tcreech.com

Hokay, so I want a machine somewhere that can do the following things:

1. Be geographically diverse
2. Be stable
3. Have “lots” of storage (1+TB)
4. Have low latency to wherever I’m currently living for the sake of AFS
5. Be able to itself virtualize hardware so that I can run a few different OSs

Basically, this all means that I need a dedicated server somewhere not too far away which has a new enough CPU to do virtualization and 1+TB of disk(s).

Dedicated server options

Here I explore the cheapest options from each provider that gives me 1+TB of storage and 8GB of memory as of Feb 17, 2015.

Vultr, Backupsy, EC2, Joyent, etc

Not dedicated machines; can’t run virtualization within. If things were cheap enough, it might be worthwhile to run what I want to virtualize as separate instances on these sorts of services. These are also prohibitively expensive unless the provider has a “storage” offering, like Backupsy and Vultr’s “SATA” VPSs.

Kimsufi

Kimsufi seems to be the cheapest overall. Currently using a KS–3:

$21/month gets you:

• 1TB enterprise disk
• 8GB non-ECC memory
• Intel Core i3–2130
• Awful/slow support: post on their forum and pray.
• Congested but supposedly unmetered 100mbps network
• 1 IPv4 address, a block of IPv6
• ~ 40ms ping from andante (Canada)

DataShack

DataShack looks promising, and is actually US-based.

$32/month gets you:

• 2x500GB disks (TODO: are these just commodity disks? what are they?)
• 8GB non-ECC (TODO: is this a mistake on their site?) memory
• Intel Xeon 5130 - !!! NO EPT! Can’t run SmartOS? !!!
• Some kind of support
• Unmetered 100mbps, or 20TB of gigabit.
• 5 IPv4 addresses, /64 of IPv6 addresses
• ~ 70ms ping from andante (Oklahoma)

$49/month gets you:

• 1x2TB sata disk (TODO: are these just commodity disks? what are they?)
• 16GB non-ECC
• Intel Core i3 3220 - cheapest Core option
• Some kind of support
• Unmetered 100mbps, or 20TB of gigabit.
• 5 IPv4 addresses, /64 of IPv6 addresses
• ~ 70ms ping from andante (Oklahoma)

$59/month gets you:

• 1x2TB sata disk (TODO: are these just commodity disks? what are they?)
• 24GB non-ECC (TODO: is this a mistake on their site?) memory
• Intel Xeon 5520 - cheapest Xeon option with EPT
• Some kind of support
• Unmetered 100mbps, or 20TB of gigabit.
• 5 IPv4 addresses, /64 of IPv6 addresses
• ~ 70ms ping from andante (Oklahoma)