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Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

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Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

#1
We've video/image processing apps and need powerful hardware with uptime guarantees. Dedicated servers are the most cost effective, no virtual or Amazon SWS. What do you use? Currently we have servers that cost around 100$/mo for a Xeon 1270 with 16gb ram, but the uptime is not that great, downtimes are frequent. We know plenty of more expensive solutions (for instance for metadata & cdn we use Softlayer which is expensive and more reliable), but we need cheaper options. thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

#6
Uptime guarantees are rarely worth the paper they're printed on. Most will give you some lame credit if they exceed the very generous amount of downtime they allow (e.g. 99% = just under 4 days a year downtime).

The only way to get real uptime is to have dedicated on-site support. Which is to say "someone to yell at" when the system(s) go down. But that type of service is quite expensive indeed (add an extra 0 to what you're currently paying minimum).

For $100 you're going to get shoddy support and some downtime. All you can really do is buy $100 systems with different vendors so that if one vendor is offline you can push the workload to the other two.

But then of course you need to design your infrastructure to move workloads around, and that within itself is a lot of work...

Re: Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

#9

Uptime guarantees are rarely worth the paper they're printed on. Most will give you some lame credit if they exceed the very generous amount of downtime they allow (e.g. 99% = just under 4 days a year downtime). The only way to get real uptime is to have dedicated on-site support. Which is to say "someone to yell at" when the system(s) go down. But that type of service is quite expensive indeed (add an extra 0 to wha…

Agreed, we do have several vendors and do distribute the workload as much as possible. In our experience when a server goes down the whole data center has problems, so even if it's more inconvenient the best is to really have an assortment of vendors.

Re: Ask HN: Best value/price dedicated servers in US and Europe?

#10
post #5

Europe: http://www.hetzner.de/uk/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver and http://www.1and1.co.uk

I'd avoid Hetzner. A competitor/malicious user can take down your site by DDoS'ing it for a short time.

And this is not true of the others? I've not seen guarantees against that in any of the other vendors...
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