Low End Dedi News

Since the recession's bite has deepened, there is no doubt that server spec per currency unit has stagnated. The market for low end dedis is no better than when this directory of offers was last updated, so I haven't bothered updating it. Sure, new providers come and old providers go, but for a better-than-Atom server the price floor definitely is the €30/month mark and unfortunately the introduction of Sandy Bridge hasn't pushed the old Core architectures into the value segment quite yet.

Oh here's an interesting thing. Want surplus low end dedi stock, or is that a stupid question? I bumped into the website at http://www.worldstream.nl/serverdeals.php recently where as far as I can tell, they list excess stock low end dedis starting from €25 per month upwards. They're one-off deals so not suitable for inclusion here, but the list is always being updated with the latest excess stock. You could pick yourself up a real bargain!

Due to a major security breach in Plones before v4.0.8, tomorrow we'll be upgrading to v4.0.9. We've already run a dry run on a local copy and it went very smoothly, so ned Productions sites shouldn't be down for more than an hour. Of course, as always, read-only content will continue to be served from the caches during the downtime.

Got a sort of implementation of currency conversion working again - unfortunately it isn't live so I have to update the rates manually. But they don't change massively over time, so it's probably good enough.

Anyway, you can now sort the leaderboard on price in euros or dollars which is what is useful. Enjoy!

Ok, just finished adding all the products which had been sent to me since December 2010. And wow, what a difference six months makes!

The leaderboard has become transformed - indeed, what you can buy today for less than €35 or US$50 a month is truly astounding. Here are the changes:

Dropped from the Leaderboard due to no longer being competitive:

1. Interserver's long standing Atom 330 server. Shame, it was one of the first entries on the Leaderboard.
2. Gotekky's 2Gb RAM VPS
3. FsckVPS's 2Gb RAM VPS

And why did these get dropped? Because you can pick up a full Intel Xeon server i.e. the thing running those VPSs for less than US$50 nowadays. Additions to the Leaderboard:

1. IPAP's Intel Xeon X3450. Gee, what a server, this thing is like nine times faster than an Intel Atom 330 with four times the memory bandwidth and 8Gb of RAM. It even runs circles around my desktop workstation which is hardly slow. This is the new best server we know of.
2. VolumeDrive's AMD Athlon X4 420. This is a fair beast in its own right running just over half the speed of the Xeon with 4Gb of RAM. Still it blasts past the Atom 330 and has the same memory bandwidth as the Xeon.
3. Online.net's Intel Core 2 Duo T7200. This still beats the pants off an Intel Atom 330, easily twice faster and 50% more memory bandwidth. It also comes with 1Tb of HD in a RAID config, and 3Gb of RAM.
4. Digicube Medium still puts up a very respectable showing, though you need to dive into the custom configurator to realise what a good deal can be got here. Here is a 2.8Ghz Athlon II X2 with 2Gb of RAM and supposedly unlimited transfer.

Other new entries which didn't make the leaderboard:

1. W2 server's Intel Atom 330. 4Gb of RAM, and an unmetered 100Mbit NIC which makes it interesting.
2. Swiftway's new Intel Atom D525. This can't be recommended given the competition above.

So there you go! Atoms are definitely last year's thing, this year even Intel Core 2 is becoming budget, it's definitely Nehelem and Phenom at the top end of the low end dedi market now that Sandy Bridge is coming on stream. Gee, welcome to 2011 - the year of the budget super server!

I have to admit, this is making me think of hopping ship to a new provider myself. We'll see what comes later in the year. Enjoy!

Due to currency rate changes, the pricing cutoffs are put back to US$50, CAD$50 and AUD$50. The UK Sterling cutoff remains at £30. I also want to see if I can get the automatic currency converter working again, but this time server side if possible.

I have NINE different new entries which have been suggested by users of this site over the past few months. I'll be adding most of these over the next two days. Enjoy!

Swiftway have completely revamped their site and their excellent Supermicro Starter is completely gone, so their entry is removed. Good while it lasted!

