First ever server purchase

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

Soldato
Joined
1 Nov 2007
Posts
6,454
Location
England
So now that Zen 3 EPYC has been released I'm looking to buy a server. I've never bought one before so I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. The budget is roughly £3,000 but I have no idea where to buy the server from. 32 cores / 64 threads would be ideal as it is going to be running virtual machines and containers.

I have no idea about storage. I'd like to use the btrfs filesystem as that is what I am used to on my home computers. I was planning on buying a small ultra-fast NVMe SSD to use as the boot drive and then a larger NVMe drive to store customer data. I'm not sure about backup either so would appreciate some advice on that front as well. Since Zen 3 EPYC has 8 memory channels I guess 8x8GB of RAM would be the best option?

I wasn't planning on using RAID at all although I'd be quite happy to use the btrfs feature that allows you to add drives to a partition on the fly. The distribution will be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
 
You might need to up your budget considerably if you want a brand new 32 core server. For that budget you might be better off buying a couple of older, lesser servers.
 
As said I doubt you'll find many new gen Epyc servers for £3k for a while.

You mention customer data, do you use a VPS or something at the moment?

I've always been anti cloud for the majority of what I do and lots of people I've come across professionally have been evangelical about cloud. My counter argument is that you're always paying top dollar and on the price treadmill as your needs grow. The more you need, the more you spend, so you're stuck if you decide to drop £50k on equipment, the beancounters might prefer the £20k/y on a AWS etc, for example.

Also, never underestimate redundancy with regards to customer data/services. I would not be happy without redundant hosts, WAN and a 3-2-1 backup strategy. Just my 2p
 
Does it have to be latest version of Epyc?

You'll probably be memory constrained way before you get close to maxing out a 32 core 64 thread CPU if your only going for 64GB of RAM - what's going to be running in these VMs, and how many will there be?

A 1st/2nd gen Epyc with 16-24 cores and 128 to 256GB of RAM might be a better shout than latest gen with a high core count and low memory for general virtualisation use

More detail needed :)
 
OK. I'll try and answer everyone's questions. If I miss anything out I'm sorry, just remind me and I'll add it in later.

Rackmount server.

Ah, OK. I guess I could get the server on finance and maybe up the budget a bit to get a mid/low-end range EPYC 2 or something.

I currently use VPS' provided by Linode for all my hosting requirements but want to move up to dedicated servers which are coloed in a local datacentre.

I take on board what you are saying about redundancy and backup. Maybe what I might do is complete a side project that will hopefully bring in some profit and then wait until I can get more servers or better backups or something. I can host the side project on Linode.

Problem is that my use case requires dedicated hardware so I can't just resell cloud services. I'm building a VPS platform with some unique features so that is my current requirement.

If there is anything else I've missed let me know.
 
Is it summer host season already?

If you don’t have any grasp on what hardware you need, how much it will cost, storage, backup, redundancy and your ‘plan’ can go from one class of server to another and purchase to finance in a few posts, then you probably need to stop and get some informed advice from people who understand your business model, you certainly shouldn’t be buying any hardware, let alone selling services to others. If that sounded overly harsh, re-read it until you understand it’s probably the best advice you’ve had so far.

If you need a dedicated server and are in the early stages of whatever this is and have outgrown a VPS, rent dedicated hardware from a reputable source, you don’t need to worry about power, bandwidth, hardware support, local hands, RMA’s, you just focus on doing whatever it is you do and pay a relatively small monthly bill, the locality of your COLO then largely becomes irrelevant (other than routing/latency). At the budget end Hetzner (and Hetzner Cloud if you like cheap EPYC 10Gb VPS) or OVH/SYS are obvious choices, less so online/one provider.
 
Avalon said:
Is it summer host season already?

If you don’t have any grasp on what hardware you need, how much it will cost, storage, backup, redundancy and your ‘plan’ can go from one class of server to another and purchase to finance in a few posts, then you probably need to stop and get some informed advice from people who understand your business model, you certainly shouldn’t be buying any hardware, let alone selling services to others. If that sounded overly harsh, re-read it until you understand it’s probably the best advice you’ve had so far.

If you need a dedicated server and are in the early stages of whatever this is and have outgrown a VPS, rent dedicated hardware from a reputable source, you don’t need to worry about power, bandwidth, hardware support, local hands, RMA’s, you just focus on doing whatever it is you do and pay a relatively small monthly bill, the locality of your COLO then largely becomes irrelevant (other than routing/latency). At the budget end Hetzner (and Hetzner Cloud if you like cheap EPYC 10Gb VPS) or OVH/SYS are obvious choices, less so online/one provider.
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Thank you. I appreciate your honest and blunt advice. I prefer to know when I am doing something wrong so I don't consider it harsh at all. There is a lot I don't know. On the other hand, I am a reasonably quick learner and have been reading countless articles on various related subjects. The business plan that got me the money to pay for this business always stipulated £3k for the server but I've been back and forth between buying hardware outright or getting it on finance. If I buy it outright then I own the server and could potentially sell it on second hand if it ceases to be needed. On the other finance would allow me to pick up two servers although obviously, that is a monthly commit for an extended period of time.

