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Who is the cheapest dedicated server provider? - Page 2
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Who is the cheapest dedicated server provider?

24

Comments

  • @mosquitoguy said:

    @letlover said:
    What is your experience about Contabo? Is it really that bad? At first I looked at its cheapest storage VPS. Seems OK to me. But I don't have handson experience on Contabo and the review is really bad.

    My experience is that you're much more likely to get an overloaded server choosing a small vps on contabo. I've had several XL vps on east coast and cpu stealing has never been over 5%. On my small vps, the cpu steal varies from 5-20%. People who tend to abuse vps want to get the biggest bang for the buck, so they go for the cheapest.

    I don't even know what "ram stealing" means. Which hypervisor allows you to overcommit memory? I don't think this applies to virtualized environments. If you're talking about LXC containers or shared hosting, then yes, but I'd never use LXC containers because of the lack of isolation.

    Thank you for the first hand experience sharing. Your approach of going high to avoid the crowd is actually very smart. I suspect that OVH and Scaleway vpses have similar pattern too. It is good that only cpu steal is popular, not RAM or HDD/SSD quota. That means Contabo's RAM and HDD/SSD spec may be trustful.

  • Peppery9Peppery9 Member
    edited June 2022

    @mosquitoguy said:
    I don't even know what "ram stealing" means. Which hypervisor allows you to overcommit memory? I don't think this applies to virtualized environments.

    Memory ballooning (or using swap as RAM) is how they do it. My “48GB” RAM VM at SSDNodes balloons every couple of days as the host runs out of memory.

  • sanvitsanvit Member

    @Peppery9 said:

    @mosquitoguy said:
    I don't even know what "ram stealing" means. Which hypervisor allows you to overcommit memory? I don't think this applies to virtualized environments.

    Memory ballooning (or using swap as RAM) is how they do it. My “48GB” RAM VM at SSDNodes balloons every couple of days as the host runs out of memory.

    How do you know if it's ballooning or not? Is there a way to check, or are you checking the ram speed?

  • Peppery9Peppery9 Member
    edited June 2022

    @sanvit said:

    @Peppery9 said:

    @mosquitoguy said:
    I don't even know what "ram stealing" means. Which hypervisor allows you to overcommit memory? I don't think this applies to virtualized environments.

    Memory ballooning (or using swap as RAM) is how they do it. My “48GB” RAM VM at SSDNodes balloons every couple of days as the host runs out of memory.

    How do you know if it's ballooning or not? Is there a way to check, or are you checking the ram speed?

    You'll notice all the free RAM is gobbled up by the balloon process, and you may get warnings in your syslog:

    Jun 12 20:28:47 hx-lax kernel: [1232601.322741] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    Jun 12 20:28:50 hx-lax kernel: [1232604.363402] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    Jun 13 06:12:45 hx-lax kernel: [1267639.377904] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    Jun 13 22:18:30 hx-lax kernel: [1325584.212976] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    Jun 13 22:18:50 hx-lax kernel: [1325603.816081] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    Jun 13 22:18:50 hx-lax kernel: [1325604.075901] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    
    Thanked by 3sanvit ralf mosquitoguy
  • ralfralf Member
    edited June 2022

    This ballooning thing was news to me, so I googled it. Presumably if you just killed the driver, the guest would just use the full memory allowance as if there was no ballooning, but the host would swap more whenever you accessed memory, so this is "kind of better"?

    But either way, it sounds pretty lame of a provider to do that as the hypervisor has to be specifically configured to tell the VM to report it has X RAM whilst requesting it to only allow a chunk of it to be used.

    That said, I am tempted to try it out on the private VMs on my dedi, as they're all currently sized to the maximum size they'll need, but most of them are usually idle.

    Just had a quick try on one of my VMs:

    # virsh setmem --domain blah --size 1024M --current
    

    It works well, and top and /proc/meminfo are reduced accordingly (in this case MemTotal is 980024KB)

  • PulsedMediaPulsedMedia Member, Patron Provider

    Memory ballooning has been common place for a reaaaally long time. It's nothing new.

  • ralfralf Member

    @PulsedMedia said:
    Memory ballooning has been common place for a reaaaally long time. It's nothing new.

    Yeah, the article I was reading was 10 years old, but I've just never experimented with VMs prior to getting a decent dedi deal last BF. Also quite pleasing to see that even Windows supports it as a guest OS.

