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Ask HN: Where can I host a 1TB DB relatively cheaply?

58 points by anothernameiluv ↗ HN
I have a 1TB DB that will grow over time and have been looking for a host that is relatively cheap. Everything I see is hosting with SSD so getting 1TB and larger is somewhat expensive. Are there any (cheap) HDD hosts out there?

35 comments

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newsmania
Hosthatch has a 1 TB hdd vps plan for $20. I’ve used them before and they were ok. They had a network outage but fixed it.
siquick
Digital Ocean is $105USD for 1TB, not sure how this compares to others?
anothernameiluv
Yeah, that's just a bit too much $ for what I need. I've been looking at Linode, Scaleway, Vultr, Digital Ocean but they are a bit too pricey. This isn't a mission critical DB and doesn't have to be SSD speeds.
brianwawok
You can get a spinny storage node at vult for like 10 or 20 bones a month. Be warned the node has almost no ram.

I ran this for about a year. Queries took a good 5 minutes but was a very cheap way to archive data.

No durability though if the disk bites it you lose.

bfrog
Linode did just start offering extensible block storage at $0.10/GB/Mo so in your case not exactly cheap, $120/mo or so minimum basically for anything sensible. AWS EBS is cheaper, $0.045/GB/Mo for their HDD option. Though again, still atleast ~$70/mo for something sensible (decent ec2 instance and ebs storage). Google is only slightly cheaper, $0.040/GB/Mo.

Realistically the cheapest option is probably renting a physical machine thats a bit older as others have suggested. If its not a true database that needs block storage, and just flat files, S3 is always hard to beat.

badestrand
As others have noted, most "traditional" dedicated server hosters should have good offers.

Hetzner in Germany for example has 8 TB HDD with 32 GB RAM and a i7-6700 Quad-Core for ~55 USD per month.

edit: US hosters seem to be quite a bit more expensive. Does anyone know why there is such a difference?

adventured
Simply put, they can command it. US GDP per capita is ~1/3 higher than in Germany, as is the median income. It's why companies like Softlayer or Rackspace, with relatively high prices, built such substantial businesses in the dedicated space years ago: US businesses could afford it.

The underlying cost structure is also more challenging in the US for most dedicated hosts. Building a data center in the US, as with most infrastructure, costs more than it does in Germany.

When you account for the higher cost of infrastructure and the higher productivity (economic output), a $80 Hetzner server becomes a $120 or $140 server in the US.

It's the same reason housing in Australia is so expensive (their incomes have skyrocketed over the last 15 years), or why the cost of living is so high in Switzerland (very high incomes). If you cut US GDP per capita from ~$57k-$60k down to $28,000 (just as an example) - dedicated hosts in the US would not be able to command the same high prices, the market would not bear that.

king_phil
What difference does it make? The price is the price is the price.
devdoomari
as a user? some milliseconds of latency maybe?
dx034
That doesn't explain why OVH can offer servers in Canada for about the same price (via soyoustart.com or OVH). Electricity in Quebec is cheap but parts of the US are similar (OR, WA). Perhaps many US companies don't trust European providers so that they have to win on price?
mosselman
Why doesn't it? Canada isn't the US and Quebec isn't New York. What doe the electricity cost of some regions of the US have to do with the costs where data centers actually are like New York? The GDP per capita in Canada is $46.000[1] and in the US it is $57.400[2].

[1]: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... [2]: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

dx034
> What doe the electricity cost of some regions of the US have to do with the costs where data centers actually are like New York?

I'd expect electricity to be a major cost item for data centers. GDP per capita is not a good proxy for the cost of running a data center. It is only loosely related to labour costs and not at all to cost of infrastructure projects and regulation.

So I still don't completely understand why US data centers are more expensive, esp at locations like Kansas or Oregon where energy is cheaper than in most/all of Europe.

smueller1234
I'm not sure I buy this. Cost of employment in Germany is high as are power costs.

