[Question] OVH vs hetzner for a cheap dedicated server
I don't know if renting a dedicated server goes against the point of selfhosting but whatever.
Everyone seems to recommend hetzner on reddit because they are cheaper, but OVH seems to be much cheaper that hetzner for low end servers, especially the Kimsufi and So You Start ranges.
This is the server I was looking at with OVH:
CPU : Intel Xeon D1520 - 4c/8t - 2.2 GHz/2.6 GHz
Memory : 32 GB DDR4 ECC
Storage : 4 x 2 TB HDD SATA Soft RAID
Public bandwidth : 250 Mbps
Price: £26.66 per month.
hetzner seems to start a lot higher with specs, but I don't need 64GB of ram and a 1Gb/s internet connection, The instance I am posting this from is the lowest spec kimsufi possible with an intel atom and 4GB of RAM and that is running lemmy and mastodon fine.
Is there something else bad about OVH that I am missing? (other than the flammable servers)
Hetzner. I've been using both, Hetzner has leaps and bounds better support and no-bullshit approach to customers.
You can find some cheap-ish options on their Server Auction but keep in mind that you should expect the disks to fail sooner than in a new machine. I found that not to be a big issue — use RAID1 and ask them to replace any failing drive, and eventually you get a cheap server with fresh new drives, without any data loss.
How is the latency with Hetzner? my OVH server has some incredibly low latency even though it is in a different country.
EDIT: Even on the auction the prices are still a lot higher than OVH, does anything lower spec ever come up on the auction? And I would use RAID anyway, probably backup the server back to my PC as well.
Not exactly. The always free tier just cuts you off if you try to go over your limits. It won't let you allocate stuff that it doesn't allow. I don't really understand how they can offer so much for free, but my consensus has mostly been "It's arm, and they probably spy a bit". Which some people are alright with, some people aren't. You can technically strip the OCI Agent from your VPS if you care about that second bit.
Looks good, but I'd rather pay for a server that use oracle. Seems a little too good for free. Especially for Oracle. The satellite image processing I want to do already has some trouble with my 48gb of ram so 24 might not work. Also I wanted to use the storage for an offsite backup. Thanks for the suggestion though!
What do you need it for? Using just HDD this server will be kinda slow. If this is just about storage, I'd recommend getting a good VPS from Hetzner, Netcup or php-friends and extend storage using a Hetzner Storage Box. 1TB for just 3,xx EUR or 5TB for around 12 EUR.
As a benefit you'll not have to deal with failing drives and you do easy backups using snapshots.
I am using cifs. There may be some ups and downs, depending on decryption, filesize and stuff, but in general I can pretty much use the full Gbit connection. The lowest transfer I can remember was 58 or 59 MB/s when I transfered a lot of small files.
I second this! I have been with Hetzner for a couple of years now, pretty happy overall. You could get a decent setup for around 20-25 EUR/m. For 25 you could get a 5TB storage box with a 4core/8GB/160GB SSD VPS, which, IMHO is a decent deal.
As for latency, which I saw you asked about, I have a VPS in their Falkenstein DC and I get 35-40ms from Greece (on a Gigabit FTTH, normalised for LAN latency)
I'm usually happy with the trade-off for better reliability and speed if it's not anything where I want absolute privacy or control.
The privacy is going to be somewhat okay because you're paying them for it, it's supposed to be your machine and analysing all of the different content and traffic people host is much more difficult versus when a company provides one app. Plus it would be a PR and legal disaster. They're probably not going to be passing on how I use my server to advertisers... probably, I hope.
So yeah, the only way I can be certain is to purely run it in my home.
Ive bin using oneprovider (Frans /Amsterdam) for a while now. They somtimes got some decent dedi server for like any where between 10/16 euros a month (1tb HD. 4gig ram is usely like 10to12 euro month . Kinda depends on what you want. But they are nice servers space wise.
Jesus, on the higher end the value gets absurd. 128Gb of RAM with 2x8Tb hdds for €52.44 a month. Shame the lower end servers aren't quite so good value. Maybe I should just find some more money