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[Poll] Anyone still interested in affordable LE storage VPS?
I'm entertaining the idea of budget storage containers based on OVH (will start with NA as there's not much in terms of supercheap LE storage providers here)
Specs would be something like:
1 GB RAM
1 TB Disk | No RAID
Unmetered Inbound
5 TB Outbound
100Mbps
LXC containers
$6/month or
$45/year
Works out to $3.75/TB which is pretty cheap.
The disks would be mounted separately so that if a disk fails, the entire node doesn't go down.
STORAGEVPSPOLL
- Would you be interested?52 votes
- Yes - As Is30.77%
- Yes - I would rather have RAID and pay a little extra ($60/yr)21.15%
- No - Too expensive already/useless service21.15%
- No - I would never use a storage server without RAID26.92%
Comments
my opinion, It is expensive if don't have raid, not worth it.
also:
Poll not found
Not sure why people want RAID so badly for their cheapo backup servers, but RAID could probably be done at a $60/yr price point if that changes anything.
there are other options cheaper. zxhost, speedkvm and more, so why pay 60 usd for the same server, if i can get it at 48/y
That's too expensive for no-RAID. A RAID offer in the $5-6/TB range would probably draw interest. Also 100mbit is too slow.
Right now I have an @i83 250GB annual plan at BHS (and another in Falkenstein, DE) that comes to $4.69/TiB/mo iirc, though they have reorganized that offer since then. They currently have (I surmise) a 1000GiB BHS plan equiv. to $5.54/TiB with coupon, and in London and Falkenstein (not BHS at the moment) they have a 2000GiB plan at $4.94/TiB equivalent (all annual NAT plans). I'm guessing the black friday coupon doesn't work any more on the 250GB plans but I haven't tried it today.
I think if I were doing cheap storage, I'd set it up like Hetzner StorageBox (i.e. scp/sftp etc. instead of a VPS) to ease up cpu workload etc.
As for me personally, I'm always monitoring cheap storage offers but for now my preferred location is Falkenstein since I have a dedi there. It's good to have more available in North America though.
I don't even recommend any solutions without RAID, personally: No
I voted "require raid" but truthfully I'd consider a non-RAID offer if it was cheap enough and I could get several that were guaranteed to be on separate physical nodes. 3.75/TB is nowhere near cheap enough.
location/providers are different. this is ovh vs hetzner basically. currently all bottom of the barrel storage is located in Europe. For people who have backup/storage needs in NA, this could be useful.
what speedykvm plan is $50/yr? I see one that's 500GB but that's still double the price. Is there a special I'm unaware of?
@willie
I am heavily considering that way of handling things as well with just sftp access/similar. i can probably hit the $6 mark with hw raid 5. Not sure about the $5 mark if I want it to stay sustainable.
Make the RAM lower, 256 MB or even 128 MB.
Maybe have options for 2 x 500GB on two different hard drives? So for the people require RAID, they can set up software RAID.
This is an option I will consider as well. That being said, it may just be better in the long run to have 2 different host nodes (one with RAID, and one without) just to cater to different audiences.
Currently, as far as I can tell, the cheapest storage WITH RAID in north america seems to be speedyKVM at $8.06/TB/mo with a minimum $129/mo commitment. (Raid 5)
The second closest contender I could find was OVH at $7.5/TB/mo (HW Raid 5) with a $181/mo commitment.
With some smart overprovisioning, this could definitely be bumped down to $6/mo ($72/yr).
If anyone knows of any cheaper providers, let me know because I'd love a solution!
Speedykvm is $8/TB with 50%-off RyanLET coupon or with some of their V-Dedi plans. $6/TB raid5 at BHS would be pretty good. Really in quantities like 1TB, even paying with personal funds another $1/month here or there doesn't matter in any sane financial picture. It's more about the recreational challenge of doing stuff cheap (most of LET is like that I think). And if my storage consumption gets a lot higher someday, I'd want to go colo rather than continue renting storage.
One issue maybe on the horizon is OVH's own FTP storage plans, which used to be competitive with Hetzner (but available at BHS etc.), $8/TB in the 10TB size. Then Hetzner dropped its prices roughly in half about a year ago but OVH didn't follow. They might do that sometime, one never knows. Oles quite a while back announced an intention to lower OVH cloud storage prices to around $4/TB (would still have bandwidth charges) but nothing has happened yet. You might think about that issue before sinking a lot of cash into a BHS setup.
I mean, ive got 512GB backup VZ from OpenVZ.io in LA, and I pay £3 for 512GB of RAID10, with 2TB of BW.
Completely agreed. I think that is the largest issue I'll have to tackle before offering this as the only thing I am competing on is price and the second a larger outfit like OVH decide to roll out lower priced alternatives, it basically falls apart.
Do you think the interest would be dropped significantly if these weren't offered as containers but rather as only FTP/SFTP access? Perhaps remote mounts?
From their site, unless you have a special deal it looks like it's RAID50 and using today's exchange rate, that comes out to ~$7.50/TB/mo
Last LEB offer.
