100-200 peak users VPS advice. HA Block Storage vs. SSD? More cores or higher clock speed?

[Gangleider]

Hey there! I'm currently looking at switching from shared hosting to a VPS for a multitude of reasons. Our forum has around 10.000 members (old forum) with about 100 to 200 concurrent users during peak times. We use several addons that increase load and we'd be looking to perhaps host other web applications/multiple domains (not really with the same amount of traffic on them but keeping the option open would be very nice) on the machine.

I'm looking at OVH mainly because I've heard their DDoS protection is fairly good, which is something we pretty much require. It's nothing serious, but we need protection from booters and other cheap solutions.
Their pricing is also decent. I've heard bad things about their support but honestly we don't really need any.

I'm mostly interested in their public cloud offerings but I can't quite decide on which option to choose. I'm hoping for some advice mostly in terms of choosing cores over clock speeds and SSD over block storage.

Our budget caps at around 40 euros (around 45 usd) a month but we'd ideally like to stay around the 20 to 30 mark.
https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/instances/

I'm linking the US version for convenience sake but we would most likely be hosting in France.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated! We're willing to look at other hosts as long as their offerings are similar, of course.

 

[rdn]

I myself always prefer higher clock speed and SSD.
Other Host I can recommend:
Ramnode KVM and Linode KVM.

 

[Gangleider]

Thanks! I'll do some digging.

 

[TPerry]

When I used RamNode I had really good luck with them and their support was fantastic. But that's been a few years ago as all I use now (even though my sites don't need it) is a dedicated server (currently one from OVH).

 

[Mike Edge]

When I used RamNode I had really good luck with them and their support was fantastic. But that's been a few years ago as all I use now (even though my sites don't need it) is a dedicated server (currently one from OVH).

What happened to your server you had?

 

[Pierce]

Thanks! I'll do some digging.

Please read this thread as I expect you will have the same issues:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/more-ram-to-speed-up-mysql-writes.121917/

 

[TPerry]

What happened to your server you had?

I change providers every now and then. I've been with (not in any particular order) QuadraNet, GetDedi, Server Complete (twice), So You Start, and now OVH. Probably will be sticking with OVH as I've not had any issues with them and have unlimited traffic on 500Mbps bandwidth.
Allows me to also serve some files and videos without having to worry about going over any allocation limit.

I've still got a Dell R320 sitting here at the house with new CPU's and SSD's in it, but haven't decided if it's worth doing a co-lo when I can get a server for the same amount and not have to worry about the hardware maintenance on it.

 

[Gangleider]

I've been looking at some of Hetzner's dedi's as well, there's a couple of last-gen servers on auction with SSDs, quad cores, ECC and 1gbit uplink for decent prices. They recently started offering "DDoS protection" but my past experiences with them (constant and long nullroutes over the most minor attacks) leave me wary. I haven't been able to find much info on it since it seems to be fairly new, though.

SoYouStart was also a top contender but I just don't know if I can live without ECC. There's nothing critical about the machine being up -- it can go down for a few minutes to an hour no problem, people will be slightly annoyed (if it's during peak hours, otherwise barely anyone will even notice) but the odds of memory errors seem so small. However from what I understand the risk is a lot more serious with databases, we do take backups fairly often but if it causes corruption that doesn't instantly fry the machine we might not catch on and keep backing up that same data.

I'm mostly torn between forking over the extra money for a small dedi vs. the public cloud SSD-CPU offering at OVH. RamNode seems good as well but we want a good amount of RAM(ironically it seems) for caching/elasticsearch/mysql/other big web apps, and in order to get that (we'd like at least 8GB) we have to get fairly expensive plans.

edit: would it be feasible to, say, host everything BUT database on a non-ecc server and get a separate ECC environment for databases?