers of many VPS providers. Going from 300MB/s to 100MB/s could increase lag for players on the game servers.
It took Quick Packet a few days to get my server up and running. They said that they had to wait for some hard drives to ship, and there were some delays with the shipping. Once the server was up and running I spent a few hours messing around with Proxmox VE in order to get everything figured out and configured. While I was messing around I compressed all of the data on my VPS's so that I could easily transfer the data over to the dedicated server.
While transferring all of the data over to the dedicated server I was pleased to see how fast their network is. With a 100Mbps port I was expecting to have everything copy over at 12.5MB/s, but in reality I was getting near gigabit speeds at around 90MB/s. I assume Quick Packet puts several 100Mbps customers on a shared gigabit switch so that the customers can burst to around gigabit speeds every once in a while. It really didn't take very long to get everything copied over to the dedicated server because of the really fast network.
Once I got the Minecraft servers up and running I was able to compare the performance between the VPS’s and the dedicated server. I noticed that chunks, or parts of the map, seem to load, and render slower when flying around, but I also noticed that jumping between different parts of the map seemed to be much snappier. This could be network related, or maybe I just have a higher priority on the system resources so everything feels snappier.
After having the dedicated server for a little over a week I decided that I was going to stick with it. I went ahead and ordered an additional 1TB hard drive for $89.99. It was installed within that hour. The hard drive installed was a Seagate Barracuda, which is a bit slower than the Western Digital Black hard drive, but it was still fast enough for me.
After another week or so I went ahead and had the RAM upgraded from 16GB to 24GB for another $89.99 setup fee. It was, just like with the hard drive, installed very quickly. However when I tried booting up the server I started to get some errors. I assumed some faulty memory was installed so I replied to the support ticket letting Quick Packet know. They were able to quickly resolve it by installing new RAM, but you'd think that they would test the RAM before installing it. The whole process took somewhere around two hours.
While I was having the problems with the faulty RAM I used IPMI for the first time. In order to see the screen of the server a small Java file was downloaded onto my computer. When I tried to use that Java file on my Mac it just wouldn't open. When I tried it out on my Windows 8 machine I got an error once it started. When I tried it out on a Windows 7 virtual machine with Java 7 it got the same error it did on Windows 8. After booting up an old computer of mine with Windows 7 and Java 6 I was finally able to open it up and see the server's screen remotely. The IPMI on the server is obviously outdated. I have only had to use IPMI twice, but it certainly would be more convenient if it would work on all of my computers.
After adding another hard drive, and upgrading the RAM, I needed once more upgrade. I needed some more IPv4 addresses so that I could have more virtual machines up and running. I opened a ticket with some justification (I basically just listed each IPv4 address that I had at the time along with what each was being used for, and then I listed each IPv4 address that I was going to get with the additional subnet and how I was going to use them.) Within a few minutes the IPv4 addresses were added. rDNS requests are also very quick.
As far as uptime goes I have been impressed. The only time my server has been down physically has been when I have rebooted it. The network has only had an issue once for a few minutes when Quick Packet was under a DDoS attack.
So over the past month I have been really enjoying my dedicated server. I really can understand why so many people have mentioned that a low end dedicated server is better than several VPS's. I have a ton of room on the server for expansion, which I didn't have with the VPS's. I also have more control over the resources and how they are allocated which is great.
There are few things that I miss from when I had a bunch of VPS's. One of those is the variety of locations. Another is the more personal approach to hosting that some of the providers I worked with had.
[SIZE=10.5pt]In the end if you are looking for a low cost dedicated server that has some serious power then I’d really recommend Quick Packet and their Dual Xeon L5420 dedicated servers. I didn’t include any benchmarks in this review, but here’s a benchmark someone else posted. If you have any questions, or want me to run any benchmarks please let me know.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10.5pt]So naturally, I tried out dedicated servers a couple of times in the past, but sadly I really wasn’t impressed. I'm not going to name either of the providers, but last fall I ordered a dedicated server from a provider and found it randomly dropping packets, and sometimes even shutting down. Earlier this year I tried a dedicated server from another provider, but found the Intel Atom processor to be too slow, and I really didn't have a very great connection to their network in Europe, so that really didn't work out very well.
Because of the issues I had with previous dedicated servers, I narrowed my search down to a dedicated server that supported IPMI, or some sort of remote control functionality, and one that was in the United States with a solid network.[/SIZE]
In April I saw an offer on LowEndBox. Quick Packet was offering a dedicated server for $50 per month. That dedicated server had pretty good specs when compared to my previous dedicated servers; it also had IPMI, and was fairly cheap. Since the offer interested me I took a look at the comments. I found quite a few people talking about how good the provider was, and how good the offer was. I didn't end up ordering the server because it sold out very quickly. Even when more stock became available I managed to convince myself that having a bunch of VPS's was better than the dedicated server.
