@RaveX said:
How bout 4vcores (shared), 4gb ram, 50gb nvme with raid1 for $6? Thinking of doing that to my own server. Also, ill make it stackable. @Not_Oles should do something similar
@RaveX Thanks! What you are suggesting kinda looks like what I have been doing. So, sure, I could do it some more.
Nevertheless, something new might be in the air?
I kinda like @willie's suggestion of selling neighbors a quarter of the box. Ya know, it's peaceful to live in a small town with great neighbors.
Then there's @yoursunny's suggestion about hourly billing, automagic with an API. I wish I had @yoursunny's list of the minimum API features needed. Perhaps:
# Add php (or other tools) to allow http to accomplish:
$ time [ insert video stuff here ]
$ awk [
convert time to push-ups;
echo push-ups >> push-ups-owed;
]
$ stripe [ charge push-ups-owed to push-up credit card ]
@Not_Oles said:
Ooops! Yeah, I don't know how that happened. I meant to order only one! I wrote to server-order asking them for only one. Sorry! My bad!
Hetzner fixed my mistake. Thanks!
So, one order remains pending. . . .
The remaining one order is a mistake too, consider that half of your last server is still idling.
Hardware has to be 80% utilized before ordering more.
@uzaysan said: Why would you share resources for 35 euro. You can get ax41 for 34 euro (or 39 in germany) and move on.
The attraction is way more cpu speed (13 cores I guess), some of the time. Also it would include 2TB of SSD instead of 1TB. And I'd want DE location. I think you are right though, ax41 may suit me better.
My i7-3770 was a great deal when I got it 3+ years ago but current stuff in the auction is even better (my i7 is also an auction server).
@willie said:
I'm currently paying 28 euro for an i7-3770 with 32gb ram and 2x 3tb hdd's.
Off topic, but have you had problems with the i7 crashing? I'm on my third one now and they all freeze up (almost) every day.
I had a E3-1245v2 from their auction that was excellent and sort of regret letting that go in favor of the i7, but needed the extra space (4x6TB).
Haven't had crashing per se. Had some weird compute errors that looked to me like bad memory, so I opened a ticket and their techs swapped out the dimms. They say they do that on suspicion of errors. I guess they put them on a memory tester after swapping, and cycle them back into their servers if the tests pass. Also had a bad hard drive and eventually convinced them to replace it, but only after its error counts were visibly increasing. They were more reluctant to swap the hdd than the ram.
Wow! I'm all excited! Hetzner delivered the new server this morning, and I could log in!
I ordered some extra IP addresses.
The next step is to install. I will try a few different setups over the next few days. I'm thinking about trying zfs, which I never used before. The Proxmox guys seem to like zfs.
A couple of guys have mentioned possibly not using disk redundancy in order to increase the amount of disk which could be assigned to each slice.
Over the years I've experienced three sudden disk failures, including my first, where the disk suffered its fatal heart attack right in the middle of making a backup!
In the second incident, both RAID disks in the server died at the same moment, allegedly due to a power surge!
The third time was the easiest. Smart tools detected an irregularity, the disk was replaced, and everything was fine.
But now I have NVMe instead of spinning rust. Here's a quote from 1MachineElf on HN:
Failure on SSDs is predictable and usually expressed with Terabytes Written (TBW). Failure on spinning disk HDDs is comparatively random. In my mind, it makes sense to mirror SSD-based vdevs only for performance reasons and not for data integrity. The reason is that the mirrors are expected to fail after the same amount of TBW, and thus the availability/redundancy guarantee of mirroring is relatively unreliable.
Of course, somebody else posts right away that 1MachineElf s wrong.
I'd feel better if folks who want the extra disk space would tell me how they do their own backups so that I can imagine, in the event of a server disk failure, they won't care. I had multiple backups when that double disk power surge failure happened. The provider offered everybody six months free service. I declined. I had my backups so I was okay, and it seemed that what happened to the poor provider could happen to anybody.
@yoursunny said:
The remaining one order is a mistake too, consider that half of your last server is still idling.
