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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

Downsides to VPS

  1. You pay stupidly high *monthly* costs based on RAM.
     This makes little sense, as RAM is ridiculously cheap.
  2. You pay masses for bandwidth if you go over.

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1. You'll always pay more renting than buying in the long run. The difference is a factor of how efficient the market is, I guess. A high memory quad XL instance on Amazon has near enough 64GB of RAM, which you can have for $2.00 per hour, or $5300 for a reserved instance for a year. If you wanted to buy that much outright, you'd be paying a couple of thousand just for the DIMMs. Then you've got to buy and maintain the box to put them in, knowing that it'll have depreciated significantly over the year. I guess it depends on what you're actually planning to do with the RAM once you've got it, but it doesn't look like too bad a deal to me.

2. That depends on your VPS host, really.

2. Show me a VPS host that has cheap bandwidth.

For example, lets say we need 10TB of transfer.

  Slicehost: $3,000 (0.30/GB !!! WTF are they smoking)
  Amazon: $1,250 (Assume 5TB in, 5TB out, in US)
  Linode: $1,000 (0.10/GB Good for VPS, but still crazy)

  Typical dedicated server: $99 with 10TB included.

Amazon is ridiculously expensive. I know it's really "hip" to use it, but it's throwing money away. I guess if it's VC's money then who cares if you get to say "We're cloud hosted!!!".

Bandwidth pricing on VPS hosts is just crazily expensive.

I'm somwhat suspicious, but there's this: http://www.hostv.com/linux-vps.shtml; OVH have similar deals.

10TB/month averages out to 32Mbps. From what I've heard, try using anywhere near that on your typical "all you can eat" provider and you'll either be QoS'd enough to never achieve it or you'll suddenly be in violation of some finely printed Terms of Service.

I do around 5mpbs on dedicated servers without issue, I've peaked at 100mps without too much fuss.

I just bought 128GiB of unbuffered ecc ddr3 last week. 4GiB sticks which would be fine in a dual-socket board with 16 ram slots; (pretty typical, at least on the amd side of things. I see a lot of dual qpi xeons with only 6 ram slots between them, though.) I paid $1800 or so for the lot. That would give me two dual-socket 64GiB ram boxes.

Hell, even if you need 8GiB registered ecc ddr3 modules, that's only around $130 per module[1], or $1040 for 64GiB.

(both the qpi xeons by intel and the new G34 and C32 opterons support both reg. ecc and unbuffered ecc, but you generally can't get unbuffered ecc in densities higher than 4GiB per stick)

My standard server has 8 cores (2.0Ghz opterons) 32GiB ram, and 4 500gb "enterprise" sata disks. total cost? under $1800. AMD is interesting in this regard because I can get a dual-socket or even quad-socket board (the above system is single socket) and not pay any extra... I just get more cpu sockets and more ram sockets. (on G34 boards you usually get 8 ram slots per CPU socket.)

Now, the price of ram varies a lot. I think we're at a low point, but there was a period a year or two back where prices on reg. ecc ddr2 were almost as low as ddr3 is now, and there was a period between then and now where I was paying well over 2x what I'm paying now. But in general, the stuff is pretty cheap.

Seriously, we (the VPS providers) are making money on renting you hardware. I am making money, and I'm the opposite of "at scale" (to be clear, I'm paying for my hardware, and paying myself a rather below-market wage. I'm not making a /lot/ of money, but I'm profitable, and by enough of a margin that my rent gets paid on time every month.)

As a rule of thumb, I generally make my money back on a new bit of hardware within four months.

[1]http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-kvr1066d3q8r7s... (I used the same vendor for my unbuffered ecc, but I'm too lazy to look up the part number right now. )

In terms of expense to my business, the hardware isn't the only number I'm focused on. By using a VPS hosting provider that I know and trust, I don't have to worry about contracts with colocation facilities, secure access auditing, host hardware failure, image-level backups, console access (in case of network issues [DDoS]), host system updates and upgrades, and a host of other things that I probably don't even know about.

Although, I probably stated that incorrectly when I said I don't have to worry about these things. I do worry about them, but I have delegated them to someone I trust and has served me well for years. That's worth at least a full time salary + hardware, which is more than I pay for a few VPSs. Of course, that equation changes as my hardware requirements increase. At some point, economies of scale shift in favor of running my own gear, but that's a long ways off for most small to medium sized businesses.

right. I'm just correcting this idea that hardware is that expensive.

"RAM" is generally used as a proxy for "what percentage of a machine you're getting", since most of the resources that aren't cheap, like CPU & bandwidth are shared. PRGMR states this explicitly: http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Scheduling#Sch... If you rent 1/8th of the RAM, you're guaranteed a minimum of 1/8th of the CPU, although you usually get more because most slices idle along most of the time.

To be fair, those are both downsides to the current VPS providors business models, rather than flaws in virtual private servers themselves.

And if the traditional leased-machine colocation businesses I've used in the past are anything to judge by, much of the hardware in commercial use today is probably old enough that todays ram prices are not even close to indicative of the actual ram costs when the hardware was purchased... (Not that that should really matter, if the 3 or 4 year old machines my hosting company are currently offering as low or medium end colos aren't fully paid off several times over by now, they're definitely "doin it wrong"!)

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