HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where to Host Dedicated Servers?

46 points by byefruit ↗ HN
Related to the discussion on sticking with on-premise servers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999) - I want to know HNers' opinions on companies that will provide dedicated servers.

Do people have recommendations for services they've used? Principally interested in reliability, quality of support, etc..

I'm looking for use in our business though experiences with personal projects would probably be useful too.

20 comments

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em10fan
We used Hetzner in Germany, when I worked for a startup a few years ago, for some stuff which was getting too expensive on AWS, and which had to be located in Europe for certain reasons. A lot cheaper and reliability was good. We had many tens of servers there, at one point, at least.
aivisol
Still using Hetzner for some of the services. They had some reliability issues in early days with servers randomly stopping or rebooting but not anymore. Cheaper than AWS definitely if you compare apples to apples.
throwlkfjq12
We had the same issues (must have been around 5 years ago). Hetzner though exchanged the servers directly. At the end it was a bios issue with some rams which were incompatible, which was quiet hard to find out.
radu_floricica
Using Hetzner for many years. Their unmanaged iron prices are unbeatable, and I haven't had any significant issues.

They also have a pretty decent cloud offering as well.

fenesiistvan
Two years ago I was in the same situation, trying to find the best dedicated server hosting for the money. I found Hetzner the best and no any issue with them in the last two years.
bobosha
Another +1 for Hetzner, We have been using their GPUs and at the pricepoint of ~$100 per month, it's unbeatable. AWS/azure are all at least 3x that.
paypalcust83
If it's for personal or pilot projects: find a third-tier, cheap co-lo within 100 mi / 161 km of your usual location. Buy some used enterprise boxes off eBay / UNIX Surplus / etc. that don't draw too much power. Data is cheap (unless you're being screwed or you don't lease your own glass). It's electricity that costs $$$.

If it's for something that makes some, but not a metric ton of, money: find a second-tier co-lo within about 50 mi / 80 km of your usual location.

If it's for something that makes a metric f-ton of money: stick to a hybrid, well-managed mix of VPS and co-lo, preferably from a good vendor.

Currently, I have a home virtualization/workstation box:

- 2x EPYC 7402 + Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 (dual fans)

- Supermicro H11DSi v2 (-NT works too if you want dual 10 GbE or NVMe OCuLink)

- 512 GiB Samsung RAM

- 4x HGST 14 TB HDD

- 2x FireCuda 520 1 TB

- Thermaltake Core V71 TG case w/ default fans & fan controller removed, modded with extra holes to support the board

- 4x 200mm Noctua fans modded to fit within the top and front panels

- 5.25" fan controller + 4 temp probes + 4 temp alarms

- 2U/tower Smart UPS 1500 with quality new batteries, NMC 2 w/ env monitoring, 2nd temp/humidity sensor and a WiFi bridge (TL-WR802N v4; overkill maximus)

- Looking at Intel Optanes for ZIL and some Samsungs for L2ARC

- Also looking at a 4U Supermicro 36x 3.5" bay for FreeNAS usage

When you need an OpenBSD or opn/pfSense jumpbox/VPN(es), find (a) minimal, supported good box(es) and stick an Intel X710 series card in it because virtualized jumpboxes maybe too converged for some use-cases. Also, Intel QAT cards can be helpful for TLS termination, edge firewall, and some VPN/SSH jumpboxes in use-cases where (mostly older) CPUs can't push accelerated crypto bits fast enough.

Off the top of my head, some of the colo's I've used:

- Bytemark

- Rackspace

- Pair

- Equinix ($$ IIRC)

Also, random ones in SF, SJC, Sacramento, and other cities that escape me right now.

CommanderData
OVH. They have a limited number of data centers around the world. Bandwidth is extremely cheap compared with AWS however there's a setup fee with their dedicated range. I haven't looked at their cloud offering.

I'd like to consider them for a project soon using k8s, needing auto node scaling and I'm not too sure what's best to use from their offerings. Maybe k8s on bare metal?

The biggest benefit is pricing, location (close to me), and reliability has been excellent. Scaling would be an issue.

ckdarby
Kimsufi if you're looking at OVH already
slawekrewaj
I think dedicated servers are used when you think about performance first. In that case the approach to scaling is probably to just over provision, which works perfectly in a lot of cases.

I would also use OVH for dedicated servers.

igrekel
We used OVH for bare metal purchases in several of their data centres for over three years now. It is cost effective and was pretty good. We did have issues with how quick it was to fix hardware issues when they arose. What doesn't help is that we were using custom instances and not their stock offering. We may switch to their "enterprise support".

We also host some machines we own in a small local datacenter from a local provider because it is connected to a dedicated connection to a private network.

deeblering4
Softlayer, while not as cheap as a straight ahead colo, strikes a nice balance between cloud and bare metal. You can provision metal on demand and manage hardware servers via an API. They also have data centers across the world and services like managed SAN/NAS storage. Worth a look for sure.
hackerman123469
I've been using hostwinds for years and has been very satisfied with them.
shrubble
Wholesaleinternet.com is based in Kansas. They have good pricing and connectivity. Support was functional but barebones, in that you are responsible for the configuration of the servers after they have put your requested òperating system on it.
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blaser-waffle
Go to Data Center Map www.datacentermap.com and see who is near/at where you want to host your servers.

Web Hosting Talk (www.webhostingtalk.com) is also worth a look.

These ^ sites aggregate various colo and dedicated server businesses; many of them have larger, more fleshed out cloud options as well. They'll rent you space, rent you severs, or rent you a slice of their cloud -- maybe all of the above. Options range from one-man-shops to regional-heavy-weight MSPs, and sometimes larger.

---

Bigger colo and dedicated providers I've dealt with are:

- Coresite

- Dupont Fabros

- Equinix

- Atlantic Metro

- Rackspace

- Flexential (formerly Peak10)

- QTS

- Raging Wire (I believe they're NTT)

- Digital Reality (Telx)

- Most large ISPs have their own spaces (Level3, Zayo, Cogent, etc.) and can host your servers or rent you some as well. Usually not competitive in terms of compute, but could offer good deals for bandwidth or other perks

(disclaimer: I used to be a data center manager in Northern VA and worked with/for/against most of the above companies)

DabbyDabberson
I worked for a company committed to managing their own DCs for cost. The idea of a big B2B contract with a cloud provider was frequently tossed around, but never manifested.

Our server demands were high. In Ad-Tech, we needed incredibly low latency which required thousands of bare-metal server boxes.

Our servers also processed nearly 300 _billion_ transaction each day, each one in around ~50ms. This generated petabytes of data, used tons of bandwidth, and required many servers.

leasing bare-metals and a warehouse was cheaper.

codegeek
I highly recommend hivelocity.net [0]. Solid and their support is top notch. In 5+ years of hosting, we probably had an issue may be once with them (DNS was not pinging) .

https://hivelocity.net

jamieweb
I've had a good experience with Zare.com. Support is very fast and the pricing is fair.