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Looking for cheap small servers around the world
As a production automation company we develop processes which are highly time dependent. For this we operate our own NTP time server network to which our clients and general users on the internet can connect. Currently our network consists of 8 time servers which are all located in Europe, but we are looking to expand our network to other continents.
For this we are looking for cheap servers (preferably no VPS because they have often less accurate timing) in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The NTP protocol is not resource heavy, so modest or older hardware will do. As we don't store any local data like websites or databases on the site, a small disk or SSD is no problem. The specs we are looking for are:
- OS: Centos 7 64 bit, minimal installation
- Access: root access through ssh
- Network connection: 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps
- Expected traffic: 200 to 1000 UDP packets per second sustained in each direction
- Expected bandwidth usage: 100 to 500 GB per month
- RAM: 1 GB due to the requirements of the Centos 7 installer, at runtime 512 MB will do
- Processor: anything Celeron, Atom or up.
- Harddisk: Anything sufficient to store a Centos 7 installation.
- IP: One IPv4 address and one IPv6/64 block
We are offering time services since 2007 and are in for a long term solution. So please no solutions with a bargain price for the first months and then skyrocketing prices. A situation where we as part of the agreement deliver accurate timing to a hosting company or data center is also an option. We have our own in-house stratum 1 time server with 1 micro second accuracy to synchronize on.
Lammert
Comments
pool.ntp.org ?
You will hardly find dedicated servers with such specs, In Asia you cannot expect 100Mbps or 1Gbps unless you do not mind about direct china route and the price is not cheap at all.
It is not fine, OpenVZ containers do not have separate clocks. They use the clock of the host node. You can authorize a specific container to modify the clock, but i doubt many providers would do it for a customer, because he can then screw up the time for everyone on the node.
@rds100 we are probably the largest world-wide time provider on pool.ntp.org with 14 IPs each at 1Gbps connection speed :-) Problem is that not all pool members have equal timing quality as many are behind ADSL and other slow or asymmetric connections. Our application can therefore not rely on the pool.ntp.org timing as a base.
@andreamada, we did tests on OpenVZ but it doesn't have good timing accuracy because the host and virtual machines are not completely separated. KVM and XEN are probably OK.
@rds100 That's correct, I thought about it few minutes later by editing the thread but
OpenVZ uses the node's clock therefore it's not suitable in his case. A KVM VPS should be fine for you.
you anticipated me
you have measures to prevent abuse for DDoS... right?
KVM/Xen/VMWare work fine (ESXi and HyperV probably most hardware near of all).
You need to state a budget though, "cheap" is not really indicative.
Yes. All commands which amplify like monitor requests are disabled. Furthermore traffic is limited at the firewall level to 10 requests per minute per IP. That is enough for initial connection requests which are typically 8 requests in 64 seconds, but will mitigate all high volume abuse.
Regarding the budget, I will not give any budget to prevent offers which are crafted to match exactly that budget. We are renting and have rented dedicated servers in the past for anything between $4 and $200 per month. Yes, that $4 is dedicated, not VPS. Prices are highly dependent on available data infrastructure, price of electricity, setup of the data center and hosting company philosophy. Prices can also depend heavily between countries due to taxes and subsidies from the government.
Some providers may give a discount because of the offer to provide their servers with accurate time from our time base and the knowledge that NTP traffic is making flat use of bandwidth without peaks. Other may add a a surplus to the offer because they are generally overselling their bandwidth or are afraid of DDoS attacks.
As there is no sensitive or critical data on the servers, an offer from Singapore will be considered the same as an offer from Brasil or Egypt, but due to the points mentioned above, those offers may differ widely in price.
We can do HK for <$100/month. If you do not need critical support or China Traffic then even less! But based on older hardware, cannot guarantee replacements in case of failures.
Thanks @randvegeta. Just to get the right perspective, is that USD 100 or HKD 100?
@Bafly, USD. The electricity alone will be more than HK$100.
That question pretty much disqualifies you from that thread anyway, 100 HKD are barely 10$ and don't cover even the space for 1U in a crap DC in Tsuen Wan, not even a VPS.
Your budget text is nice, but not helpful - Sure, i can list you 500+ ISPs now in a range from 1$ to 200$/mo all over the world, but it's neither helpful nor useful.
Your assumption is that a dedicated server needs 1U space. Please ask Online.Net how they were able to offer dedicated servers for EUR 1.99 some time ago and Digicube how they are continuously offering dedicated servers for EUR 3.99 per month. If you assume that a server needs at least 1U and uses 100 Watt, then yes, 100 HKD is way out of range. But if you use low energy servers with a size where you can fit hundreds of servers in one rack, the world changes dramatically.
If you read my budget text I also mentioned the phrase "hosting company philosophy". The LET environment seems to concentrate around old-world bulky energy consuming servers which are sliced with virtualization software in partitions. Really, the world is much bigger than that. In our offline network we use now 4 Watt consuming 4 core servers with 1GB ram and SSD as our main processors.
The Internet server world still lags behind in using these new technology servers but will catch up. And I am looking for those providers who have seen that light. Not those who have made choices in the past and are not able to see how the world has changed and react on that and still charge prices which were normal 10 years ago but way out of range now.
And these providers exist.