Would you pay more for EPYC cloud servers?

SpryServers_Tab · March 2020

Hey guys. Right now our KVM VPS are all Intel E5-26xx on SolusVM. We have some EPYC, but use them internally with Proxmox, as we need the advanced networking capabilities Proxmox provides. We'd love to be able to offer users EPYC VPS, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing this via Proxmox. I would be willing to convert them to Solus.io once it's stable, since it offers much more network flexibility. I'd probably offer local and network storage options.

As Solus.io is much more expensive than SolusVM, and each 32 core epyc CPU would cost us over $150/mo for licensing, we'd definitely need to charge more per VM.

How many people here would be willing to pay more for this, and how much per VPS/core more would you be willing to pay?

SpryServers_Tab · March 2020

Also, if you choose <$1, please provide feedback with if or how much you are willing to pay. I greatly appreciate your help with this LE market research.

havoc · March 2020

Same as comparable Intel after deducting hit for vulnerabilities. Don't really care what it says on the tin...I just want good performance without any super hairy vulnerabilities.

seriesn · March 2020

@SpryServers_Tab said:
Hey guys. Right now our KVM VPS are all Intel E5-26xx on SolusVM. We have some EPYC, but use them internally with Proxmox, as we need the advanced networking capabilities Proxmox provides. We'd love to be able to offer users EPYC VPS, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing this via Proxmox. I would be willing to convert them to Solus.io once it's stable, since it offers much more network flexibility. I'd probably offer local and network storage options.

As Solus.io is much more expensive than SolusVM, and each 32 core epyc CPU would cost us over $150/mo for licensing, we'd definitely need to charge more per VM.

How many people here would be willing to pay more for this, and how much per VPS/core more would you be willing to pay?

Honestly brother, at that point, you are competing against DO/vultr etc. So the question comes in, would you offer similar feature as them at the same price point? If not, what is your competitive advantage?

wdmg · March 2020

I’d be happy to pay $2/vcore/mo, but $3+/vcore isn’t as attractive

SpryServers_Tab · March 2020

@seriesn said:

@SpryServers_Tab said:
Hey guys. Right now our KVM VPS are all Intel E5-26xx on SolusVM. We have some EPYC, but use them internally with Proxmox, as we need the advanced networking capabilities Proxmox provides. We'd love to be able to offer users EPYC VPS, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing this via Proxmox. I would be willing to convert them to Solus.io once it's stable, since it offers much more network flexibility. I'd probably offer local and network storage options.

As Solus.io is much more expensive than SolusVM, and each 32 core epyc CPU would cost us over $150/mo for licensing, we'd definitely need to charge more per VM.

How many people here would be willing to pay more for this, and how much per VPS/core more would you be willing to pay?

Honestly brother, at that point, you are competing against DO/vultr etc. So the question comes in, would you offer similar feature as them at the same price point? If not, what is your competitive advantage?

Well from what I've seen playing around with Solus.io, it gives the tools to directly compete with their featuresets. I may be able to get away with a minimal increase, while using EPYC, due to the large core count vs intel.

And possibly just increase the base price slightly rather than core price?

Just trying to get a good idea of the market for this. I'm trying to see the response in low end community and non-le.

seriesn · March 2020

@SpryServers_Tab said: low end community and non-le.

In LE community, it will always be the best bang for less.

While non-le, I strongly believe that there's a beautiful niche between Do and AWS, that can do really well if done right. Elastic IP, quick deployment, custom template creation, auto failover, scalability, 100% hw/network uptime guarantee, legendary support, if done and combined properly, you might have the perfect formula.

deank · March 2020

Nope, I wouldn't pay more.

InceptionHosting · March 2020

May I suggest that you simply look at Vultr, DO, Hetzner cloud, OVH Cloud prices, that is what people are prepared to pay or rather what people are accustomed to paying in the majority of cases for this market segment.

SpryServers_Tab · March 2020

@AnthonySmith said:
May I suggest that you simply look at Vultr, DO, Hetzner cloud, OVH Cloud prices, that is what people are prepared to pay or rather what people are accustomed to paying in the majority of cases for this market segment.

That's a good point, thanks

Harambe · March 2020

I wouldn't go out of my way to pay more for an Epyc VM, I would just avoid hosts/find someone else at the same price point that offers AMD.

It's a slight edge for marketing but that's about it. Maybe when you get into enterprise more people will care and want AMD private cloud and be willing to pay a premium over Intel, but I doubt you'll see it in this market.

As an example of what I will pay more for, it's stuff like Vultr's high frequency plans. I think it's basically a 20% premium but you get high core clock CPUs and NVMe over standard SSD (plus a few extra gigs of space iirc). I regularly spin these up at work for our devs when I know the tasks are going to need a little extra horsepower.

AK_KWH · March 2020

we can understand the power of Eypyc VM but non-tech person dont so @seriesn said if you can do something better then Do,Vultr,AWS then you are welcome however what i research personally currently situation is that in major countries peoples even dont look at the CPU they just check the RAM CPU cores and SSD nothing else they check they even dont know but my suggestion is to always try for the best one which u can do however a person who understand that he/she will pay more then 3$/core

willie · March 2020

It's nice to have a bit more per-core performance but it's also a matter of how much cpu headroom is available. A small VM on a 4-core E3 box can easily be swamped by just a few noisy neighbors, but if it's on a 12+ core Ryzen or Epyc or E5, unless the product starts to attract cpu hogs, there is less likelihood of all cores being busy at once even if load per core is the same.

