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!

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!

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.

Once again, our thanks to the forty or fifty people who visit daily and who have been twittering and blogging about us. We still haven't been picked up by Google, so receving your attention is much valued by us.

Since we fixed the bad email server setup, we've been seeing a few emails coming in with suggestions for additions - thank you very much for these! We had to add programming support to the site for Canadian dollars in order to add one of the more infamous Canadian dedi providers HostMDS who currently have a fairly dreadful reputation due to some severe recent outages. They do however offer the lowest dedi server price we've ever seen - a 667Mhz Pentium 3 for just CAD$7.99/month which is just plain crazy cheap.

We also added a reasonable offer from MegaNetServe which are a Silicon Valley (California) outfit - we really wish that providers would give more thought to balance and not hobble their low end dedis with at least one really awful feature. We know that these are the lowest of the low products, but why supply a perfectly good server in every area except its CPU or its network transfer or its RAM? It's a waste of an offering, and it smacks of loss leader pricing where you tempt people in with the intention of making them upgrade later after they have expended lots of time on setup.

In fact just yesterday we here at lowenddedi.net were dealing with a well known cheap memory supplier on eBay. We, because we occasionally suffer from bouts of stupidity, tried buying cheap RAM again having forgetten our last bad experience a few years ago only to find that the supplied sticks have bad chips. Upon trying to return them, the eBay supplier is claiming that there can be nothing wrong with them and it is motherboard incompatibility despite us testing the sticks in two separate motherboards (and finding the same bad memory address ranges). However, they kindly offered to "upgrade" our order (at "no profit" to them) to a "brand leader" memory stick by paying an extra fee - which guess what, makes them about the same cost as if we just bought the sticks from crucial.com in the first place.

This kind of loss leading business model is wrong on many counts, but it is so common because it works thanks to greed and gullibility. I luckily didn't spend much on the cheap RAM, and they are one of the biggest eBay sellers of cheap RAM used by thousands every week. Caveat emptor as always!