Disclaimer: lived in both countries, operated sizeable DCs in both countries, but didn't do the math just now. Edit: spelling

veeti
I wouldn't host a database on a server without ECC RAM like most Hetzner offerings.
outside1234
My guess is that economies of scale are starting to hit - it wouldn't surprise me to learn that dedicated hosting is draining rapidly from competition from the cloud.
jurgenwerk
DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT host serious applications on Hetzner. Firstly, their equipment is incredibly unreliable. It happened three times to me that their server stopped responding due to hardware failures. Secondly, their support (especially their support website) is beyond awful, hard to get, and sometimes even arrogant over the phone.
mad182
I have the exact opposite experience. I have only used their support once, but it was great. One of my servers had hardware issue (unable to access half of RAM), and less than hour after first contacting them via website they had moved drives to another, identical machine and everything was running fine (and most of that time was spent waiting for my responses).
ktta
https://www.time4vps.eu/storage-servers/

They aren't the most reputed but aren't sketchy either. You're not going to get cheaper than this. If you are sure that you'll use to for a while, then go for the annual/biennial plans. They really bring down the monthly price.

balladeer
Also, I recently saw a post on LET that after October 4 they are bumping their VPS prices up.

Been a happy customer for last 3+ years. Just my second online backup of encrypted personal data (first is CrashPlan). But at this price they don’t backup their severs and even though they have been around for really a long time I’ll hesitate to do something on production there. Good with support tickets and all.

wetha
AWS. t2.Micro instance = $15 monthly. EBS Cold HDD 1 TB = $26 monthly. With the free tier, the T2 instance is free the first year. Plus, all the cloudy goodness of EBS Snapshots for backup and easy scalability.
jaequery
unless you are just storing logs or your app dont really care about performance, id always advise to run your databases on SSD
dx034
Why? For simple queries with medium load, SSD is not necessary at all. Esp if you don't do much writing and reading at the same time. HDD is still 5-10x cheaper.
BrianT
[Disclosure - I work for Delimiter]

@nreece suggested our StorageVPS. Delimiter's storage VPS are HDD based but NVMe accelerated. We run ZFS with the ZIL/Cache on the NVMe. The storage performance is great, but CPU isn't overly generous. They are optimised to get data to/from disk.

I would recommend you look at our Cloud Compute product. Its based on Cloudstack, highly distributed Ceph backend - HDD with NVMe fronting the disks. It uses Cloudstack's advanced networking so you have a router/firewall by default as well as internal networking should you want to have more than just the DB locally.

https://cc.delimiter.com/cart/cloud-resource-pool/

A 1TB Ceph disk with 1GB RAM, 1 CPU will cost you $20.40/month

I am not sure what DB you are running but even if boost that up to 4GB RAM, 2 CPUs, 1TB Disk that is $34.62/month

Dedicated cores on the CPUs, 10Gbps uplink. We have a variety of customers running MongoDB clusters, MySQL/MariaDB, Couchbase and so on. Internal networks lets you keep the cluster network private. Just punch through the firewall for the ports you need publicly accessible or even limit the source address to stop non-authorised users.

If you want to give it a test, then just mail me on sales@delimiter.com and I'll get you a 30 day trial.

--

Another option could be a cheap dedicated - we have some Dual E5420, 16GB RAM, 1TB Disk or 2 x 500GB for $200/year

r3muxd
Aren't you the people that null-routed a Eve online guild?
[dead] aaronheid
Vpsdime 2000 GB Storage VPS is $28/month. But better ask them if they allow it for your purposes
mproud
Do you need to be fast at all? Do you need to run persistent apps?

Because if not, traditional hosting often has near limitless storage for less than $100 a year (think Dreamhost, Bluehost, 1&1, etc.)

EKSolutions
I use a service called Kimsufi quite some. They offer cheap Dedicated Servers with up to 2TB of storage.

Very reliable and trustable too since they're owned by OVH.

dx034
Their soyoustart.com server range is also worth checking out. More powerful servers than Kimsufi. Price/value is extremely good as long as you don't mind managing your own server. A dedicated machine with 16GB ram and 1-2TB HDD will cost you $25-30/month.
thrownaway954
Out of curiosity... What DB platform and OS are you using?
corobo
In addition to those questions lets stop beating up bushes - whats your budget @op

All you're getting right now are vague suggestions and hugely varying price points. If we knew the budget we could more easily recommend something