VPS or dedicated server?

[csdude55]

I used to have a dedicated server, but that was at least 7 years ago. I switched to a virtual server in 2013 or so. But now it's been so long that I honestly don't remember the advantages / disadvantages either way.

VPS
My current VPS has (2) Intel Xeon E5-2683 v4 CPUs (2.10GHz), and the processor load is just fine (Munin shows a system average of 22.75 out of 200). It used to have 4G of RAM, but I was constantly swapping so I upgraded to 8G about a week ago. Now my "committed" load ranges from 3.75 to to 7.27.

The VPS has a 100G SSD that's 96% full, so I'm trying to add a second 100G SSD to it.

Before the upgrade, my VPS was a legacy account with 5TB of bandwidth available. After the upgrades, though, they said I would have to be bumped down to 250G of bandwidth because they don't offer the 5TB plan anymore. I typically use around 500G, so after paying for the overages my new monthly price will be around $106.75 (give or take a little, based on actual bandwidth used). I haven't gotten the first invoice yet, though, and their website has given me 3 different prices, so I honestly don't know how much it will be.

I should mention that the support at the company where my VPS is used to be phenomenal, now it's just phenomenally bad. It's supposed to be semi-managed, but I honestly can't remember the last time that they actually managed... anything.

Dedicated
When I first started working online (1996, I think), I used a small business located in Dallas, Texas for my hosting. I loved those guys; the tech staff knew me by name, I often chatted with the CEO (Kaitlynn), I even remember when she had her daughter! They were awesome. But they only offered shared hosting at the time and I needed more resources, so I had to move on. But now I see that they offer dedicated servers.

They quoted me a dedicated with (2) AMD 2358 8 core CPUs (2.4GHz), 8G of RAM, and a 250GB HDD (not SSD) for $98.99. This does not include WHM/cPanel, though, which many of my hosted clients use and rely on, so I kinda have to have it. A license for 100 accounts takes me up to $143.99.


So the dedicated has more CPU (two 2.4 vs two 2.1), but that's not critical. Same RAM. More storage that I could actually use, but on a slower drive. Much better support. But $37 more, at a time when I'm counting pennies every month.

What do you all think, which do you think is a better choice?

[robzilla]

Your VPS is probably assigned two cores of those Xeon CPUs. Otherwise you'd have 32 cores at your disposal for only about $100, and you shouldn't ever leave ;-)

Neither of these options sound very good, actually. SSDs make such a big difference, and they've become quite affordable, that I wouldn't ever recommend going back to HDD unless you require multiple terabytes of storage. And 250GB of traffic is quite absurd for that price. Like storage, traffic is only getting cheaper, so they're just wringing extra cash out of you. Support also being bad, I would plan on leaving them.

We've talked about the well-known VPS providers previously. There, you can get 4 CPU cores (2x what you have now), 8 GB of RAM, 160 GB of SSD storage (1.6x) and 5 TB of traffic (20x) for less than half the price ($40). This is unmanaged, of course, but it didn't sound like they're managing very much for you now anyway.

I tend to prefer virtual over dedicated servers, mostly because of the flexibility, price and increased redundancy (and free KVM), but sometimes a dedicated server may offer more bang for the buck. Right now I have one unmanaged dedicated server with an Intel Xeon E3-1240 v5 (4C/8T), 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD and 50TB of traffic for $30/month. It's absurd, really. We seem to have more competitively priced dedicated servers here in Europe, though, so you may not be able to find something similar over there.

[NickMNS]

VPS. What Robzilla said. Check out the major VPS providers for pricing it is all very similar. Support is excellent. You can also throw in a few extra bucks for automatic back-ups.

[brotherhood of LAN]

For a frame of reference I have a dedi with a well known German provider that is unmanaged. i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz (4 cores), 860 GB of NVMe (2x 480GB), 2TB HDD, 64GB RAM, 1Gbit bandwidth for 50EUR/month, paid monthly. I don't host anyone else's stuff and I manage it myself so it's suitable for me. If you can, try get rid of the panels as they've been jacking up their prices over the past few years. I use the SSDs for databases and memory maps, hard disk for logging and any sequential writing.

As Robzilla said, prices seem to be more competitive in Europe for dedis at least, but there's some decent/value VPS providers in the US.

