Dedicated server recommendations?

4) Hivelocity.

I have recently set up a server for a customer of mine, they did some really aggressive pricing on pre sales and initial issues (just some licensing stuff that didnt go through correctly as we bought via them rather than separately) was all sorted within 15 minutes of opening a ticket.
 
To pile on the OVH bandwagon. Bought a cheap vps for a year to act as a proxy, maybe $11 in total as it was an offer on WHT. They wouldnt give me access to anything without sending over my drivers license.

$11 for my license? No thank you.
 
To pile on the OVH bandwagon. Bought a cheap vps for a year to act as a proxy, maybe $11 in total as it was an offer on WHT. They wouldnt give me access to anything without sending over my drivers license.

$11 for my license? No thank you.
This isn't just OVH - Hetzner wanted the same from me.
 
They wouldnt give me access to anything without sending over my drivers license.
This isn't just OVH - Hetzner wanted the same from me.
I've found a lot of this is based apparently on order origination location information. I've been with both (currently with Hetzner) and did not have to send any documentation in to them (reside in Texas). From my understanding it's a fraud/spam prevention system they have in place in that certain locales (either IP based location or given address not matching IP data) have a higher incidence of both types of behavior and they want further identification to lower the level of incidence.
 
That doesn't surprise me, but it's also a very annoying thing to deal with, and there's no way to know ahead of time if you'll be flagged for it. OVH has some reputation issues with their IP blocks to my knowledge, and this might be a way to try and mitigate that.
 
some reputation issues with their IP blocks to my knowledge, and this might be a way to try and mitigate that.
WELL more than "some"... I've found that they are in many various block lists, and some mail providers will not accept mail from them even if that specific IP is clean. And that's a large part of what they are trying to mitigate.... they let it go on for so long and spammers flocked to them, that for hosting an MTA server, it's pretty much a lost cause with them. Digital Ocean has a similar issue. Hetzner also requires you to have an active account with them for 30 days (think it is) and then you can request that they unblock port 25/465 on their Cloud/VPS (which means if you get a VPS and set up cPanel and hope to use it for sending mail, you aren't going to be able to immediately).
 
WELL more than "some"... I've found that they are in many various block lists, and some mail providers will not accept mail from them even if that specific IP is clean. And that's a large part of what they are trying to mitigate.... they let it go on for so long and spammers flocked to them, that for hosting an MTA server, it's pretty much a lost cause with them. Digital Ocean has a similar issue. Hetzner also requires you to have an active account with them for 30 days (think it is) and then you can request that they unblock port 25/465 on their Cloud/VPS (which means if you get a VPS and set up cPanel and hope to use it for sending mail, you aren't going to be able to immediately).
It's interesting you mention Digital Ocean. They must be trying to clean up their image too, because they wouldn't even let me buy a high performance VPS. They insisted I had to be a regular customer for some time with a good billing history before allowing for higher tier usage. Lost them my business with that policy. On the one hand I get the need to prevent abuse, but on the other it does prevent legitimate users from getting what they need.
 
but we absolutely need prompt responses on infrastructure or hardware issues.
Yeah well we did get a response that same evening, but the response was we did not have an SLA and had to wait for hardware replacement until after the weekend on monday. ;)
Also the first time we encountered that anyway anywhere, we used Leaseweb before (and another one) that for a couple of years and there was also no issue with hardware support outside office hours without any certain extra SLA.

Indeed more and more company's nowadays will wait to open port 25 due to anti spam measures or ask things like ID for could/vps at least.
At this point Contabo does not yet as far as I know. Also not a bad VPS provider with nice prices, but experiences there differ. Some like it and see it as a good choice (we never had issues) and some do not like it and had odd issues.
 
Yeah well we did get a response that same evening, but the response was we did not have an SLA and had to wait for hardware replacement until after the weekend on monday. ;)
When was this? And was it on an ovh machine or one of the kimsufi/soyoustart ones?

The sla on a standard dedicated is 99.95% and is monitored and swapped out 24*7.

The servers have ping monitoring and if unresponsive for more than 10 (I think) minutes then a technician goes to manually check it.
 
When was this? And was it on an ovh machine or one of the kimsufi/soyoustart ones?
To be honest, that was several years ago (might be 10 years) on a real OVH machine ordered on the OVH website, not at kimsufi/soyoustart. It might be they changed that policy in the meantime because lots of customers were going over to Hetzner at that time. But as said, we left to never come back so haven't looked anymore, but did here more complaints over the years.

