I've found our current xeon E5-1660v3 (and lesser versions) suitable for my needs so I can't speak to AMD setups or performance. For OP I'd recommend a decent xeon server and as much storage and RAM as you think you'll need to grow, you can run as many forums as you like until it can't take anymore. I wouldn't spend more then $100 on it. Even less if you have low traffic. Add Nginx, mariadb and php-fpm, backups and away you go.
Main difference is that server CPU's are designed to run at full tilt for long periods of time. Things like ECC support and multi-cpu support are not really an issue in this usercase.
For me.. it is... if I'm going to go so far to invest in a a dedicated server... I would rather it be able to run something like ProxMox or SolusVM efficiently. There's simply something inherently nice being able to wall off your individual sites from each other.
Yep, but I still won't use desktop class hardware for my server needs... there is an ultimate reason there is a difference between the two. If I was going to do that, I'd simply purchase my own desktop (workstation) grade equipment and then place it in a co-lo environment.
Oh for sure. If I wasn't planning on joining multiple sites and projects in one to save money, I'd just be sticking with a low cost server or higher end VPS. But in my case, we do a lot of local processing in the databases for custom scripts and workflows unrelated to core XF features, and some other projects involve a lot of long-running CPU intensive processes that hit the databases and file system hard enough that io slowdowns due to shared interface resources have been a pain for a while. Sure, we can get nvme storage, but that pcie bandwidth is virtually guaranteed to be over provisioned, split among enough devices that full pcie bandwidth will not be available reliably. Additionally, I'll often offload long running data processing tasks from personal projects, like data compression, encoding, compiling, etc., and I'll often run test instances of existing sites, so while the overhead may not be required on a day to day basis for XF, it'll definitely get used enough to justify the extra power and cost.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.
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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 had two different dedicated with QuadraNet, and was really pleased with them when I did...
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This is actually why SpaceBattles moved off Linode. the CPU steal issue just caused massive (and random) lagspikes and once they introduced the dedicated CPU option support was vastly less willing to move VMs to a less used host.
We really, really don't like that kind of thing to be completely honest, so we research and buy solely on 1-month costs. I get that these companies need multiple months of service to turn a profit especially on dedicated servers, but it seems every time we make a long term commitment to something to save money, it always comes back to bite us in some way, shape, or form. A simple pay as you go option makes it easy to pick up and go somewhere else if there's ever a problem that necessitates leaving, without having to give up hundreds of dollars in operating costs due to preexisting commitments. It's what made Linode, for example, a very attractive option with their hourly billing. It also makes it easy to just schedule a migration when we have the time to do so, instead of at the end of an arbitrary term. Thankfully, while Hivelocity does offer discounts on some servers for annual commitments, their budget sales are competitive even with yearly pricing, with only a month-to-month commitment, so we're not locked in long term there either. It's one of the reasons we settled on them. In fact, the server we bought doesn't even offer additional savings for annual plans because it's already heavily discounted.
Get monthly even if expensive. If it works good for you, switch to yearly with discount?
