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Euro Plex Server VPS - rclone/fuse for encrypted ACD. No torrents. No transcoding. $10 or less
Hello.
First I'd like to thank the people on this site, only discovered it yesterday and have learned a lot. Now, if I may, I'd like to ask a question. There are similar questions to mine but I think my use case might be a bit different to those...
I've got my media up on Amazon Cloud Drive, encrypted via rclone. My current home server is a 10 year-old Ubuntu build (Q6600), noisy and hot. Plex server runs well from this using rclone's FUSE-mounted Amazon Cloud Drive. My Plex clients (Shield TV, Amazon FireTV) generally do not require transcoding.
I'm looking at replacing this with a VPS if that is possible/advisable. I have 300 Mbit/s down and am in Spain. I would be the only user, on only one client. No more than two hours per day I'd say and far more likely, no hours per day!
I think I'd only need a smallish local disk for the Plex server's metadata plus rclone/temp usage (say less than 64 gig all told.)
Suggestions gratefully received - thanks in advance!
Comments
Sounds like something that scaleway.com should be able to handle. Save money by shutting down the instances you dont use.
Thanks! I'll have a quick look. For some reason I thought Scaleway were all ARM cores...
@AshleyUK
ZXPlay has some nice offers in Germany where encoding is allowed if you should need it later for whatever reason.
Thanks Cartman. ZXPlay.co.uk looks very good but a bit more than I was hoping to spend. (Do they have somewhere in Germany too? I couldn't find it...)
60GB Netherlands VPS $5/month. Does this work for you? Do you need KVM?
Ishaq, thank you. That looks ve-e-e-ry interesting. As to whether I'd need KVM, I'm not sure. I do need FUSE installed in the linux kernel so that rclone can mount the Amazon Cloud Drive (so that Plex can see the media.) I know it can be done with KVM but am not sure whether it can be done with OpenVZ. I'll try to find out more on that (and if anyone knows, please inform this ignorant newbie!)
Thanks again!
On OpenVZ your hoster will have to enable the fuse module for your VPS but once they do that you should be able to install the fuse package and mount any fuse filesystem you want.
Thanks JonsCookie. I'll have a look at these options some more tonight after work and will report my findings here. All in the interests of science! :-)
Just a quick note, I spent a couple of hours playing around with Scaleway's 6 euro VC1M offering (Avoton C2750 4 cores, 4 GB RAM, 100GB "SSD"). I'm quite impressed with it, a small bit of faffing around with fuse, rclone and Plex and I'm able to stream my 1080p movies stored in an encrypted ACD with no problems. rclone never hits more than 5 % according to top. I then tried a short transcode of a 12 Mbps 1080p down to a 4Mbps 720p just to see what would happen - no stutters but the transcoder was hovering around the 250..300% CPU mark. A bit like my current Q6600 server does for the same movie... except a hell of a lot quieter!
The ability to shut down the server and restart it whenever and then be up and running watching another movie inside 2 minutes is also impressive.
If I have time I may try out the other options mentioned here but I can see myself just sticking with this, it worked almost first time!
Or maybe I'll see how low I can go switching to an even lower-powered VPS on Scaleway... while still being able to stream 1080p of course! I might be back with another report during the week.
Thank you all for your help and suggestions - much appreciated!
And by way of another follow-up, I tossed that server and set up the even cheaper 2.99 euro VC1S dual core C2450 Avoton, 2 Gigs RAM, and one 50 gig "SSD".
It's half the cores, RAM and disk of its bigger brother... And half the price.
Transcoding 12 Mbit/s to 4 Mbit/s was not very satisfying, as expected given yesterday's numbers.
However general usage and direct play is on a par with the VC1M.
I must say that I am pleasantly surprised.
I'll run a few more tests tomorrow, but for now I think I have a winner!
VC1S is an excellent deal. You probably know that 1) you can add extra disk volumes (50gb) for 1 euro/month; 2) you can keep the disk volumes active while the server is shut down and the IP address is released, so you're paying only for the disk space when you're not using the network or cpu. Just FYI if you didn't know this.
Thanks Willie! I'm still amazed by the whole Scaleway thing to be honest. I reckon with my Plex usage I should be able to get a server for less than $2 a month. (For me, the base 50 GB "SSD" is fine - the only local disk space used would be for Plex databases and my library isn't that big!)
Though I might try their ARM offering as well to see how that pans out... all in the interests of science, you understand :-)
Their ARM server is usually out of stock these days, though I'm told you can get one if you're persistent. I'd guess each ARM core is around 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of an Atom core, and an Atom core is about 1/4 the speed of an E3 core. I can try transcoding something on one for you if you want. I've had one a year or so and they are cool, though I don't use it much.
Cheers Willie! Yeah, just tried getting one now and they're OOS. No worries on the transcode tests, I think I'm happy enough with the VC1S.
the best option for you i think is @jmginer because hi have Madrid location
These atom cores are about 1/4th of an E3 core, but about 1/2 of an E3 thread. They come with 8 cores whereas most E3s come with 8 threads.
The full atom box (8 cores) benches about 50% of a full E3 box (4c/8t), and Plex doesn't care about single-thread performance.