Servers of opportunity

From PrgmrWiki

Below I describe the prgmr.com Standard Server- at one point I was renting these out, but not right now.

includes co-location in the svtix datacenter

our current standard server has 2x 2.2Ghz Shanghai quad-core Opterons, 32GB registered ecc ddr2, 2x1.5TB disks, We include a 10Mbps commit on a 1000Mbps pipe. I was charging $409.6/month, with a $409.6 setup fee. (It will be some time before I have more of these available, as renting VPSs is a good bit more profitable)

These are your usual unmanaged servers; I am responsible for the hardware and initial setup; you are responsible for the operating system updates.

E-mail lsc@prgmr.com if you are interested. Note, these servers are available when I have the spare hardware/space. I always see to it that I have capacity for my Xen VPS hosting business before I sell whole servers.

A note on renting vs. owning servers

It is almost always a better deal to buy/build your own hardware and just co-locate it, if you plan on keeping the server up for any period of time.

(I don't charge significantly below market rental prices on whole servers because they can be a little bit capital intensive to setup. Also, I'm greedy. My VPSs are priced below market, but if you do the math on my prices, you see that I'm making rather a lot on each 32GiB server.)

I'm not saying it's a good deal for people who own an ESD wrist strap, and have the knowledge and spare time. It's not, but some people don't want to deal with that sort of thing, (and if you buy a server built by someone who doesn't believe in ESD, well, uh, I believe you made a poor choice. I think it's quite reasonable to expect 3+ years uptime out of reasonably decent hardware. If you start getting hardware problems before then, you are probably doing something wrong.)

Usually if you buy servers pre-assembled from the big names (dell, HP) and you want a reasonable amount of ram, they figure you are spending someone else's money and charge accordingly. They do usually observe reasonable ESD precautions, and they usually give you a reasonable server, but It's very expensive, and not really any better than what you could assemble yourself, assuming you took precautions. Even so, it's usually cheaper to take the hit once from dell or HP than to take the hit every month from your hosting provider.

Tips for those who wish to build their own server

if you are building yourself, newegg is having a sale on the socket F 2 in 1U servers... free CPU when you buy the superserver.

Also, right now, there is no reason to buy anything but the Shanghais, or alternately if you need a lot of CPU (and can afford more expensive ram) the Nehalam Xeons. the older generation Xeons are worse than the Shanghais in terms of power per watt, and they use ridiculously expensive (and power-hungry) ram. (that's not entirely true, some Xeon chipsets can use registered ecc ddr2; but I haven't seen any of those that support more than 6 sticks of ram, and we all know how price per gigabyte goes up with density.)

The Nehalams are pretty neat; and they aren't too expensive, either. well, until you go to buy ram. Registered ecc ddr3 is still 2-3x more expensive than registered ecc ddr2, as far as I can tell.

Also, the cheapest place I've found to get ram is shop.kingston.com.

Just my opinion (but I've been building many high-ram boxes of late)