  • coldcold Member

    @cociu he can help you

  • @afn said:
    If you want toys/non-serious servers

    • Kimsufi (ovh)
    • legacy online.net servers via oneprovider's website

    If you want real servers:

    • Hetzner

    If you want big and quality servers or 10gbps

    • Leaseweb resellers (andy10gbit and walkerservers)

    No one beats these prices in Europe value/money. Can't talk for US. I see some crazy 20$ bucks dedis in US from time to time here on LET.

    please what is the website of andy10gbit?

  • iKeyZiKeyZ Veteran

    @mimihost said:

    @afn said:
    If you want toys/non-serious servers

    • Kimsufi (ovh)
    • legacy online.net servers via oneprovider's website

    If you want real servers:

    • Hetzner

    If you want big and quality servers or 10gbps

    • Leaseweb resellers (andy10gbit and walkerservers)

    No one beats these prices in Europe value/money. Can't talk for US. I see some crazy 20$ bucks dedis in US from time to time here on LET.

    please what is the website of andy10gbit?

    It's over discord - links in his profile here; https://www.reddit.com/user/Andy10gbit/

  • @iKeyZ said:

    @mimihost said:

    @afn said:
    If you want toys/non-serious servers

    • Kimsufi (ovh)
    • legacy online.net servers via oneprovider's website

    If you want real servers:

    • Hetzner

    If you want big and quality servers or 10gbps

    • Leaseweb resellers (andy10gbit and walkerservers)

    No one beats these prices in Europe value/money. Can't talk for US. I see some crazy 20$ bucks dedis in US from time to time here on LET.

    please what is the website of andy10gbit?

    It's over discord - links in his profile here; https://www.reddit.com/user/Andy10gbit/

    thank you

    Thanked by 1iKeyZ
  • @Peppery9 said:
    You'll notice all the free RAM is gobbled up by the balloon process, and you may get warnings in your syslog:

    Jun 12 20:28:47 hx-lax kernel: [1232601.322741] virtio_balloon virtio3: Out of puff! Can't get 1 pages
    

    I've never seen this in any of my vps. If I did, it would be the last payment for that vps. That's a massive performance hit as the OS presumably needs to defrag the memory in order to return contiguous pages of it to the hypervisor. It makes cpu/memory specifications pointless.

  • Thanks for sharing the information.
    https://www.pcmag.com/

  • DPDP Administrator, The Domain Guy

    @wowspremium12 said:
    Thanks for sharing the information.
    https://www.pcmag.com/

    Sorry but what does PCMag have to do with this?

  • @letlover said: ks-1 raid 0 is not safe unless some realtime backup is implemented

    KS1 only has one drive, so not RAID at all. This is actually safer than RAID0 (R0 gains speed by sacrificing safety). But you aren't wrong about backups, anything you care enough about to store long term should be in at least two locations (not just mirrored on the same machine, it should be in another location, or another provider entirely, or preferably both).

    realtime backup

    True realtime backup is going to be overkill for most uses. Work out what your desired maximum data loss window and recovery times objectives are, and work out your backup strategy from that. You might find they are quite different for different bits of your data.

    @letlover said:
    By the way, for 4 same size disks, other than raid 10, can I mirror all? For example 4x2tb, I just want 2tb, mirrored on 4 disks to be safe. Is this Raid 100? or something else. It will be useful for old servers.

    As others already mentioned, you probably don't need to do that - an off-server backup it likely what you are looking for. RAID1 is for availability and easy replacement of failed drives, not backup. Depending on what you use for RAID you can easily use all four drives as a single mirror (with Linux software RAID just create a RAID1 array with all four devices, and it is done). Though the amount of safety each extra drive gives is smaller each time, especially compared to what other protections (off server backups) can offer.

    Thanked by 1letlover
  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    The KS Sale from 2016/2017, machine still running btw, not a single hw failure yet.
    Best uptime so far.

    Can't beat 9.99€ for an i5 with 16GB and 2TB drive.

    Thanked by 1Erisa
  • @Neoon said:
    Can't beat 9.99€ for an i5 with 16GB and 2TB drive.

    which i5 model?

  • ahnlakahnlak Member

    At that price, does it matter? :smile:

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    @mosquitoguy said:

    @Neoon said:
    Can't beat 9.99€ for an i5 with 16GB and 2TB drive.

    which i5 model?

    Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570S CPU @ 3.10GHz

  • AXYZEAXYZE Member

    @ralf said:
    This ballooning thing was news to me, so I googled it. Presumably if you just killed the driver, the guest would just use the full memory allowance as if there was no ballooning, but the host would swap more whenever you accessed memory, so this is "kind of better"?

    But you cant do it, killing balloon = abuse. They will reboot your machine for that.
    https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3083500/#Comment_3083500

  • Other than cpu stealing, ram stealing, is there network stealing? is there hdd/ssd stealing? Just curious.

