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Comments
Are you serious mate? Of course they're not going to upgrade the cpu on this kind of offer. The reason you get all this for such at a low price point is that it's "low end".
And it's only the cpu. Everything else at @PHP_Friends is high end.
If you want a faster CPU, use the German "Widerrufsrecht" and cancel within 14 days just to sign up for one of their regular packages. Or another deal.
The scary thing is that I think he's serious when he says such things
People, this winter special is basically an extended version of @PHP_Friends' BF special, but with more RAM and disk space -- the CPU is the same as the CPU of their BF special.
As @PHP_Friends clarified earlier, the main advantage of these two offers is a good amount of disk space on recent SSDs with SAS (as opposed to SATA) as the protocol, which makes for fast transfer rates.
@PHP_Friends also acknowledged that the CPU is an older model, which means that these offers are aimed more at those people who appreciate the RAM and SSD space rather than at those who want/need a recent (more performant) CPU.
I think that this winter special, just like their BF special before, is a great value for money for what you get.
I absolutely concur that this is a great deal if you are not going to do heavy stuff like transcoding or machine learning. It is plenty of CPU power for running a forum, multiple blogs, NextCloud or whatever other self-hosted stuff that people commonly use (that disk space is really tempting for a NextCloud install).
Please don't forget the fact that this has nested virtualization enabled, so it is wonderful to throw a Proxmox on it to containerize your applications (that amount of RAM and disk space is absolutely delicious for Proxmox).
At that price point, this special offer as I have reviewed earlier ranks very well using my LEBRE value scoring methodology and if you are a savvy value hunter, this special should be in your crosshairs. PHP-Friends have lots of user testimony to the reliability of their services, so there really isn't any reason not to get it if you want a future-proof box.
Cancellations can be done with one sentence via mail / ticket, we don't have plans to automate this as we don't have much cancellations and don't see a real advantage in logging in and clicking some buttons instead of answering to any mail of ours with one sentence (two words would be also okay
) that you want to cancel. The advantage of our current cancellation process is that we always ask for feedback and if we can make a special offer to keep the customer. This way we often can find a new product for the customer and both parties are happy 
English emails will come, we are working on this, but we are in Germany - so basically everything we "publish" has to be checked by a lawyer etc. so it's not that easy. It's not something we can do over a weekend.
Thanks. We had a lot of older Xeon E5 CPUs, mainboards and RAM on stock from our last HDD generation (released in the beginning of 2015 - after that we only sold SSD servers) and they are working great, so should we throw them away? ^^ No, we don't think that this is senseful for economic and ecological reasons. So we thought that really fast storage instead of just reactivating four year old products for a better price would be a good deal to use this hardware. We bought new chassis with redundant power supplies (to make sure our regular redundancy standards are applied), new SAS controllers, added a bunch of the best non-NVMe SSDs Samsung offers and started the Black Friday special - which was the most successful product we ever sold on a single day.
If you need lots of CPU performance, this product is not for you. If you serve a few websites, voice servers, VPN, ... you won't even notice that you are not running an Intel Gold CPU. Our website, CRM, SolusVM etc. runs on the same CPU and has relatively high traffic in December. Is it slow? Absolutely not
I would even say that for most regular tasks the disk and RAM performance is more important than the CPU. Run some apt / yum tasks and you'll see what I mean.
And of course we will not buy new CPUs and upgrade the nodes. The chassis and disks are that expensive that the systems have to run 6-9 months before we earn a single Euro, it's not that these offers make us rich on the first day
Our regular products come with a notice period of only two weeks. Most German providers have 1 month / 30 / 31 days.
Best Regards,
Tim
Great news: We were able to buy new hardware from a local distributor, so we don't have to wait for the hardware that will be delivered tomorrow. Pending orders should be delivered within the next 6 hours.
Best Regards,
Tim
Totally makes sense to re-purpose old servers. Samsung SSDs have legendary endurance and speeds (I have two of them I know) and with SAS controllers, these boxes offer beastly speeds at a low end pricing. Anyone who has ever built and tested PCs will know that the order of bottle is usually storage, followed by RAM and finally CPU (assuming we are talking about regular desktop/server CPUs produced at least 5-6 years ago). I have breathed new life into even 7-8 year old desktop PCs will a cheap SSD and RAM upgrade, and for regular usage, I don't feel a difference from my Ryzen 2600X with 32GB DDR4 Samsung SSD.
I like the philosophy and how you repurposed and repackaged the offer. Now I just need to find the * need * to take this up :-)
Deleted duplicate post
Friend of mine is using this offer for plex in combination with Gdrive. Without transcoding, there is almost no load on it. And i‘m sure one transcode (needs around 2.000 benchmark) is going to work fine too. He‘s happy as he knows that the storage is that high for metadata and redundant everything will make up for a high uptime.
How long has PHP Friends been doing business? Looks like 2009 per their website?
Just wondering.. Companies that have been around 5-10+ years normally inspire some degree of confidence.
Tagging @Ympker - their (volunteer) "marketing person" . I think in some post he had mentioned that they started out as a group of enthusiasts several years ago and turned it into business. So the unofficial Corporate history of PHP Friends can be confirmed :-)
I don't remember when exactly they started out but they have been around for quite some time for sure
should tag @PHP_Friends directly, isn't it?
Thanks- since this is a day of Providers completely mis understanding my intentions, I opted not to tag Tim / PHP_Friends
Tagging Ympker was tongue in cheek- someone had asked him in this very thread if they worked in Marketing Department of PHP_Friends.
And to be more Mr. Evident- I am sure the German equivalent of Ministry of Company/Corporate affairs would have the record of the company- how long they have been around etc. But then the poster who posed that question did not want to take that step. Maybe due to language. Or time of the year, or both.
Anyways, time to take a break from posting.
Cheers and Merry Christmas
Hi,
our very short timeline is:
2009: first steps in hosting, building websites for local companies etc. (which was absolutely not successful at all
)
)
2010: Launch of our free hosting which became one of the biggest in Germany, providing managed hosting for some local companies to finance it (which was - you guessed it - also not very successful
2013: Free beta test for KVM servers with a few hundred users, founding of the "Strauch & Schneider IT GbR"
2014: (9 months later) official release of our first KVM generation
2015: Conversion of the "Strauch & Schneider IT GbR" into the "PHP-Friends GmbH", moving into our first real office in a local business park
Since 2013 it's already a full-time job, but the real growth started with the GmbH in the end of 2015. The business before was kind of a hobby which somehow escalated to a real company with real employees.
Merry Christmas
Best Regards,
Tim
So why PHP-Friends this brand name?