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!

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

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.

As the database keeps on growing, we decided that the time had come for a leaderboard which shows the best entries in our database: we congratulate those seven providers who got awarded with "Strongly Recommended". We have also uploaded a series of graphs for those providers who are strongly recommended showing world ping times to their servers.

We are also extremely glad to have added the new best low end dedicated server in the database which is one from European provider Swiftway. Congratulations are due to them for offering a modern, powerful and cheap dedi with loads of well priced add-ons!