@Not_Oles said:
Wow! I'm all excited! Hetzner delivered the new server this morning, and I could log in!
My AX51 in Helsinki might be up for transfer after the existing services are migrated. If you might want it, please feel free to let me know.
Now it starts to make sense. 66% more costs, 100% more resources.
@Not_Oles said:
A couple of guys have mentioned possibly not using disk redundancy in order to increase the amount of disk which could be assigned to each slice.
Over the years I've experienced three sudden disk failures,
But now I have NVMe instead of spinning rust. Here's a quote from 1MachineElf on HN:
Failure on SSDs is predictable and usually expressed with Terabytes Written (TBW). Failure on spinning disk HDDs is comparatively random. In my mind, it makes sense to mirror SSD-based vdevs only for performance reasons and not for data integrity. The reason is that the mirrors are expected to fail after the same amount of TBW, and thus the availability/redundancy guarantee of mirroring is relatively unreliable.
In 2019, after spending two days installing 5 new servers, I powered off 3 and kept 2 online. A week later, one server had an NVMe failure. The NVMe device just disappeared from the system, invisible from BIOS or Live CD. I guess there's electric fault.
We haven't paid the vendor at the time so they replaced the defective drive swiftly, but I had to redo the setup. I also tested the other 3 servers for two weeks, but they didn't have the same problem.
@Not_Oles said:
Then there's @yoursunny's suggestion about hourly billing, automagic with an API. I wish I had @yoursunny's list of the minimum API features needed.
@yoursunny said: In 2019, after spending two days installing 5 new servers, I powered off 3 and kept 2 online. A week later, one server had an NVMe failure. The NVMe device just disappeared from the system, invisible from BIOS or Live CD. I guess there's electric fault.
We haven't paid the vendor at the time so they replaced the defective drive swiftly, but I had to redo the setup. I also tested the other 3 servers for two weeks, but they didn't have the same problem.
@yoursunny We joke around so much, and there is great fun! Perhaps also, sometimes, some small risk of misunderstanding might arise.
Although I appreciate that you have lots of resources for your research and for your website and other projects, I nevertheless jumped to the conclusion that you actually might want to use my server for something sometime.
When I was joking about the API increasing the push-up count I was ineptly trying to suggest that payment might be adequate in push-ups and jokes instead of dollars. Maybe one push-up per processor day, or something like that.
To me, your research seems worth being supported even by little folks like me who are incapable of endowing a university building and a professorial chair.
I thought I was humorously masking my possibly good intentions in what perhaps could have looked like sarcasm. If that happened, I am sorry!
Now I will just leave this topic by suggesting that, if ever there is some little thing that I could do for you on one of my servers, it's okay, but you probably will need to help me implement whatever it is that you want.
@Not_Oles said: @yoursunny We joke around so much, and there is great fun! Perhaps also, sometimes, some small risk of misunderstanding might arise.
I thought I was humorously masking my possibly good intentions in what perhaps could have looked like sarcasm. If that happened, I am sorry!
I don't see any misunderstanding here, and I do not interpret sarcasm. Thus, what you might fear has not happened.
When I was joking about the API increasing the push-up count I was ineptly trying to suggest that payment might be adequate in push-ups and jokes instead of dollars. Maybe one push-up per processor day, or something like that.
It's possible to design an API that supports multiple currencies, but that would not be minimal.
In SolusIO, the native price unit is token, and the provider can set the exchange rate between token and dollars / push-ups.
To me, your research seems worth being supported even by little folks like me who are incapable of endowing a university building and a professorial chair.
I don't have a chair. I place the computers on top of cardboard boxes on top of the table, and I operate the computers while standing. It's healthier this way.
@Not_Oles said: I will try a few different setups over the next few days.
One suggestion, in case it hasn't crossed your mind (yet), is to have both RAID 1 (mdadm) for your main OS (avoid ZFS only because rescue with ZFS isn't very straightforward). A simple <50GB partition should do the trick for Proxmox and friends.