In June I started to need just a little bit more resources. I had a friend who wanted me to host his game server, and I wanted to host another game server of my own. I went ahead and setup a new VPS for that friend, and decided to wait a little while before I created my new game server.
A month later in July I saw a new thread on vpsBoard where Quick Packet was offering that same dedicated server at that same discount. This time I ended up opening a few pre sales tickets, and then a day or so later I ordered the dedicated server.
Here's the initial configuration that cost me $53.99 per month. Essentially it is stock with additional IPv4 addresses.
- Dual Intel Xeon L5420 processors
- 1TB Western Digital Black hard drive
- 16GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory
- 12 usable IPv4 addresses
- 10TB of bandwidth on 100Mbps port
- IPMI
- Proxmox VE 3.0
A few things made me hesitant to switch over to this dedicated server. First off was the processor, which was six years old. Older processors can be kind of hit or miss, and when running multiple game servers the processor is pretty important. The hard drive was another thing I questioned. A single hard drive is quite a bit slower, and quite a bit less reliable than a RAID 10 configuration found in the servers of many VPS providers. Going from 300MB/s to 100MB/s could increase lag for players on the game servers.
It took Quick Packet a few days to get my server up and running. They said that they had to wait for some hard drives to ship, and there were some delays with the shipping. Once the server was up and running I spent a few hours messing around with Proxmox VE in order to get everything figured out and configured. While I was messing around I compressed all of the data on my VPS's so that I could easily transfer the data over to the dedicated server.
While transferring all of the data over to the dedicated server I was pleased to see how fast their network is. With a 100Mbps port I was expecting to have everything copy over at 12.5MB/s, but in reality I was getting near gigabit speeds at around 90MB/s. I assume Quick Packet puts several 100Mbps customers on a shared gigabit switch so that the customers can burst to around gigabit speeds every once in a while. It really didn't take very long to get everything copied over to the dedicated server because of the really fast network.
Once I got the Minecraft servers up and running I was able to compare the performance between the VPS’s and the dedicated server. I noticed that chunks, or parts of the map, seem to load, and render slower when flying around, but I also noticed that jumping between different parts of the map seemed to be much snappier. This could be network related, or maybe I just have a higher priority on the system resources so everything feels snappier.
After having the dedicated server for a little over a week I decided that I was going to stick with it. I went ahead and ordered an additional 1TB hard drive for $89.99. It was installed within that hour. The hard drive installed was a Seagate Barracuda, which is a bit slower than the Western Digital Black hard drive, but it was still fast enough for me.
After another week or so I went ahead and had the RAM upgraded from 16GB to 24GB for another $89.99 setup fee. It was, just like with the hard drive, installed very quickly. However when I tried booting up the server I started to get some errors. I assumed some faulty memory was installed so I replied to the support ticket letting Quick Packet know. They were able to quickly resolve it by installing new RAM, but you'd think that they would test the RAM before installing it. The whole process took somewhere around two hours.
While I was having the problems with the faulty RAM I used IPMI for the first time. In order to see the screen of the server a small Java file was downloaded onto my computer. When I tried to use that Java file on my Mac it just wouldn't open. When I tried it out on my Windows 8 machine I got an error once it started. When I tried it out on a Windows 7 virtual machine with Java 7 it got the same error it did on Windows 8. After booting up an old computer of mine with Windows 7 and Java 6 I was finally able to open it up and see the server's screen remotely. The IPMI on the server is obviously outdated. I have only had to use IPMI twice, but it certainly would be more convenient if it would work on all of my computers.
After adding another hard drive, and upgrading the RAM, I needed once more upgrade. I needed some more IPv4 addresses so that I could have more virtual machines up and running. I opened a ticket with some justification (I basically just listed each IPv4 address that I had at the time along with what each was being used for, and then I listed each IPv4 address that I was going to get with the additional subnet and how I was going to use them.) Within a few minutes the IPv4 addresses were added. rDNS requests are also very quick.
As far as uptime goes I have been impressed. The only time my server has been down physically has been when I have rebooted it. The network has only had an issue once for a few minutes when Quick Packet was under a DDoS attack.
So over the past month I have been really enjoying my dedicated server. I really can understand why so many people have mentioned that a low end dedicated server is better than several VPS's. I have a ton of room on the server for expansion, which I didn't have with the VPS's. I also have more control over the resources and how they are allocated which is great.
There are few things that I miss from when I had a bunch of VPS's. One of those is the variety of locations. Another is the more personal approach to hosting that some of the providers I worked with had.
[SIZE=10.5pt]In the end if you are looking for a low cost dedicated server that has some serious power then I’d really recommend Quick Packet and their Dual Xeon L5420 dedicated servers. I didn’t include any benchmarks in this review, but here’s a benchmark someone else posted. If you have any questions, or want me to run any benchmarks please let me know.[/SIZE]