You mentioned in another thread you own a number of sites, I'd probably lean towards VPS(s) to avoid a single point of failure for all of them. There are lots of VPS providers in the $3-$5/m range that'd give you 512MB/1GB RAM, 10-15GB SSD space, a couple of CPUs and bandwidth... perhaps slowly moving your sites one by one onto these could be an option. For static sites you could put a dozen on one no problem (bandwidth permitting). An advantage of using VPS(s) is you'll be able to be more flexible in upgrading for more disk space/RAM etc. "cloud" type solutions are more or less the same as VPS but tend to sell the idea of being flexible with resources more, but seemingly they tend to cost a bit more.

Basically I think the prices you were quoted are quite high but the "managed element" can add orders of magnitude onto the cost of bare metal.

[graeme_p]

VPS are more flexible and easier - you can usually clone existing VPSs and do whole VPS backups easily.

As @robzilla said, Dedis can give you more bang for the buck. I am considering consolidating my VPSes to a dedi - but doing so by running VPSes on the dedi.

You can certainly get better prices for dedis (at least in Europe) - a big French provider I just checked will do an unmanaged Xeon E3-1230 + 32GB memory + two 2Tb HHDs for $69/month. On the other hand they are definitely not the sort of place where tech support know your name or you will chat to the CEO.

"cloud" type solutions are more or less the same as VPS but tend to sell the idea of being flexible with resources more, but seemingly they tend to cost a bit more.

Cloud usually means a bunch of add on services - but the bigger VPS providers now offer managed database services and similar, and have kept the lower pricing and with a lot less lockin.

What I hate seeing is people paying for one of the big "cloud" solutions and then using as just a VPS.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

VPS or dedicated server

(I assume we are speaking about unmanaged servers)

You can find very-very cheap "good" VPS. This can be interesting, if you want to separate things.

If you prefer to have all in one place, as you get more RAM and especially disk on a VPS, it trends to be more expensive than a dedicated server.

An advantage of a VPS, is that, it's the host which is (supposedly) monitoring , replacing and rebuilding a broken disk. If you run a dedicated server, "good" providers will monitor the health of the hardware for you, but, it might still rely on you to report a breaking / broken disk, and once replaced, it's up to you, to rebuild the RAID.

Personally, I prefer dedicated servers.

You can also look for providers in Canada.

[csdude55]

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong... I went to 2 of the providers recommended and used their online-calculator to get a price. For a similar VPS to what I have now, one quoted $158 /month, another quoted $330 +/- (I saved the first one but not the second one, I just remember it was around the $330 mark).

It's very confusing, there are a lot of terms being used now that I don't understand AT ALL (eg, "droplets" and "kubernetes"). But the one that quoted $158 shows that a VPS droplet with 8G of RAM, 4 vCPU, and 160G of storage would be $40, which sounds great, but after you go through the steps it's $158. There's no explanation of a difference between "Basic" or "General Purpose" (which is the reason for the price jump), and when I emailed for support I got an auto-reply that they basically don't offer support... huuuuuge turn off.

Right now I'm leaning towards getting 2 separate VPS; one for my hosted clients and one for my own sites. None of my hosted clients are high demand so they could easily go on a VPS with much less memory and save me some money, while giving me the option of having 2 separate firewall configurations.

[robzilla]

A "droplet" or a "node" is just another term for a VPS. Ignore the Kubernetes stuff, you don't need it.

Make sure you're selecting a VPS with a shared CPU. You generally only need a dedicated CPU if you have long-running CPU-intensive tasks. Since you're now, with 2 cores, using only about 10-15% of your CPU power, with 4 cores you'll only use about 5%, so you'll have lots of CPU power to spare. Disk space, bandwidth and traffic are guaranteed, CPU power and disk i/o are shared among the virtual servers residing on a host. This can be a problem with VPS providers that oversell their host machines so that noisy neighbors can harm your server's performance, but the more reputable providers will maintain a good balance and monitor the host machines for egregious use. A shared CPU will suit you just fine.

It's true that these virtual servers are self-managed. Support is only available for networking, access and performance issues, so you're mostly on your own in terms of server configuration. You can usually find pre-configured images, with cPanel or Plesk for example, but you'll need to take care of licensing yourself. And there's a tutorial or answer available for pretty much anything you run into when configuring your server.