Have a separate RAID 1 setup (either mdadm or ZFS) for the OS for your VMs - this can be a smallish size that is given to your "customers" (think UltraVPS, who typically give you a 10GB partition to install the core OS - maybe you can bump up to 20GB depending on the size/purpose of the other allocation for the VMs). You can then have a separate RAID-0 stripe of the balance disk which is the "non-RAID" storage given to the VMs at their own risk.
Best case, 1 drive dies, RAID-0 goes and everyone knows but they can still boot and rebuild data.
Worst case, both drives die - nothing you can do except restore from backups.
My thinking - 50GB for your Promox host (RAID-1), 200GB-600TB for RAID-1 for VMs (depending on demand the size will change), Rest of disk ( > 2 x 3TB ) - RAID-0 stripe as additional storage for the VMs.
I thought about adding one or two spinning rust drives. But the added cost seemed more than I wanted to pay.
Right now the server is up with ext4 and RAID 1 on its two 3.84 TB NVME disks. Making 30 of the 32 logical cores into slices and giving each slice 100 GB might work. zfs and friends will continue improving between now and next time.
Hetzner has some thorough tutorials online about installing and configuring Proxmox. See here and here. But Proxmox also might be more easily available via the Rescue System's installimage installer, the code for which seems to be on Github.
What was I thinking... maybe someday though that looks too far fetched for mere mortals like me. Though @lentro will disagree...
@Not_Oles said: Making 30 of the 32 logical cores into slices and giving each slice 100 GB
That makes sense. If you literally divide the server into 30 "chunks" evenly, netting 100GB NVMe + 1 vCPU + 4GB RAM at roughly $5/month (including 1 IPv4) will be > break even for you cost wise and it is (I think) a good VM to have considering the resources (assuming fair share and that there are no abusers). I think though, that this is still a "typical" VM with nothing outrageous resource wise. As others have mentioned, I think you'll find more takers with some unusual resources like 10+GB RAM/4 cores/disk etc. appropriately priced because this kind of a big honking server is more suitable for some serious loading.
Either way you have exciting times ahead to test out various configurations and options. It's a wonderful problem to have.
Good luck and it is invigorating to read on your experiences as you discover more...
@nullnothere said: assuming fair share and that there are no abusers
So far all the neighbors on my servers have been really nice! So lucky!
@nullnothere said: this is still a "typical" VM with nothing outrageous resource wise
Hopefully it's a little faster than some others?
@nullnothere said: If you literally divide the server into 30 "chunks" evenly, netting 100GB NVMe + 1 vCPU + 4GB RAM
1 vCPU = neighbor's choice of either 1 100% dedicated logical core or 4 x 25% burstable to 100% logical cores.
@nullnothere said: roughly $5/month (including 1 IPv4) will be break even for you cost wise
I need to do some arithmetic on the pricing and also post a yabs benchmark that I ran yesterday. It's getting a bit late here. ? I am looking forward to another happy day tomorrow! I wish the same to all of you! ?
I know it can be installed on AX41/51/Intel E3s on proxmox so no reason why it shouldn't! Installer isn't very flashy and the partitioner takes some getting used to lol
I know it can be installed on AX41/51/Intel E3s on proxmox so no reason why it shouldn't! Installer isn't very flashy and the partitioner takes some getting used to lol
The report I got from the friend trying it was that the NoVNC console typed underscore for dash. Or maybe it was the reverse. He said he went through the whole process but didn't seem to get the networking right.
He will do better next time! It's a rite of passage! ?
So, maybe pricing might look somewhat like the following schedule.
Hetzner's AX101 has 32 logical cores. Reserving two cores for the host node suggests dividing the server into 30 slices. What does each slice cost per month? What do the additional IPv4 addresses cost per month?
Hetzner prices are in euros, but my US bank thinks in dollars. According to Google, as of Feb 12, 00:32 UTC, one euro equals 1.21 US dollars.
There also are transfer fees which I have to pay in dollars, so these are shown as additional line items. These fees seem to be about $0.35 per transaction plus 5%. The $0.35 per transaction portion is included with the price of the first slice.