The leaderboard is back and fully working. Site is fully restored, enjoy!

Commenting is back, this time based on the Disqus cloud based commenting system. Plone does provide a fairly reasonable commenting infrastructure, however I couldn't find an easy way of turning it on for database item entries which weren't written to support individual commenting, so I simply took the easy option and hacked in the disqus support javascript into the database item entry display TAL. I then installed a Plone plugin which replaces the default commenting system with Disqus across the site, and problem solved.

Last thing needing fixed is calculating the leaderboard. I'm not sure what to do here ... I'd like some text up front explaining the selection criteria, but haven't figured out how to do this quite yet. I'm getting there though :)

The database has been restored, though not only are all the old comments gone but so has the ability to add new comments.

I'm working on restoring commenting, so please do bear with me.

The other thing is that for obvious reasons the links are all borked too what with the data storage change, so these will need fixing up probably manually. Also, right now the leaderboard shows nothing as presently it has no concept of which is a leaderboard item as yet.

This is coming soon though, so watch this space ...

Unfortunately during the port of this site from Plone v3.3 to Plone v4.0 the custom content type we used to represent the dedicated server entries refused to function. Rather than try too hard to fix this, we decided we ought to really bite the bullet and upgrade the entry database to something less hacky and more proper such that - god forbid - if we ever wanted to change the field design we simply could.

To that end we have made a significant start using a proper database design - the database currently has one test entry in it, and not everything is 100% working yet. But we hope to get all the entries restored by tomorrow and even currency conversion working again.

Unfortunately in the process of replacing the old data type, any non-core data attached to it has been lost i.e. all your comments. We do apologise for this - however, more than 80% of them were spam (you never saw these because we moderate all comments) but it was becoming a real pain in the ass to delete all these each day. This upgrade to Plone v4.0 fixes all those problems, not least that we now have OpenID support and a whole new commenting and discussion system which is vastly superior, not least that it supports some limited HTML and formatting now.

So do bear with us, and thanks for your patience. We'll be fully back soon!

I am glad to report a new entry to the leaderboard: a dual core Intel Atom based in Colorado, USA, with no less than 4Gb of RAM for just US$50/month. At this price it complements the wonderful Swiftway nicely as for around the same money you now have a choice between an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2Gb of RAM or an Intel Atom D510 (dual core) with 4Gb of RAM.

Such an amazing choice for this kind of money was unthinkable when this database first opened. Good news indeed!

Raymond from Swiftway tells me that such were the emails coming from users of this site about the loss of this excellent low end dedi that they have reinstated it! He said to use the coupon code "lowend" which will remove €42 from the price of the prepaid three monthly tariff - thus restoring the €35/month price - and that this will be an ongoing permanent offer.

They have also bumped the spec of the server with it now having a 500Gb HD, own VLAN APC powerunit remote reboot and native IPv6 connectivity.

I went through the ordering process this afternoon and found that their website does the €42 discount anyway without the coupon code. If however this changes then try "lowend".

My congratulations to Swiftway for listening to their customers! If this isn't an excellent example of customer service then I don't know what is!

And of course, well done all of you for letting Swiftway know what you think!

Enjoy!

Sadly, Swiftway have raised the price of their excellent Supermicro Starter from €35 to €49/month - a large 40% rise - and hence have had to be dropped from the database 

Thanks to whoever it was who reported it to me - I accidentally deleted your email before replying, otherwise I'd have replied to thank you personally.

I guess it's back to one of the Intel Atom 330 based servers as best bang for the buck for the time being. A sad day for low end dedis.

My apologies for not publishing comments for the last few months - I upgraded my email to handle IPv6 deliveries a while ago. Unfortunately, this caused Plone which runs this site to start delivering email exclusively in IPv6, and basically my email server thought it spam and kept refusing the mail delivery. Hence I never got notified about new comments - sorry!

I have also deleted all servers from 1&1 Internet as they no longer offer any servers for less than the minimum prices required by this database. Thanks to whoever it was for letting me know.