[csdude55]

I gotcha. That's where I get nervous... if I select a server that's too slow then it's going to be a huge pain to transition again, and in the meanwhile I risk losing users. I found this on the provider's site regarding Basic and General Purpose:

BASIC (Shared CPU):
The most basic Droplet – a burstable portion of vCPU – along with a configurable amount of memory.

Designed for:
Simple or bursty applications such as low traffic web servers, blogs, discussion forums, CMS, small databases, dev/test servers, microservices, and repository hosting.

GENERAL PURPOSE (DedicatedCPU):
The most popular modern Droplet, with 100% dedicated vCPU, along with a balanced 4GB of memory for each vCPU.

Designed for:
Critical applications such as high-traffic web servers, e-commerce sites, medium-sized databases, and enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS).

The concept of "low traffic" vs "high traffic" is totally subjective, though. How is that defined? I know that in the last week, I had a max of 37.82 Apache processes per second on port 80, with an average of 13.95. And Apache bytes per second had a max of 2.73M and an average of 149.25k... is that high or low?

It's true that these virtual servers are self-managed. Support is only available for networking, access and performance issues, so you're mostly on your own in terms of server configuration.

I'm fine with doing the configuration on my own. And truth be told, I'm really too much of a control freak to let someone else decide, anyway (thus why I don't use templates). I worry more about emergency situations. Like, I've been having a problem with iptables blocking all Charter users, and I can't figure out why... so when I restart Apache, I have to stop iptables manually. A few nights ago I got the bright idea to flush iptables using:

# iptables -F

After about 10 minutes it appeared to be still running, but then I discovered that the server was unresponsive. I logged in to my provider's dashboard and issued a soft reboot, but 30 minutes later it was still not responsive.

I had to log in to a chat session at 3am, and it seriously took about 4 hours for him to figure out the problem and get me back online. It should have taken him 5 minutes, but I don't think he was the brightest bulb in the pack...

So when I email sales to ask for a quote, and all I get in reply is auto-reply saying that they won't read it and encouraging me to ask in their message board? That makes me nervous. If they're not going to reply to a sales quote, how are they going to handle an emergency situation at 3am?

[NickMNS]

if I select a server that's too slow then it's going to be a huge pain to transition again,

No. This is the beauty of these VPS's, it is stupid easy to upgrade. You simply shut-down, select the size you want to upgrade to and that is it. You auto-magically have a a new VPS with more RAM/Disk space/CPU's. I did it last week, it took less than 2 minutes. Nothing changes, you keep the same IP and everything works like before. It's great for development too, because you can clone your box, then restrict access too it. and then you have dev environment that you can make change to and test with all the same data as the live box.

So choose the plan that most reasonably meets your needs, then if you find you need more CPU's or more disk-space just upgrade.

As far as support goes I can't speak for the droplets company as I have only ever used their main competitor, but I have rarely needed to contact support, but when I did, I always gotten quick and knowledgeable responses.

[robzilla]

The concept of "low traffic" vs "high traffic" is totally subjective, though. How is that defined? I know that in the last week, I had a max of 37.82 Apache processes per second on port 80, with an average of 13.95. And Apache bytes per second had a max of 2.73M and an average of 149.25k... is that high or low?

It's not defined, they're just generalized examples of possible use cases. It's not really about traffic, it's about how much stress you'll be putting on the server and what sort of performance guarantees you require. After all, a low-traffic but inefficient site can easily put more strain on a server than an optimized high-traffic site. What's important is that you're not maxing out on CPU power and disk i/o all the time, because then performance might be less predictable and they may suggest you upgrade to a bigger plan or a dedicated CPU. This is probably no different from your current VPS. You're only using about 10% of your 2-core CPU power right now, which translates to ~5% if you pick a 4-core plan, so you'd need 15-20x more traffic to even get close to that.

So when I email sales to ask for a quote, and all I get in reply is auto-reply saying that they won't read it and encouraging me to ask in their message board? That makes me nervous. If they're not going to reply to a sales quote, how are they going to handle an emergency situation at 3am?

Support is available round-the-clock for technical issues related to performance, networking and accessing your server. I've rarely needed it, but both of these companies have always been responsive. Sales is perhaps less of a priority since it's all self-managed and aimed mostly at developers, but I usually get a personal response to any type of ticket. It's a good way to compare companies, though - send them both your questions and see which answers you like best.