Each slice's logical core could be delivered as the client chooses, either 100% dedicated or as 4 x 25% burstable to 100%. Also, more IPv6 addresses might be okay. Maybe I can figure out getting a shared IPv4 into some VMs for those who prefer not to pay the IPv4 rental.
$11 looks pretty good since it's really quite dedicated. not all dedicated are the same. comparing Avoro/php-friends their dedicated actually means unlimited, and virmach unless someone has a bench, I believe their vcores aren't full CPU threads.
I would safely leave virmach out of this comparison.
Comments
@RaveX Thanks! What you are suggesting kinda looks like what I have been doing. So, sure, I could do it some more.
Nevertheless, something new might be in the air?
I kinda like @willie's suggestion of selling neighbors a quarter of the box. Ya know, it's peaceful to live in a small town with great neighbors.
Then there's @yoursunny's suggestion about hourly billing, automagic with an API. I wish I had @yoursunny's list of the minimum API features needed. Perhaps:
MetalVPS
The remaining one order is a mistake too, consider that half of your last server is still idling.
Hardware has to be 80% utilized before ordering more.
Webhosting24 aff best VPS; ServerFactory aff best VDS; Cloudie best ASN; Huel aff best brotein.
The attraction is way more cpu speed (13 cores I guess), some of the time. Also it would include 2TB of SSD instead of 1TB. And I'd want DE location. I think you are right though, ax41 may suit me better.
My i7-3770 was a great deal when I got it 3+ years ago but current stuff in the auction is even better (my i7 is also an auction server).
Off topic, but have you had problems with the i7 crashing? I'm on my third one now and they all freeze up (almost) every day.
I had a E3-1245v2 from their auction that was excellent and sort of regret letting that go in favor of the i7, but needed the extra space (4x6TB).
Haven't had crashing per se. Had some weird compute errors that looked to me like bad memory, so I opened a ticket and their techs swapped out the dimms. They say they do that on suspicion of errors. I guess they put them on a memory tester after swapping, and cycle them back into their servers if the tests pass. Also had a bad hard drive and eventually convinced them to replace it, but only after its error counts were visibly increasing. They were more reluctant to swap the hdd than the ram.
Wow! I'm all excited! Hetzner delivered the new server this morning, and I could log in!
I ordered some extra IP addresses.
The next step is to install. I will try a few different setups over the next few days. I'm thinking about trying zfs, which I never used before. The Proxmox guys seem to like zfs.
A couple of guys have mentioned possibly not using disk redundancy in order to increase the amount of disk which could be assigned to each slice.
Over the years I've experienced three sudden disk failures, including my first, where the disk suffered its fatal heart attack right in the middle of making a backup!
In the second incident, both RAID disks in the server died at the same moment, allegedly due to a power surge!
The third time was the easiest. Smart tools detected an irregularity, the disk was replaced, and everything was fine.
But now I have NVMe instead of spinning rust. Here's a quote from 1MachineElf on HN:
Of course, somebody else posts right away that 1MachineElf s wrong.
I'd feel better if folks who want the extra disk space would tell me how they do their own backups so that I can imagine, in the event of a server disk failure, they won't care. I had multiple backups when that double disk power surge failure happened. The provider offered everybody six months free service. I declined. I had my backups so I was okay, and it seemed that what happened to the poor provider could happen to anybody.
MetalVPS
A couple more things:
If somebody wants an account to help with testing, I might be able to do it.
My AX51 in Helsinki might be up for transfer after the existing services are migrated. If you might want it, please feel free to let me know.
MetalVPS
Now it starts to make sense. 66% more costs, 100% more resources.
In 2019, after spending two days installing 5 new servers, I powered off 3 and kept 2 online. A week later, one server had an NVMe failure. The NVMe device just disappeared from the system, invisible from BIOS or Live CD. I guess there's electric fault.
We haven't paid the vendor at the time so they replaced the defective drive swiftly, but I had to redo the setup. I also tested the other 3 servers for two weeks, but they didn't have the same problem.
