C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers • Hacker News Board

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#211

Post by mikeyur » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

tkinom wrote: post #161

zschallz wrote: post #25

The blade servers at Delimiter ( https://www.delimiter.com/ ) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram. They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.

How long was the "very long downtime"? Hours, days, weeks?

~50% of customers were back online within 14 hours. 96% were online within 24-28 hours. There were a few that stretched approximately 3.5 days due to disk/psu failures, etc. It was our first (and hopefully only) large outage.

We released a full RFO to our customers, but it was a really unfortunate series of events involving losing phase, burning out compressors/pumps for HVAC equipment, overnighting replacement parts from up and down the east coast and some from LA.

We had to keep ~10 racks of blades (doesn't sound like much, but that's over 500 customers) offline to manage heat as we brought up the HVAC equipment and added more spot coolers.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#212

Post by mikeyur » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

zschallz wrote: post #203

tkinom wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long was the "very long downtime"? Hours, days, weeks?

They were down for 4 or 5 days last month. Was due to a power issue in their DC's building. They kept everyone in the loop, and it's the only downtime I've noticed from them.

It's the only downtime we plan to have. I get Nam flashbacks just thinking about it.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#213

Post by ropiku » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 11:22 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #144

If you do CPU-intensive work on these servers, might not the electricity cost surpass the 0.02/hour income? Example: if a kWh costs 0.10, then to have something burning 200W costs 0.02 per hour. (Someone substitute real-ish numbers.)

These are low-end devices, the system-on-chip uses at most 20W. Add in memory, etc and you don't get that far. I'm sure they've run their numbers.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#214

Post by mikeyur » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:07 AM UTC

Freaky wrote: post #102

zx2c4 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got super excited at first, but then... The servers are based on: http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E54... and http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L56... These are super ancient. If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from t…

I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable. Yes, the cores are relatively slow, but you get plenty of them. > OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware I see one dual socket Westmere Xeon that's actually slower than the two you're complaining about (1/3rd as much cache, 5-20% slower clock), and a bunch of similarly ancient consumer-level junk. I even spy an i7 920 in there…

> I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable.

Disclaimer: I run Delimiter

That's absolutely what we're going for with our offerings. Gear that's off lease and long paid for, which allows us to slap some new drives in it and rack it at a low monthly price. But we only use proper server gear - so that means HP blade servers, ECC memory, dedicated ILO/KVM with each box, etc.

To be fair though: I'm a big fan of Kimsufi stuff, along with OVH's SYS lineup. Great for backups/testing/etc. The guys at OVH are great.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#215

Post by voltagex_ » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 12:30 AM UTC

networked wrote: post #57

voltagex_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also compare to most AWS instances if you like.

Please run nbench [1]. I ran it on the C1 in April 2015 and got the following results: CPU : 4 CPU L2 Cache : OS : Linux 3.2.34-29 C compiler : gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) libc : libc-2.19.so MEMORY INDEX : 5.859 INTEGER INDEX : 8.164 FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.770 For comparison, here are an Intel Atom N450, a Core 2 Duo L7500 and a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B: CPU : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM)…

How does nbench compare to vpsbench?

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#216

Post by zschallz » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:25 AM UTC

mikeyur wrote: post #212

zschallz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were down for 4 or 5 days last month. Was due to a power issue in their DC's building. They kept everyone in the loop, and it's the only downtime I've noticed from them.

It's the only downtime we plan to have. I get Nam flashbacks just thinking about it.

Baptism by fire, huh? :) I guess I was one of the unlucky ones, but it hasn't put me off. Hoping you guys expand to the UK (datacenter-wise) eventually!

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#217

Post by mynameisvlad » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #199

mynameisvlad wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even possible to have a KVM for a VM? Don't you need it to be bare metal for that? In which case, it would make sense why neither AWS nor Azure offer it, since they don't offer bare metal hosting.

Yes, a number of VPS providers offer it. Well not precisely KVM, since that's for bare-metal machines, but a similar kind of console access. For example https://prgmr.com/ does.

Ah, yes, you're right. I even used this once when I was on Linode with Lish. I think I was a bit too focused on the KVM naming and it didn't click.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#218

Post by mikeyur » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 5:13 AM UTC

zschallz wrote: post #216

mikeyur wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only downtime we plan to have. I get Nam flashbacks just thinking about it.

Baptism by fire, huh? :) I guess I was one of the unlucky ones, but it hasn't put me off. Hoping you guys expand to the UK (datacenter-wise) eventually!

It was my second week on the job, not a fun way to start things off...

I don't know if we'll have UK dedi offerings (power + space are at a premium), but we're looking at rapidly pushing out our cloud offering.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#219

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

xd1936 wrote: post #169

nikolay wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free advertising, I guess. I also hate the criminal false advertising as "now available".

Ha. "I can't sign up for a new account and use this service right now, so nobody should care". K.

People should care; the current clients of this service should care. It shouldn't be on top of HN for hours IMHO; by far most cannot do anything with this which makes it indeed cheap advertising. Or it should say 'invite only' or 'only for current members'. Then I probably wouldn't have read it and would've checked it when it said 'Signups now open'.

Re: C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers

#220

Post by girvo » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:54 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #92

PudgePacket wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means you can process more requests at once (across several threads/cores), but per request timings will be slower because each core is slower than the cores on the competitions CPUs.

Can confirm. Dual core Atom loading bare Wordpress is a nightmare without caching, and still barely acceptable with caching.

Though really, running Wordpress without caching is just asking for trouble regardless of your server configuration.