I logged in to my provider's dashboard and issued a soft reboot, but 30 minutes later it was still not responsive.

You can usually get direct (virtualized) terminal access to your VPS from your dashboard to get around things like problems with iptables. If your current provider does not offer that feature, that's another great reason to move away. I've locked myself out many times by misconfiguring the firewall or ssh, and without a terminal I'd have been screwed. That's one of the things that scares me about running a dedicated server without KVM (it's available as an add-on but would almost double the price).

[edited by: robzilla at 9:19 am (utc) on Nov 11, 2020]

[brotherhood of LAN]

And Apache bytes per second had a max of 2.73M and an average of 149.25k... is that high or low?

It's low. Dedis will tend to come with dedicated/guaranteed 250Mbps/500Mbps/1Gbps (divide by 8 for bytes). Your peak bandwidth is about one tenth of that.

[tangor]

You guys must be running FAR LARGER sites than I ... My VPS is about $30 month and handles multi-millions per year ... perhaps you folks are multi-millions per month?

I've always looked for the "bang and buck" out there, and usually support local companies that have the required geo reach...

One thing I will not do is pay more for the hosting than I have to, and also manage "who gets in" to keep the bandwidth manageable ... but that's a different topic.

At present my host, for those dollars, is "unlimited" in resources and bandwidth and since switching over to them two years back, have been very satisfied.

Sometimes we overthink things.

YMMV

[csdude55]

I really just get gun-shy because I've had issues in the past with servers running super slow. My sites rely on returning traffic, so a week of the site running slow or unresponsive can cause me to lose a ton of users... then they move on to Facebook or something, and they're gone forever. So a short period of "try it and see" could end up costing me a lot of money in the long run.

[robzilla]

So a short period of "try it and see" could end up costing me a lot of money in the long run.

You don't want to jump the gun and move everything before you've fully tested it, of course. Set up the new server, then stress-test it to ensure it can handle at least the same amount of traffic, and then you can make the switch with peace of mind.

[JorgeV]

I don't know if it can help, but, when you try to compare servers, here are things to look for, to know, if you'll get more performances or not.

- Bandwidth speed, be careful of the units, "b" is bits and "B" is Byte (8 bits). When you monitor your bandwidth usage, you can figure out how much you are using.

- Disk. SSD vs HD.

- CPU cores. To appraise this, you can check the site [cpubenchmark.net...]

For example, and from my understanding, your current server has 2 cores on a Intel Xeon E5-2683 v4 CPUs.

Here : [cpubenchmark.net...]

You can see that this CPU has a Single Thread Rating of 1680

About the AMD 2358 (if the reference is right, because I find it odd, since it's a very old CPU) : [cpubenchmark.net...]

You find that it has a Single Thread Rating of 858

So, the one AMD core is twice slower than your actual server. Frequency doesn't make everything.

Now, in real life situation, this is different, because Web servers are not achieving complex calculations or moving large amount of memory around all the time. Still it can be a useful information when it comes to compare offers.

[robzilla]

if the reference is right, because I find it odd, since it's a very old CPU

It's common for older, previously used servers to be rented out again, usually for a lower price, so that's good advice to not focus too much on the number of cores or even clock speed. (However, this 1-on-1 comparison is a little tricky because the Xeon is shared whereas the AMD is not.)

[csdude55]

That quote was actually sent in August 2019... man, as bad as 2020 has been, it's really flown by! LOL Probably because I have so many things I needed to do, and haven't actually finished anything! LOL

I appreciate the info, @JorgeV, I'll definitely test it out. I'm 99% sure that my current provider is overselling, because my Munin reports look a LOT different than they did before they sold out to another company. They say they don't... I mentioned before that I saw my RAM usage almost double one day, with no apparent explanation, but now I realize that about 2 weeks later is when they announced the buy-out. Coincidence?

[robzilla]

Coincidence?

Most likely, yes :-) You can't really oversubscribe RAM reliably, so the cause is probably local: an update, a memory leak, a config change, etc.

[tangor]

^^^ could be all of those, OR hinky/incompetent support or over-billing on hoarded resources (they got it, just want to make it look scarce).

But coincidence seems more likely. :)

[chaser]

VPS is enough in most cases. If you have a large portal, you immediately need to think about optimization or switch to DDS