I guess I could start off with a decent dedicated server provider but then I worry I'll be paying roughly the same amount of money as I would if I got the servers on finance and if I did get them on finance at the end of the term I'd actually own them whereas with renting dedicated servers I'm committed to a monthly fee with no prospect of owning the equipment.

I am planning on taking on a few courses to increase my knowledge in various networking/datacentre topics so if you have any suggestions on that front I would appreciate it.
 
If you buy a £3K asset, you can depreciate it which has potential tax benefits. Obviously if you need to sell it, it has a reduced value, but as you say, you can raise cash, but you realise the depreciation, and it’ll likely be steep in situations like this where newer hardware is always coming. Finance providers will still want the finance settled and it’s potentially secured against the asset until settled which can make sales difficult as the money needs to be paid to the finance provider before you can legally sell the asset.

The other consideration is your COLO, most aren’t cheap, they then stipulate power limits and many will stipulate (in the UK at least) traffic limits, this can be problematic. I was quoted a price per megabyte for over usage by one UK provider and the bandwidth was less than ideal. You can pick up cheap quad core i7/Xeon 6th/7th gen or Ryzen 3600 with dual 512GB NVMe and 64GB of RAM for €35-45 from Hetzner, a few € more gets you even better hardware, though cheap auction boxes are hard to find the last 12 months due to COVID demand. 30 day notice, symmetrical gigabit, unlimited bandwidth, remote hardware support 24/7 etc. compare that to your likely finance + COLO costs in the UK. I’d suggest if you have proven you can do this with a VPS set-up, then the next logical step is rental, I know hardware purchases are tempting, but build your client base to support your purchases, longer term it can make sense, but based on the limited information available it doesn’t seem to right now.

Be warned, German hosts are not hospitable to certain types of services/content and they will come after you if they have to.
 
Avalon said:
If you buy a £3K asset, you can depreciate it which has potential tax benefits. Obviously if you need to sell it, it has a reduced value, but as you say, you can raise cash, but you realise the depreciation, and it’ll likely be steep in situations like this where newer hardware is always coming. Finance providers will still want the finance settled and it’s potentially secured against the asset until settled which can make sales difficult as the money needs to be paid to the finance provider before you can legally sell the asset.

The other consideration is your COLO, most aren’t cheap, they then stipulate power limits and many will stipulate (in the UK at least) traffic limits, this can be problematic. I was quoted a price per megabyte for over usage by one UK provider and the bandwidth was less than ideal. You can pick up cheap quad core i7/Xeon 6th/7th gen or Ryzen 3600 with dual 512GB NVMe and 64GB of RAM for €35-45 from Hetzner, a few € more gets you even better hardware, though cheap auction boxes are hard to find the last 12 months due to COVID demand. 30 day notice, symmetrical gigabit, unlimited bandwidth, remote hardware support 24/7 etc. compare that to your likely finance + COLO costs in the UK. I’d suggest if you have proven you can do this with a VPS set-up, then the next logical step is rental, I know hardware purchases are tempting, but build your client base to support your purchases, longer term it can make sense, but based on the limited information available it doesn’t seem to right now.

Be warned, German hosts are not hospitable to certain types of services/content and they will come after you if they have to.
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Thank you for your reply.

I guess you are right. Having a couple of cheap(ish) dedicated servers would help in the short to medium term while I build up the client base and then when I have more money available I can always reassess. I was just getting carried away by things. This side project is almost looking more promising than the original idea anyway so I might just pivot to the side project for a few months.
 
For an idea of base pricing (excl VAT) which many UK providers are in the region - see below:

Colo for a 2u server, upto 1amp power (most modern dual CPU servers will be around or below this) 10TB, 1Gbps port will be circa £49/month.
Additional bandwidth 10TB = £15/month (gets cheaper the more you commit to)
Unlimited bandwidth (1Gbps port = £150/month)

I have seen some UK colo providers quote double this and they are generally the ones that don't really want your business and stick to them multi-million pound contracts through overcharging very large companies/government contracts.

Add on a premium for being within the M25 so it's good to look further afield for the sake of 5-6ms latency extra.

Avalon pretty much has it bang on; it's nice to own your own equipment but you are then liable for hardware replacement costs too, at least with dedicated you've got the safety of an SLA for hardware. Until you're well established and making good money then the safety net of dedicated is where you want to be.

Hetzner is very cheap but their support isn't anything to write home about, it took me weeks to have them replace failed HDDs in various servers and like Avalon says, they can be very unforgiving for any signs of abuse - i.e. a bit of spam that your clients sent out through a form without a CAPTCHA for example? Server gets chopped offline immediately until you've given a written explanation.
OVH support is non-existent other than ensuring it's got power, online and no hardware faults. Price reflects this. Excellent network + DDoS protection though.
Some UK providers will go a little extra on support but it's not something to expect unless paying for management.
 
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