  • I just got my KS1. I am installing OS on it. The control panel that the partions of 2 tb and 512 mb. Hahaha.

  • I'm a fan of the lowest option in the SoYouStart (now OVH Eco) line. It is quite a step up in price, but you get a Xeon D-1520 or 1521 quad core, 2.6-2.7Ghz (it always boosts, even within 45W), 32GB ECC RAM, and for the HDD option 4x2TB. Crucially, it has IPMI access included, which means you can mount your own ISO and fully configure or rescue the system. HDD is not as fast as SSD, but put a RAID10 at the start and allocate the rest to RAID5 and performance should be good enough for many purposes.

  • ralfralf Member

    @AXYZE said:
    But you cant do it, killing balloon = abuse. They will reboot your machine for that.
    https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3083500/#Comment_3083500

    I guess I'll be avoiding that provider then!

  • @letlover said:
    Other than cpu stealing, ram stealing, is there network stealing? is there hdd/ssd stealing? Just curious.

    network stealing is a given. that's just the nature of vps. you're sharing bandwidth with the other vps and no one has gets a dedicated bandwidth.

    same with hdd/ssd if the disk is virtual. you can be promised 2TB but maybe there's only 500GB disk free on the host. You won't know it until you've filled up the hd.

    Thanked by 1letlover
  • ralfralf Member

    @letlover said:
    I just got my KS1. I am installing OS on it. The control panel that the partions of 2 tb and 512 mb. Hahaha.

    Yeah, my second KS-1 finally got provisioned after 20 hours wait. Also 2TB disk which is almost 8 years old and probably taken more of a beating than the one in the KS-1 I'm going to dispose of. Funny that the e-mail from Kimsufi says that they "extensively tested" the drive, even though it has only ever had 3 short disk tests, done in the first couple of months of its life.

    What's weird though is that the iperf tests show decent connectivity to Europe, but the connectivity to the US and non-Europe is around 23 Mbps even though though the original KS-1 gets also identical bandwidth to Europe as elsewhere. I guess as I'm just using it for backup, I don't care too much as 2TB disk is better than 512GB, but it's still weird that the network connectivity is so different even though both machines are in GRA-1.

  • @ralf said:

    @letlover said:
    I just got my KS1. I am installing OS on it. The control panel that the partions of 2 tb and 512 mb. Hahaha.

    Yeah, my second KS-1 finally got provisioned after 20 hours wait. Also 2TB disk which is almost 8 years old and probably taken more of a beating than the one in the KS-1 I'm going to dispose of. Funny that the e-mail from Kimsufi says that they "extensively tested" the drive, even though it has only ever had 3 short disk tests, done in the first couple of months of its life.

    What's weird though is that the iperf tests show decent connectivity to Europe, but the connectivity to the US and non-Europe is around 23 Mbps even though though the original KS-1 gets also identical bandwidth to Europe as elsewhere. I guess as I'm just using it for backup, I don't care too much as 2TB disk is better than 512GB, but it's still weird that the network connectivity is so different even though both machines are in GRA-1.

    I guess Kimsufi is cheaping out after the branding period. The same with Scaleway stardust. Hetzner is really good for transatlantic transmission.

  • ralfralf Member

    @letlover said:

    What's weird though is that the iperf tests show decent connectivity to Europe, but the connectivity to the US and non-Europe is around 23 Mbps even though though the original KS-1 gets also identical bandwidth to Europe as elsewhere.

    I guess Kimsufi is cheaping out after the branding period. The same with Scaleway stardust. Hetzner is really good for transatlantic transmission.

    I think it's something else. Just tried scp'ing data at the same time from both boxes to my two VMs in different parts of the US, and they both got almost identical throughput (10.5MB/s to one and 9.8MB/s vs 9.9MB/s to the other). So maybe they just have different routes from different subnets to the iperf servers.

    Anyway, for my use cases, throughput is fine! :D

  • @mosquitoguy said:

    @letlover said:
    Other than cpu stealing, ram stealing, is there network stealing? is there hdd/ssd stealing? Just curious.

    network stealing is a given. that's just the nature of vps. you're sharing bandwidth with the other vps and no one has gets a dedicated bandwidth.

    same with hdd/ssd if the disk is virtual. you can be promised 2TB but maybe there's only 500GB disk free on the host. You won't know it until you've filled up the hd.

    Just did some reading. Disk I/O is shared also. There is a disk speed stealing too!

  • I really hope Kimsufi can provide a below $10 raid 1 dedi. I do not care about the cpu and ram. HDD can 500 gb. Just give me raid 1 and $9.99.

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