List servers in account:
Create a server:
Destroy a server:
Uptime is in seconds. Price is dollars per second.
Webhosting24 aff best VPS; ServerFactory aff best VDS; Cloudie best ASN; Huel aff best brotein.
Yes, RAM is up 100% (64 to 128 GB). Notably, disk is up 340% (1 to 3.4 TB).
Also 30% faster single thread cpu benchmark.
MetalVPS
This is a great story! Thank you for sharing!
MetalVPS
Got it! Thanks!
@yoursunny We joke around so much, and there is great fun! Perhaps also, sometimes, some small risk of misunderstanding might arise.
Although I appreciate that you have lots of resources for your research and for your website and other projects, I nevertheless jumped to the conclusion that you actually might want to use my server for something sometime.
When I was joking about the API increasing the push-up count I was ineptly trying to suggest that payment might be adequate in push-ups and jokes instead of dollars. Maybe one push-up per processor day, or something like that.
To me, your research seems worth being supported even by little folks like me who are incapable of endowing a university building and a professorial chair.
I thought I was humorously masking my possibly good intentions in what perhaps could have looked like sarcasm.
If that happened, I am sorry!
Now I will just leave this topic by suggesting that, if ever there is some little thing that I could do for you on one of my servers, it's okay, but you probably will need to help me implement whatever it is that you want.
Best wishes from Mexico! ??????️
MetalVPS
I don't see any misunderstanding here, and I do not interpret sarcasm. Thus, what you might fear has not happened.
It's possible to design an API that supports multiple currencies, but that would not be minimal.
In SolusIO, the native price unit is token, and the provider can set the exchange rate between token and dollars / push-ups.
I don't have a chair. I place the computers on top of cardboard boxes on top of the table, and I operate the computers while standing. It's healthier this way.
Webhosting24 aff best VPS; ServerFactory aff best VDS; Cloudie best ASN; Huel aff best brotein.
One suggestion, in case it hasn't crossed your mind (yet), is to have both RAID 1 (mdadm) for your main OS (avoid ZFS only because rescue with ZFS isn't very straightforward). A simple <50GB partition should do the trick for Proxmox and friends.
Have a separate RAID 1 setup (either mdadm or ZFS) for the OS for your VMs - this can be a smallish size that is given to your "customers" (think UltraVPS, who typically give you a 10GB partition to install the core OS - maybe you can bump up to 20GB depending on the size/purpose of the other allocation for the VMs). You can then have a separate RAID-0 stripe of the balance disk which is the "non-RAID" storage given to the VMs at their own risk.
Best case, 1 drive dies, RAID-0 goes and everyone knows but they can still boot and rebuild data.
Worst case, both drives die - nothing you can do except restore from backups.
My thinking - 50GB for your Promox host (RAID-1), 200GB-600TB for RAID-1 for VMs (depending on demand the size will change), Rest of disk ( > 2 x 3TB ) - RAID-0 stripe as additional storage for the VMs.
Profit
Best wishes...
This reminded me of https://web.archive.org/web/20060423082708/http://www.fedexfurniture.com/
MetalVPS
I thought about adding more disks. Interestingly, additional 3.84 TB NVMe disks seem to cost € 48.00 monthly each. Adding two would cost € 96. An entire additional server seems only € 3 more than simply adding two extra NVMe disks!
I thought about adding one or two spinning rust drives. But the added cost seemed more than I wanted to pay.
Right now the server is up with ext4 and RAID 1 on its two 3.84 TB NVME disks. Making 30 of the 32 logical cores into slices and giving each slice 100 GB might work. zfs and friends will continue improving between now and next time.
Hetzner has some thorough tutorials online about installing and configuring Proxmox. See here and here. But Proxmox also might be more easily available via the Rescue System's installimage installer, the code for which seems to be on Github.
We will see.
Much appreciated! Thank you! ?
MetalVPS
I wonder if OpenBSD will work. One of my friends wanted to try doing the install, so I got it ready for him.
