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Where are the dedicated lowend boxes offers?
In IT, everything is getting cheaper. CPUs. RAM. SSDs. The only thing that's getting more expensive is electricity, rent and wages.
So why are dedicated servers no longer getting cheaper?
You can buy HP T630s for 33€ each, stick in an M.2 256GB SATA SSD for 30€ and 2x8 GB DDR4 SO-DIMM for 26€ and end up with a total cost of less than 100€ and perhaps 7.2kWh per month of electricity (assuming 10 Watts on average).
It should be possible to offer this cheaply as a dedicated server. Why is noone doing it? Is there not enough interest? Too much abuse? Please let me know,
Thanked by 1JerryHou
Comments
You mean Dell T630s. they are ~1Meter in depth and tower, not rack mount, you could fit maybe 2 units or 3 on a shelf ( assuming a DC will accept that, highly doubt it ) and in height it will consume ~8U that you will pay.
So in my opinion, they can be on sale for 10 USD, no use case in a Data-center.
Dell R330/430/630 or HP DL 360 G9 or other 1U variants of the G9 family ( xeon V3 and V4 ), Not that cheap, atho they are almost 10 years old.
350W of power 24/7 will cost you 45-65 USD in EU, (depending on region, can be much higher ) + the colocation expenses + networking + routing + net.
So, unless the Provider owns the building and has ~60KW of solar ( that might help him 3-4 MO out of 12 ) I doubt you will see cheap dedi offers.
It does not make sense expense wise
You actually answered your question before you asked it.
Buy some hardware and bring it into your basement.... voila you became a lowend host and can decide the price. And a thin client is not a reliable hardware to run 24/7
A few factors [of which some were mentioned in your thread]:
1. Renting out those HPs can be a pain in the ass
2. Higher electricity, rent and wages
3. Bandwidth isn't free
Those HPs don't have IPMI, so getting them rented and working is a little bit of a pain. I'm not sure if you ever dealt with abuse, but I do, and can say it's a huge pain. Then you have refunds, chargebacks etc... to deal with.
Well you also still want to make some profit, and that adds a bit to the price.
And also a lot of providers are walking away from the low-end market due to the extreme competitiveness, as well as the fact that these usually attract a lot of people just entering the market with a lot of questions [taking up admin time, requiring more employees].
And then these break, and let me tell you, remote hands are expensive, and when you have some custom chassis made to fit those, they take up a lot more time to work on, and fix, thus the remote hands bill just goes up.
@Lunics
T630 for me is Dell T630. Just saw those are thin clients. ( why would any.... ah never mind )
So my input is what I wrote + what gbzret4d and skorupion said.
Virtualization is simply more efficient in terms of power / space / cost, for both the provider and the customer. Benchmark score of the CPU in those T630s is probably worse than most $3 VPS offered here.
VPS have shitty privacy though.
No i mean HP T630 thin clients.
HP T630
65W external power adapter
These things are very fun for light tasks. They max out at 16gb and I believe they support nvme(never tried, only put a sata m2 SSD in mine).
Stuff like docker, some transcoding (no hdr) would work.
Wouldn't do anything beyond that.
You could always full disk encrypt your VM's partition. Obviously your data in memory is still readable though.
I don't think there's enough demand for bare metal specifically for privacy purposes to justify offering these for most providers. Virtualized environments on newer hardware are better in terms of cost and performance verses to using 10+ year old bare metal hardware.
Here ya go, micro and mini colo at microtronix datacenter 😁 we have a lot of thin clients colod right now. But they are right, without ipmi its a pain, we've had very little.
www.microtronixdc.com
But you wanna colo that thin client hit us up 😁
If you want to colo something like that then @DataIdeas-Josh can definitely help you with that.
Josh and @PulsedMedia both do sell mini dedis which is just mini pcs.
There are plenty of hosts that do lowend and old xeon servers.
Indeed, currently available:
Those will probably consume more like 25-30W.
This spec is too lowend to make any sense for a provider to build, way too low end.
That would get what 5€ a month each maybe, if lucky. It's too outdated out of the box.
So you spend like 4hrs getting it up, spend 30€ for the IP purchase, spend like 5€ a month on OpEx (Space, electricity, bandwidth. BW is most expensive), and get 5€ minus TRX fees.
Then you maybe get a user for it for 1 year, all the support associated etc.
Then you have to stock perhaps 25% more units for spare parts, to get the sales etc.
It's all loss loss and loss.
You can build much better nodes for that budget.
As a business, it makes more sense to build something like 400€ a pop average nodes, which will eventually get old and revenue from them decreases over time as people are willing to pay less for them later on. Eventually you hit that 10€ a month mark, and at 5€ a month mark it's time to scrap them.
Minimize the most expensive bits; Man hours spent on building and managing it, infra costs.
It's extremely difficult to hit those very low € per month rates. Why you may ask?
Imagine 10€ a month, after TRX fees, admin overheads etc. that's only 8€.
You have 5€ a month OpEx on that node, that leaves you 3€ of profit.
To pay for 100€ unit that is 33 months. To pay for the infra + manhours to build it that is another 50 to 100 months or so. Bottomline; Never yields any profit.
We have hundreds of old atoms in warehouse, they would be COMPLETELY FREE, but the costs around setting them up makes them not worth to pursue ... at least if we do not set them up with say 2x8TB SATA SSDs or something like that, at which point they would be like 100-150€ a month each. Cost to build would be something like 1300€ a piece.