Welcome to Low End Dedis

This site is all about really cheap affordable dedicated servers: what's on offer, who's offering them and a certain amount of subjective experiences of them. We host a database of low end dedicated servers where visitors may comment upon the offer, or submit a new server to the database. In this we are hoping to replicate the wonderful site over at lowendbox.com where they list VPSs available for less than US$7/month - if that's more your price range, check them out!

What do we define as a low end dedicated server?

We define a low end dedicated server as one of the following:

• It must have a CPU, Memory and Storage device the use of all of which is exclusively allocated to one customer (i.e. fully dedicated) OR ...
• It must have 2Gb of RAM or more and at least one CPU (or equivalent thereof) or more exclusively allocated to one customer (i.e. somewhat dedicated like a high-end VPS).

And to qualify for inclusion in this database it must satisfy both of:

• It must cost no more than US$50, EUR€35, UK £30, Australian AUD$50 or Canadian CAD$50 a month.
• It must be a permanent offer not a temporary one used to lure in customers or granted on a "first come first served" or non-public basis.

The latter clause is because almost everyone other than torrent seedbox users needs a dedicated server for a long period of time because setting the things up takes weeks or months before it even goes live, so we have no interest in providers who offer a dedicated server cheap today and will raise their prices to a fortune tomorrow.

Needless to say, what you will get for such a low, low price is not much. One tends to get ancient hardware nearing the dustbin like old, slow and hot Pentium 4's, or a mix of reasonably good features and one awful feature like a 1Mbit network connection. More recently we are beginning to see Intel Atom servers which are actually not bad so long as they have plenty of RAM and a fast hard drive. And the future does look especially bright with the imminent deployment of Dell XS11-VX8 VIA Nano based servers which should really kick down the price/performance ratio.

The other major thing lacking is customer support - for such a low, low price expect a several day response time. Also expect zero data backups, negligible if any support outside hardware faults (which YOU have to prove not them), and somewhere between castrated and appalling data transfer restrictions.

So why on earth would a person want such a crappy dedicated server?

In most cases you don't - go get a Virtual Private Server instead as if you choose a decent provider you'll get an outstanding VPS for €35/month, perhaps 2Gb of RAM and 2Ghz of Core2 CPU guaranteed and indeed such providers are listed in this database. However if on the other hand:

• You don't like how VPSs are oversold (e.g. OpenVZ) and you want a guaranteed consistently behaving server ...
• Lots of RAM and a guaranteed fast hard drive are far more important to your deployment than CPU horsepower ...
• You are building a fault tolerant load spreading network of geographically distributed low end dedicated servers ...
• You need much more control over your server than a VPS allows e.g. custom Linux kernel builds, or you are running an application or service which is really unfriendly to anyone else sharing your server ...

... then you are probably in the market for one or more of our database entries. Remember, lots of little crappy servers with good load balancing can be far more resilient AND performant than a few big ones, plus they can offer superior performance through geolocalisation.

Give us an example!

Well in the case of the owner of this website, we needed to deploy a resilient and scalable virtual Plone site hosting server cluster which was intended to provide several dozen websites simultaneously. Plone runs on Zope, and Zope runs on Python. Just starting up one Zope instance costs a minimum of 100Mb and that rapidly grows as the number of sites and activity upon them grows. Zope is also slow, so you need to deploy a large and intelligent reverse proxy cache such as varnish in front of your Zope instances which costs another few hundred megabytes. We also needed them to scale very easily according to demand such that we could proactively deploy Zope instances around the globe in just a matter of days.

Traditionally this is big iron enterprise web application deployment stuff, and traditionally this kind of deployment costs thousands of dollars per month to run. Thanks to the recession, we currently don't have that kind of money (nor a lot of work on actually), so we thought we'd brush up our skills and see what we could do with a few 1.2Ghz Celeron D 220 servers :). Most people would think us insane to try running Plone on a cluster of 1.2Ghz single core processors, however in fact Plone (and Zope) is severely memory bound i.e. CPU speed is fairly unimportant when compared to L2 cache speed and RAM speed. Perversely enough, a top of the range Intel Core i7 920 is only about 1.7 times faster (thanks to the L2 cache clock speed difference) than an Intel Atom 330 though of course it would scale better. However for the price of an i7 920, you can rent a LOT of Intel Atom 330s - and that also means more redundancy.

If you'd like to know lots more about our Plone cluster deployment, we wrote up our experiences here.