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!

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.