If you're reading this, then you are looking at the new server! Write access restored!

This is just to let you know that this site will have write access disabled during tomorrow (Thurs 1st July) as our web hosting service, ned Productions Limited, is migrating onto a new and considerably more powerful server infrastructure.

There should be no downtime apart from the lack of write access. Full service should be restored on the 2nd July.

Here's the first of the new low end dedicated servers I intended to add: the DigiCube Small and DigiCube Medium with the Small having become quite famous on WHT recently as an outstandingly cheap Intel Atom server often recommended to anyone asking for such a thing.

What you probably did not expect is for this website to NOT recommend the Small and to instead add the Medium to its Leaderboard. This isn't because the Small isn't a great deal, it's rather because OVH's bottom end Kimsufi gives between 50-100% more in every single area including CPU for €5/month less and put simply, unless the DigiCube Small were going for €10/month it simply can't compete. In contrast the DigiCube Medium offers the best bang for its buck anywhere in the world, so it gets onto the Leaderboard.

In fact, so good is the DigiCube Medium that it pushed an entry off the Leaderboard for the very first time: Wholesale Internet's Dual Core Atom is simply no longer even remotely competitive with the other low end dedicated servers on the Leaderboard, so we have removed it from our strongly recommended list.

I have done two things, and thanks to those of you who persistently emailed me to fix them! Firstly I have fixed the broken AJAX currency converter which spontaneously stopped working - this is because the hardcoded Google server from which the script was pulling the exchange rates suddenly vanished, so I simply updated the IP.

Secondly I have updated the substantial price reduction which OVH have applied to their bottom model Kimsufi where they dropped from €25/month to €15/month. This is very good value for money, so much so that you have to wonder what all their fuss was last year when they raised that product's price from €20 to €25 citing permanently rising costs. However it raises to a yawning gap between that single core Celeron for €15 and the next model up, a quad core Intel Core 2 for €40/month. As I've said for the umpteenth time now, there really needs to be a dual core in there at about €25/month.

Since the last update, low end dedicated servers have just got better and better. I have two very low priced Atom servers in Europe coming shortly to the database which make sense of why OVH had to so dramatically drop their price - and yes, you can get a central European located Intel Atom 220 for €20/month and an Intel Atom 330 for just €25/month! But I'll leave the full reviews till when I get round to them which should be in the next few days.

It's a few months into 2010 and Low End Dedis appears to have become sufficiently well established that server providers are doing and updating their own entries as you will surely see as the database now spans two pages. Thanks in particular to those of you who emailed their thanks, comments and suggestions to me, and I just want to reiterate that if you are having problems with the Plone editing interface (this is the CMS upon which this website runs) then please fill in as much as you can and use the contact form to tell me to finish off your entry for you. Also, I really must remind some of you that I will only accept entries for servers which are publicly available on your website with no temporary price reductions or initial low price offers with the price rising later.

The really good news as we get into 2010 is that more and more low end dedis are gaining desktop class Intel Core 2 Duo processors (all Intel Core 2 entries are listed here). We have three non-VPS entries already in our database with maybe another two hidden from view because their submitters don't have them listed publicly on their websites yet. I just did a review of just such a horse of a server from Secured Servers and it went straight into the Leaderboard as it is the best US-located low end dedi for your money in this database right now. With a 2Ghz dual core Core 2 CPU and 2Gb of RAM you should find that it will run even the most CPU demanding web applications with ease - though as we have often said here, you would be surprised at how well an Intel Atom 330 does seeing as most web applications are HD or network bound rather than CPU bound.

Better still is that I haven't seen a new entry with some nasty Pentium 4 era technology in a long while now. It would seem that providers are realising that anything less than an Intel Core 1 just won't cut it in today's aggressive marketplace.

Such is the ongoing march of technology! I wonder when the first quad core low end dedi will appear? OVH will already do you a quad core for €40/month, so for it to drop to €35 or lower we might be thinking 2011 maybe. What a thought!