Their website was different too then without all the cloud stuff and cloud in domainname. Contact OVH support directly, customer number was gr4xxxx-OVH.

he sla on a standard dedicated is 99.95% and is monitored and swapped out 24*7.

The servers have ping monitoring and if unresponsive for more than 10 (I think) minutes then a technician goes to manually check it.
Included in the dedicated server without you having to get a SLA? Then they changed for the better indeed.
Might not be that bad as longer ago then, but our trust is gone, also because we regularly kept hearing complaints.
However I'll keep your response in mind so if people ask I can tell them it seems it's better now.
 
The sla on a standard dedicated is 99.95% and is monitored and swapped out 24*7.
Have to be careful with this. I've had hosting providers claim "99.99%" uptime or whatever, then you read the fine print and it's only on network outages. Not saying OVH does or doesn't do this, but just in general I'd be very careful about verifying exactly what is covered under that SLA.
 
Have to be careful with this. I've had hosting providers claim "99.99%" uptime or whatever, then you read the fine print and it's only on network outages. Not saying OVH does or doesn't do this, but just in general I'd be very careful about verifying exactly what is covered under that SLA.
This is a good point - many will say it only counts when the service cannot be reached from external connectivity.

So if the link to their datacenter is down, that's not covered - however internal network, power and hardware would be.

OVH use this phrase : "A class of OVHcloud Services will be considered "Unavailable" or in state of "Unavailability" when a class of OVHcloud Services has no external connectivity."

 
I've used WebNX for a while now and they have been pretty good.

They did have a datacenter fire a couple years ago which is kind of wild but they did get our server back eventually and credited us the lost time. Lesson in backups, really.

The pricing on their hardware isn't super impressive on their website, but the gems are to be found in their periodic deal posts on WebHostingTalk. The hardware tends to be very much on the new side, and they are somehow usually one of the first providers to get newly released hardware in to deploy in servers. Latest deals post: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1896530
 
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Check out PhoenixNAP, multiple US locations with quite good pricing. Also if you do contract with them for longer periods they give quite good discounts (They currently also have some promo for specific servers)...

We're paying 91€/month for:
  • E-2288G
  • 64Gb DDR4 ECC RAM
  • 1TB NVMe disc
  • 5 public IPs

Haven't had any problems with them for the ~3years we've used their services :) 👍


Otherwise, I would also recommend Hetzner where you can get a quite nice dedicated server for as low as ~35€/month, but if you need US locations I think they don't have that...
 
I have recently set up a server for a customer of mine, they did some really aggressive pricing on pre sales and initial issues (just some licensing stuff that didnt go through correctly as we bought via them rather than separately) was all sorted within 15 minutes of opening a ticket.
Thank you for suggesting contacting pre sales. I was able to get a decent deal that helped balance the budget with our storage config, which I thought was priced well outside acceptable range normally, particularly for their HDD storage. That helped bring the entire package down to a reasonable and competitive price. We're testing out one of their servers now in addition to Interserver, but the pre-sales experience so far on Hivelocity has been really good. Had to drop IONOS as they just don't let you configure additional drives which I need for other projects, and S3 storage just hasn't been fast enough in random read/write tests so far for my needs.
 
I've used WebNX for a while now and they have been pretty good.

They did have a datacenter fire a couple years ago which is kind of wild but they did get our server back eventually and credited us the lost time. Lesson in backups, really.

The pricing on their hardware isn't super impressive on their website, but the gems are to be found in their periodic deal posts on WebHostingTalk. The hardware tends to be very much on the new side, and they are somehow usually one of the first providers to get newly released hardware in to deploy in servers. Latest deals post: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1896530
We saw this but they didn't have any clearance options available by the time we got to it. Unfortunate, but it is the nature of these kinds of clearances.
You may read this test results: https://www.webwhim.co.uk/how-to-select-the-best-wordpress-hosting-providers-for-uk-business/

Both MechanicWeb and HostXNow have AMD Ryzen 9 but cost more than a hundred for their Dedicated but their VPS or Semi-dedicated plans might suffice for you.
While I appreciate the info, we just want to move away from vps hosting now. I can combine projects onto one server to save on operating costs, so it's actually saving money vs our separate VPS setups we currently have running.
Check out PhoenixNAP, multiple US locations with quite good pricing. Also if you do contract with them for longer periods they give quite good discounts (They currently also have some promo for specific servers)...

We're paying 91€/month for:
  • E-2288G
  • 64Gb DDR4 ECC RAM
  • 1TB NVMe disc
  • 5 public IPs

Haven't had any problems with them for the ~3years we've used their services :) 👍


Otherwise, I would also recommend Hetzner where you can get a quite nice dedicated server for as low as ~35€/month, but if you need US locations I think they don't have that...
That sounds like a nice deal, we'll keep in mind if Hivelocity doesn't work out. Thanks.
 