Best I could find, their offer post said RAID50 as well. They also charged $4/mo in USD which would translate to $8/TB/mo which matches SpeedyKVM (Yes, there might be a bit more performance due to striping but it's a storage/backup server... I don't think performance is a super-duper huge thing)
I probably meant RAID 50, and wrote RAID 10. I'm tired (and arguing with Online.net at the moment).
Arguing with online.net seems to take up everyone's time nowadays
Please don't touch RAID50. With drives being as large as they are these days the chances of a 2nd drive having unreadable sectors is almost guaranteed and you're going to have a failed array when you have to do a rebuild.
I've had to dd_rescue way too many drives when we were doing 50's for that very reason.
Francisco
Thanks for the input. I agree that RAID50 is no fun. I only mentioned it because Iniz seems to use it while hawc mentioned it was RAID10 (Just wanted to clarify which it was)
What type of RAID would you say is suitable for today's technology?
1, 10, 100, 6, 60, are all safe.
Francisco
Yes I'm also scared of raid 5 with more than 4 drives. Maybe I should be scared with 3 or 4 drives too.
Hetzner storage boxes support scp/sftp so it's possible to sshfs-mount the storage and that works ok except the transfer speed is cut in half compared with plain scp. I don't remember if sshfs worked with OVH's backup storage (I had some ages ago) but I think it was ftp-only.
I got into this while involved with a project needing around 20TB, at which point the costs start actually adding up, but now someone else is taking care of the storage side of that.
Overall I don't think this is a promising venture unless you're using your own hardware and cheap colo. I'd be hesitant to buy large storage plans from a new entrant because migrating TB's of data if the seller has problems is much harder than migrating a small VPS. So I've stayed with BuyVM, OVH, Hetzner, and more recently Time4vps and i83, which are smaller but have at least been around for a while.
Yes I'd be fine with an scp-only product, or possibly even a storage plan with zero internet connectivity, accessible only through a VPS or dedi hosted at the same DC over a private LAN. I use my i83 BHS plan mostly like that, sshfs mounted to an OVH VPS-SSD. That setup has been working quite well.
For the first time in years I start feeling like my own storage appetite is close to satisfied, since I've just gotten the two i83 plans, plus handed off some data to other people and am in the process of consolidating more. When I got my Hetzner dedi I'd have had to spend at least 3x as much to get anything comparable in North America, but that's starting to get better, so I could imagine wanting to move at some point.
If you do raid 5 or 50 and have to do a rebuild, I'd much rather that you took the node offline during the rebuild than trying to keep it running, to go easier on the remaining disks.
If this about openvz.io, their 2TB plan works out to $5.62/TB. The 512GB and 1TB plans are $7.50/TB.
RAID 5 isn't about total drives, it's size of the array. There was some statistical report done that at around 10TB of space you're more or less guaranteed to have 2nd failure while rebuilding. You can work around it with dd-rescuing but you end up having to pull the array offline to do that and then wait for rescue to finish. Say you're using 2TB drives, that's still a good 8+ hours assuming you get 100MB/sec+ end to end.
Francisco
Thanks, I'll try to find further info about when to expect 2 drives failing. I had thought the problem was worst if you were trying to do an online rebuild.
I wouldn't use a cheap storage plan to run any live services, so I'd much rather take an 8 hour outage than a longer period of hobbled performance that had increased risk of trashing all the data. I don't know how other people use these plans.
But I'm even more comfortable with raid 6, which is still economical if there's a lot of drives with hardware raid.
Backup servers and storage servers aren't the same thing.
Backup = the data actually lives somewhere else but here's a copy in case something bad happens to the primary copy. Or if something happens to the backup then I still have the primary. So no-RAID is ok unless both servers fail simultaneously.
Storage = this IS the primary copy, it's not very active so I want to park it here with the intention of using it later, with reasonable assurance that it will still be there at that time.
If the data is highly important then it should also be backed up, but for medium-importance data I've been (unwisely) ok relying on storage plans with RAID. The data is not in active use so I'm less likely to fatfinger-delete something than on a dev box, etc.
If the drive has an unreadable bit it's going to shit out of the array be it under stress or not
Francisco
raid z3 will be the new raid 6, with all these 8tb drives hitting mainstream.
5TB bandwidth is not enough outbound.
I thought you could set up raid 6 hw controllers to use 3 redundancy drives, e.g. with a 15 drive Hetzner SX-291 you could have 12 data drives and 3 spares, so you'd survive any 3-drive failure. ZFS sounds great but can software keep up with it???
I've heard of some large NAS systems designed for zero hardware maintenance. They're built so that as drives fail, spares take their place seamlessly, and they start with enough spares that they expect to not run out within the designed 5 year (or whatever) product life. I guess if there's unexpectedly many failures there's an alert of some sort, but that is intended to not happen.
Modern E5/E3 is powerful enough AFAIK on zfs+ECC.
It's the 'home-NAS' ARM SoCs that may not have the juice.
More reading at /r/homelab and /r/datahoarder.
Personally, I'd prefer to split up 15 direct-attached drives into 2 RaidZ2/raid6 pools .
edit: or alternatively: 4xdisk RAID10 + 11xdisk RAIDz3 for sequential IO friendly data.
It's just that my risk quotient is lower.