Lots of fun!
MetalVPS
What was I thinking... maybe someday though that looks too far fetched for mere mortals like me. Though @lentro will disagree...
That makes sense. If you literally divide the server into 30 "chunks" evenly, netting 100GB NVMe + 1 vCPU + 4GB RAM at roughly $5/month (including 1 IPv4) will be > break even for you cost wise and it is (I think) a good VM to have considering the resources (assuming fair share and that there are no abusers). I think though, that this is still a "typical" VM with nothing outrageous resource wise. As others have mentioned, I think you'll find more takers with some unusual resources like 10+GB RAM/4 cores/disk etc. appropriately priced because this kind of a big honking server is more suitable for some serious loading.
Either way you have exciting times ahead to test out various configurations and options. It's a wonderful problem to have.
Good luck and it is invigorating to read on your experiences as you discover more...
Thank you for sharing.
Yaaaassss. I am now implied as immortal!
So far all the neighbors on my servers have been really nice! So lucky!
Hopefully it's a little faster than some others?
1 vCPU = neighbor's choice of either 1 100% dedicated logical core or 4 x 25% burstable to 100% logical cores.
I need to do some arithmetic on the pricing and also post a yabs benchmark that I ran yesterday. It's getting a bit late here. ? I am looking forward to another happy day tomorrow!
I wish the same to all of you! ?
MetalVPS
I know it can be installed on AX41/51/Intel E3s on proxmox so no reason why it shouldn't! Installer isn't very flashy and the partitioner takes some getting used to lol
The report I got from the friend trying it was that the NoVNC console typed underscore for dash. Or maybe it was the reverse. He said he went through the whole process but didn't seem to get the networking right.
He will do better next time! It's a rite of passage! ?
MetalVPS
I posted some yabs results at https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/56312/#Comment_56312 and a few questions at https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/56321/#Comment_56321. Thanks!
MetalVPS
So, maybe pricing might look somewhat like the following schedule.
Hetzner's AX101 has 32 logical cores. Reserving two cores for the host node suggests dividing the server into 30 slices. What does each slice cost per month? What do the additional IPv4 addresses cost per month?
Hetzner prices are in euros, but my US bank thinks in dollars. According to Google, as of Feb 12, 00:32 UTC, one euro equals 1.21 US dollars.
There also are transfer fees which I have to pay in dollars, so these are shown as additional line items. These fees seem to be about $0.35 per transaction plus 5%. The $0.35 per transaction portion is included with the price of the first slice.
Each slice's logical core could be delivered as the client chooses, either 100% dedicated or as 4 x 25% burstable to 100%. Also, more IPv6 addresses might be okay. Maybe I can figure out getting a shared IPv4 into some VMs for those who prefer not to pay the IPv4 rental.
AX101 30 Slice Pricing
Greetings from the Sonoran Desert! ?️
MetalVPS
Wrong answer. Should be /69.
Put in a typical offer form:
Compare to similar 4GB plans from other providers:
So MetalVPS-AX101 has a reasonable price, despite that greedy administrator wants 100% profit.
Webhosting24 aff best VPS; ServerFactory aff best VDS; Cloudie best ASN; Huel aff best brotein.
$11 looks pretty good since it's really quite dedicated. not all dedicated are the same. comparing Avoro/php-friends their dedicated actually means unlimited, and virmach unless someone has a bench, I believe their vcores aren't full CPU threads.
I would safely leave virmach out of this comparison.
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
if this can take off in tuesday/wednesday i probably bite one. really need a testing ground badly now especially with dedicated core
I posted a yabs of a Debian KVM VPS at https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/56543/#Comment_56543
MetalVPS
Hi @mobile! As always, lovely to see you!
How many slices?
What OS?
LXC or KVM?
Same public key or do you want to use a different one?
What are one or two IP addresses from which you want administrative access?
Can you burn the processor? ??
Best wishes from Mexico!
Tom
MetalVPS
As always, thanks for thorough analysis coupled with humor!
MetalVPS
Thanks!
MetalVPS