We're looking to leave Linode as we're tired of dealing with IOPS and cpu slowdowns due to sharing the interface with our vps neighbors. We tried looking at other vps options but we now think we'll need to go dedicated after all. The hope is we can get a ~$100 a month server that can host multiple sites of ours, instead of a vps for each one.

Curious what folks have been using in this price range? We've noticed a lot of host's in this range offer really, really old server hardware, but there are a few that give more modern hardware. We are concerned primarily about single-threaded performance. Our current VPS runs us on an Epyc 7642 which has decent single threaded performance (2131 on Passmark), so we hoped to at least match this if possible.

Ultimately we came up with this shortlist:

1) Knownhost - very dated hardware (circa 2013 Xeon E5-2680v2, 1790 Passmark SC, 10c/20t, 32GB ram) but solid support options across the board at least for VPS users. Unknown if dedi is the same? $119 a month for our required storage and ram configuration. Storage in particular is quite expensive.

2) IONOS - slightly newer hardware (circa 2017 Xeon 1270v6, 2484 single core Passmark, 4c/8t, 32gb ram), but less customization and higher cost especially after the promo pricing. They also charge a $50 setup fee which is annoying as we can't easily order one for a month to see how it performs. We can't add a high capacity hard drive to the config. $130/month after promo pricing $20 discount for 3 months

3) Interserver. This is a weird one. I have trouble finding a lot of folks that have even heard of this host, let alone used them. They have a ton of customization options and we were able to configure a test server with way more than the rest were offering. Unknown customer support. Their sales team was hit and miss as was their vps support, but their dedicated support seems to be a different team and in a 1 month test I've not had issues. They even caught a config choice I made that wasn't optimal (wrong raid software config that needlessly increased CPU overhead), and suggested I approve a fix for it before provisioning. Very new hardware but using a desktop chip (circa 2020 Ryzen 5600X 6c/12t with 64gb ECC ram, 3352 Passmark, nvme boot drive), $100/month including our ideal storage solution. Notably their storage is super cheap, 2tb data drive for just $5 a month makes a data drive in raid 1 super viable. Curious if anyone's had experience with their dedi team?

4) Hivelocity. I've heard good things about them but again like Knownhost it's mostly VPS reviews. They have a dedicated option with newer hardware (circa 2019 Xeon E-2236, 6c/12t, 32gb ram, nvme boot drive, 2841 Passmark), but they don't offer software raid which is annoying and their properly configured hardware raid is $50/month...also their storage, especially HDD data storage, is stupidly expensive compared to other options. $119 a month but notably no OS raid 1 at this price. Can improve pricing with a long term commitment but we don't like that. Coming from linode, we prefer flexibility to pick up and go if we ever need to without worrying about too much in lost funds.

We'd be using an S3 compatible bucket to self-mamage our backups, so keep in mind we aren't relying on raid as a backup, just want to ensure as much redundancy as we can to avoid disruptions in service. That said, we'd absolutely prefer redundancy vs no redundancy...Any other host's I should consider in this price range? Right now based on pricing an customization options, it's between Interserver and Hivelocity, but customer support is also important and that's a bit of an unknown for both in the dedi space. Both have been around a long, long time with 20+ years in business. Any experience with these?
I use about 33TB bandwidth a month from 500,000 unique IP's/users and I do not look for much in one dedicated server to handle this, except 16GB of ram (8 if you're desperate for elasticsearch) a large TB harddrive (doesn't have to be SSD) and unlimited 1gbps bandwidth. Old xeons have suited me fine. This is how my forum has survived since 2008. People are overthinking this whole hosting thing for forums and paying a lot more than necessary. S3 backups? Rip off. Backblaze is cheaper using restic. Offsite image hosting? Rip off. Cheap extra drive and spin it all off that from another location. Control panels? Forget it, start compiling nginx and php yourself. Nvme? Come back when it's cheap.


Most people starting here or with a medium sized community should be paying like $39 a month for a server. Unless you are a legit bigboard. I think a lot of people are paying too much.
 
Most people starting here or with a medium sized community should be paying like $39 a month for a server. Unless you are a legit bigboard. I think a lot of people are paying too much.
I personally am not a big fan of using desktop chipsets for my "big iron" if I'm going to jump into a dedicated server option... and the majority of those AMD Ryzen 5xxx chipsets are, at their core, simply desktop chipsets... and there IS a difference between server level chipsets and desktop chipsets.
 
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