Hetzner charge between €10 and €48 for an 8vcpu setup, depending on how many other users you're happy to share with.
For €104/mo you can get a 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (basically identical to your 4565p) w/ 128GB DDR5, 2x2TB PCIE Gen4 SSD.
That's not to say you're wrong about dedicated being much better value than VPS on a performance per dollar basis, but the markup that the European companies charge is much, much lower compared to what they'd charge in the US.
In this instance you're looking at a ~17 month payback period even ignoring colo fees. Assuming a ~$100 colo fee that sibling comment suggested, you're looking at closer to 8 years.
Great points. If we’re going to talk about dedicated servers and long lock-in contracts, you have to look at the equivalent prices for hosted alternatives.
It’s fun to start thinking about building your own server and putting in a rack, but there’s always a lot of tortured math to compare it to completely different cloud hosted solutions.
One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day. As the user base grows we can easily switch to larger instances. We can also geographically distribute servers and provide lower latency.
There is a long list of benefits that are omitted when people make arguments based solely on monthly cost numbers. If we’re going to talk about long term dedicated server contracts we should at least price against similar options from companies like Hetzner.
> One of the great things about cloud instances is that I can scale them up or down with the load without being locked into some hardware I purchased. For products I’ve worked on that have activity curves that follow day-night cycles or spike on holidays, this has been amazing. In some cases we could auto scale down at night and then auto scale back up during the day.
At work we have this day / night cycle. But for some reason we're married to AWS. If we provisioned 24/7/365 a bunch of servers at Hetzner or such to cover the peaks with some margin, it would still be cheaper by a notable margin. Sure, 90% of them would twiddle their thumbs from 22 PM to 10 AM. So what?
Sure, if your clients are completely unpredictable and you'll see x100 traffic without notice, the cloud is great.
But how many companies are actually in that kind of situation? Looking back over a year or two, we're quite reliably able to predict when we'll have more visitors and how many more compared to baseline. We could just adjust the headroom to be able to take in those spikes. And I suppose if you want to save the environment, you could just turn off the Hetzner servers while they sit unused.
I’ve ran MP game servers that follow this pattern. A good rule of thumb is you should cover 75% of your peak load with your cheaper steady state pre allocated machines, and burst for the last 25%. It really is that expensive to do.
If you can reasonably estimate your usage and the peak total usage is less than ~5x the minimum, it still makes sense to just rent hardware at Hetzner.
You even have the possibility of managed racks, whereby you rent one or more racks, but the servers are still provided by Hetzner so you don't have to handle procurement, logistics or replacements.
I'd be terrified to run anything other than a classic web server on Hetzner, have heard too many stories of them arbitrarily terminating workloads they didn't understand.
I've gotten notices from Hetzner for hosting IPFS node, apparently it does some local network discovery by default which looks like a malware when you squint hard enough.
For €104/mo you can get a 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (basically identical to your 4565p) w/ 128GB DDR5, 2x2TB PCIE Gen4 SSD.
That's not to say you're wrong about dedicated being much better value than VPS on a performance per dollar basis, but the markup that the European companies charge is much, much lower compared to what they'd charge in the US.
In this instance you're looking at a ~17 month payback period even ignoring colo fees. Assuming a ~$100 colo fee that sibling comment suggested, you're looking at closer to 8 years.