Officially they provide 2000 read/write IOPS for a volume composed of one chunk (50GB) [1]. You measured 4000 r/w IOPS, so does this mean you ran it on a 100GB volume? If yes, then that's pretty amazing you get exactly the expected allocated IOPS performance for a $3.40/mo server.
Nitpicking the submission title ("ARM7 dedicated servers for 3.40 per month"): ARM7 is actually very old ARM cores running ARMv4; these servers are ARMv7.
To be even more specific, these CPU are produced by Marvell under the name Armada 370/XP (according /proc/cpuinfo), and are based on ARM's Cortex A9 design (source: https://scaleway.com/faq/server/#-Why-did-you-choose-ARM ).
According to /proc/cpuinfo, CPU Implementer is 0x56 ('V' = Marvell) and CPU part is 0x584 (Marvell Armada XP). This is most likely not Cortex A9 (which would have CPU Implementer == 0x41 and CPU part == 0xC09), but Marvell's own PJ4 microarchitecture.
Intel uses the letters to indicate the type of connection between the CPU and motherboard. So LGA = Land Grid Array [1]. The number is the number of pins/contacts connecting the CPU to the motherboard. So LGA1155 is a Land Grid Array Socket with 1,155 pins.
It's definitely not random, at least not with Intel. ARM is confusing as hell though. Part of the issue is that there is the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that has different versions, and then there are different ARM CPU architectures, but those two don't necessarily need to correspond.
But what about bandwidth? That's still shared among all the users, right?
And given that they are even advertising 'Seedboxes' and VPN servers [0] hosted in the same network, it makes me doubt the quality of network even more.
They have another product mini dedicated for 6 euro/mo[0]. Which I've been using recently and the network performance has been pretty consistent. They are however seem marketed more for personal usage though.
The submission title really should include a dollar to indicate which currency is meant.
Also, for non-corporate customers in Europe, VAT should be added.
The VAT-inclusive price is €3.59 (for 4 ARM cores, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSB disk, and one IP with 200 Mbps unmetered bandwidth). This is the VAT-inclusive number from the site, which is using French VAT (20%). Here in Sweden it'd be 25%, it seems. :|
For european union based users without a valid EU VAT number, VAT must be added based on the VAT rate in the users own country, not always french VAT at 20%. Ie we pay 25% here in DK.
This is due to the new rules that went into effect 1 January 2015: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_wo...
There was some discussion of that in the original announcement. Apparently the kernel requirement is because the root fs is a network drive, and the system PXE-boots: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309661
I wonder if I could buy a couple of those servers for my own. I work on cloud and data-center automation tools and having real metal to test ideas and software would be amazing. I've been toying with the idea of hooking up a couple Edisons or Galileos (x86 makes everything easier on my side) but they have complete running hardware and that easily beats developing my own.
I didn't click on the original article at the time because the title was utterly meaningless without context: "We are slashing the C1 price by 70 percent". I'm not motivated enough to figure out the context for every article, so I just skip those unless they have a very high number of points or comments. I'm probably not alone in this.
I like the idea of the product a lot - but the question I have is how these servers stack up in an 'apples to apples' comparison (that is to say, with a DO small / medium / large instance - or an AWS small / medium / large instance) - which would allow for me to work out if it's worthwhile investing..
There's also hard limits on the number of servers you can create (~10) until you contact support to get that value lifted so it appears there are caps on what you spend
The IPv4 address is independent of any one server. Think of it kind of like L2 / L3, when a packet gets to its final network the L3 address is translated to a L2 address (ARP typically with ethernet / IP) with the L3 frame wrapped by a L2 frame. So think of this more like L2 is now a combination of classic L2 and the lower end of L3. It's sort of halfway between home router style NAT and switching; and yes, I'm sure it runs as close to full speed as switching does. This kind of set up is very common in cloud based services that support live migration (not that this service does; it's bare metal).
They have made a couple of customizations to the regular Linux bootup that have severe security implications (i.e. download kernel modules from them among other things).
Contrary to a "classic" dedicated server, with this configuration you are very much trusting them unless you make changes.
Unfortunately the script on that page has some errors (it references missing files and it's missing some files that are required), they should really go over it and fix them.
Is the storage attached directly to the box or is it a SAN? I'd like to use one of these for a personal email server, but don't want to bother if a fried disk or disk controller would result in significant downtime for my email.
A huge part of the monthly cost of any infrastructure is less about power and the hardware and more about the quality of the internet connection. If I can't get data in and out quickly it isn't going to be much good to me.
Unlikely...If there are 912 blades per server it would require 20Gbps of dedicated capacity per server. Having played around with Scaleway servers, they have at least a two cabinets of these servers (10-20 servers).
Online.net's total network capacity is in the realm of 1Tbps.
They would have to dedicated anywhere from 20-40% of their network capacity if they were to guarantee 200mbit
of course we don't deploy a network accounting for every machine at 200mb/s flat 24/24, this would just be throwing money away. The reality is that most users won't be using these 200mb/s constantly, every customer have different traffic pattern usages.
We (online.net) have a long history in dedicated servers (yes we have a >1tb/s global network footprint), we known how to scale the network the proper way. It is carefully monitored, when upgrades are needed, we do upgrade (for example you can check on status.online.net network section, you will see that we upgrade when it is needed, we have quite a few ongoing)
the same applies to scaleway, we can upgrade network uplinks if needed and we do monitor that closely
Note that only uplinks to the backbone are "shared", each 1gb/s port of the servers really are dedicated
Hope this clarifies the design :)
Do you mean the 1Gbps port for the enclosure (i.e. the server hosting the 912 blades)? If so, unless you're providing many 1Gbps links you're not anywhere close to providing good quality networking for these
Comments on HN normally provide both sides to the story, so I am hoping someone with deep/vast server knowledge and the VPS market will provide a critique of why this is "not so good".
Also, France? Same country that is trying to push privacy-unfriendly laws? Probably not a good idea to use this service for VPN then.
It would probably suffice as a test-box or cheap-static hosting I guess.
> Also, France? Same country that is trying to push privacy-unfriendly laws? Probably not a good idea to use this service for VPN then.
They are explicitly advertising VPNs, but even though I live in France I'm not sure whether the situation there is secure enough. France is collecting internet logs, and a server has its own IP, is a VPN then even useful?
> It would probably suffice as a test-box or cheap-static hosting I guess.
More than static. I installed serendipity (a blogging engine, think wordpress) there and it worked good enough for me to assume that it would work fine with medium traffic as well.
Got a pretty good impression otherwise. The thing that bothered me most was that the free test month was not a full month, but till the next accounting period – 14 days for me. Cut my time short to test it. But you can imagine that if that is my sole complain, it was fine otherwise for me. A solid site and their scripts to build images worked fine.
Boxes like these are extremely popular as BitTorrent seedboxes. Online.net, for example, is huge, and not just in Europe; people run FTP servers on these things and copy stuff over to their home servers. I would say that $3.40/mo is pretty competitive.