Let's say the config is 8GB of ram per pcore and the basic LES VM is 1GB ram, which means 1/8 or 12.5% of a pcore. My reasonable(?) expectation is to idle the VM most of the time, and have occasional CPU bursts where I have better than 90% chance of getting 90% of a pcore. If I'm idle 95% of the time and burst 5%, that's well under the "allotted" 12.5%, but it does tend to lead to contention if the bursts are long and the # of cores is low.

Regarding Vultr, their high frequency option is great. Observably 2x the speed of the regular VM last time I tried it.

ilnahro · March 2020

Correct me if I'm wrong but afaik (current-gen) EPYC CPUs deliver higher performance per dollar both in acquisition as well as power consumption. That means lower cost to the provider, so in the baseline I'd expect EPYC servers to be competitively priced or cheaper than Intel solutions with similar performance. I see no reason for a premium based on those CPUs unless you are targeting a usergroup that is extremely environmentally sensitive. As with everything in our economies, most people care about task performance or price or a balance of the two.

Solus.io on the other hand is another matter. Depending on user needs, that may justify higher prices but I fail to see why you would link it to CPU vendor. Personally, I don't see myself really using any of them, but I'm sure solus has user group in mind that would be willing to pay that rather steep price per vcore.

cybertech · March 2020

Or just make more vCores than threads like hostdoc did.

WSS · March 2020

@cybertech said:
Or just make more vCores than threads like hostdoc did.

That's kind of common. Hence, 1/2 core, etc...

willie · March 2020

@ilnahro said: Correct me if I'm wrong but afaik (current-gen) EPYC CPUs deliver higher performance per dollar both in acquisition as well as power consumption.

Power consumption yes; acquisition only in comparison to new Intel stuff. This is LES and providers here tend to use older equipment acquired on the used market for almost nothing. Epyc acquisition is also way more expensive per unit performance than AMD's own lower end lines, Threadripper and Ryzen. There are several very nice Ryzen products being offered or in the works right now.

SpryServers_Tab · March 2020

@WSS said:

@cybertech said:
Or just make more vCores than threads like hostdoc did.

That's kind of common. Hence, 1/2 core, etc...

Welp we see how that business model turned out. lol

ilnahro · March 2020

@willie said:

@ilnahro said: Correct me if I'm wrong but afaik (current-gen) EPYC CPUs deliver higher performance per dollar both in acquisition as well as power consumption.

Power consumption yes; acquisition only in comparison to new Intel stuff. This is LES and providers here tend to use older equipment acquired on the used market for almost nothing. Epyc acquisition is also way more expensive per unit performance than AMD's own lower end lines, Threadripper and Ryzen. There are several very nice Ryzen products being offered or in the works right now.

If you're using extremely cheap, used hardware, then Epycs are simply out of the question because they haven't been around long enough. I guess key here is what rack-space and power cost. The last generation EPYC CPUs use roughly 30% less power per calculation than even state-of-the-art xeons. My guess would be that it is the bundling policy of costs for rackspace/power/connection practiced by datacenters than makes old Xeons with comparatively massive power requirements feasible. But the inflection point is coming quickly, now that AMD has livened up competitions in the CPU space. I expect another round of substantial performance gains at little to now added power-use this year and another substantial efficiency boost due to TSMC-5nm next year. That may finally make running current hardware more profitable.

And EPYCs don't really become a lot more expensive than Ryzens until the very top end of HEDT platforms (Ryzen 9 3950X and EPYC 7282 both 16C/32T at roughly €750, TR 3970X and EPYC 7452 both 32C/64T at roughly €2k) where the TR 3990X is about €1k cheaper than the EPYC 7702P at €5k (both 64C/128T). Of course the sweetspot for price per core*clock is the R5 3600 but the low core-density also incurs efficiency on the total platform (the 7702P delivers roughly 10x the 3600 performance in 3,5x the power envelope).

elliotc · March 2020

$3/ y?

WSS · March 2020

@elliotc said:
$3/ y?

willie · March 2020

@ilnahro said: And EPYCs don't really become a lot more expensive than Ryzens until the very top end of HEDT platforms (Ryzen 9 3950X and EPYC 7282 both 16C/32T at roughly €750, TR 3970X and EPYC 7452 both 32C/64T at roughly €2k) where the TR 3990X is about €1k cheaper than the EPYC 7702P at €5k (both 64C/128T).

Don't forget to take mhz into account. The Epyc 7502P and TR 3970X are both around €2k and both have 32 cores, but the TR 3970X has over 2x the passmark because of its higher clock speed (I don't understand that passmark ratio since the mhz difference is less than 2x, but it's been measured). Similar things happen with the Ryzen 3950X vs Epyc 7282. The Ryzen 3900X seems to be another sweet spot right now, at around US$ 400 while the 3950X is still US$ 750 over here. The 3900X has slightly higher mhz than the 3950X so it is not that far of in cores*mhz.

InceptionHosting · March 2020

Personally I hope they start just doing a Ryzen 3900(S) = Server literally the same chip with an S on it so server hardware vendors start using them

FlamingSpaceJunk · March 2020

Not really. I couldn't count on the VM to migrate to something with the same feature set, or the full feature set wouldn't be exposed because not all of the servers are EPYC procs. It would just be a branding exercise after that, and I'm guessing AMD isn't paying anyone to pimp their EPYC based products.

If the VM can't be migrated to different hosts due to maintenance or consolidation/expansion, it's not a really a cloud server.

I'd pay more for a low end, EPYC, baremetal, like $20 , but that's not what we're talking about.

Would you pay more for EPYC cloud servers?

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