What sort of price should I be expecting to pay for a quarter rack in a Surrey DC?

[Cromulent]

As with all these things all the companies want you to contact them so they can give you a quote but I have literally no knowledge in this area when it comes to pricing so I was hoping some of you might be able to give me some ballpark figures and things to look out for.

 

[Cromulent]

I can tell you that pay 600pcm including 12amps of power delivery for a half rack. 1200pcm for a full rack. Discounted the more racks you take. I negotiated down to about 1k on the full racks. This includes remote hands, 1gb/1gb internet etc.

Thank you. That was useful. At least I know what kind of range to expect now.

 

[Cromulent]

If it helps I csn pm you a breakdown of an invoice so you have something to work with.

That would certainly help. One thing I've never figured out (I must have bunked off my electronics lessons at school) is working out how much power you need. I'm looking at EPYC servers and I'm guessing their power reqiorements are on the high side.

 

[Cromulent]

It just so happens that I have 3 epyc (rome) servers in one of my racks

Nice .

 

[Cromulent]

What servers are you looking at? I've got dual socket servers but am currently running just 3x 7452 chips. So ive got a socket per server spare at the moment.

Tomorrow ill send you all the details but will also attempt to breakdown how to calcualte power usage on a epyc (its not a lot i can assure you of that) for example a rack full of about 30 intel 8500 i5's only pulls about 2 amps.

Ive got a spreadsheet somewhere that helped me calculate all the details on power and how to calculate it that I used when we were building our London dc. I need to find that spreadsheet.

I'm looking for servers for maximum VM density so I was gravitating towards EPYC on that front. I'd be using qemu and KVM on an OpenSUSE LEAP host on each server. The more cores, RAM and storage I can fit in each server the better.

 

[Cromulent]

If you are doing what I think you are doing and based on your previous posting history you are likely better off looking at renting dedicated servers via a reseller at least until things are more established as a business or looking at options such as what AWS can provide.

Let me give you a bit of background. I'm trying to start a VPS hosting company with a unique selling point. I currently use Linode for my own VPS needs so my first idea was just to resell them (my unique selling point allows me to charge more) but then I thought I could get higher margins if I went with a dedicated server provider. I spent hours upon hours upon hours looking at dedicated server providers and none of them offered what I wanted. I mean I can get a VPS with higher technical specifications than most dedicated servers that are being sold at the moment. So then I started thinking about colocation and doing it myself.

If you know of a really flexible dedicated server provider that is prepared to work with a small company that offers that level of flexibility I would love it. So I'm all ears for any suggestions.

 

[Cromulent]

@Cromulent - I could set up a call with you and a couple of DC guys for a little chat also if you wanted to get an idea what you are looking at.

That is very kind of you but I have to warn you I'm really early in the whole process. I'm currently writing my business plan, setting up a landing page and researching marketing. As long as these people realise that I am just looking for information that I can put in my business plan as a projected expense we'll be fine but if they think I'm in the market to buy in a couple of months there will be a bit of a misunderstanding.

Having said all of that if they are nice and give reasonable it would be highly tempting to go with them when I do finally reach that spot (I'm working as fast as I can on the whole project).

 

[Cromulent]

Just do what I do - Tell them exactly how it is! This is what I may want /need i'm not close to ready yet but need some indicative pricing etc etc.

If you could give me a few days to get my sleep schedule back on track that would be awesome. It'll certainly help with the numbers anyway. In the meantime, I'll look into dedicated server providers. Maybe there is something I have missed there. I'm already pretty up to date on the VPS marketplace so I'll stick to my knowledge there.

 

[Cromulent]

What is the niche that you're aiming for as a VPS provider that isn't covered by the thousands of other providers out there currently? If you don't want to share publicly then feel free to message me but I'm wondering if perhaps you've not looked in the right places if you have something that you couldn't find from a provider already?

I wouldn't bother calling anybody for dedicated server pricing unless you need something really non-standard. As has been mentioned, the only wiggle room you have is if you're ordering more than a few where you might be able to sway some discount. It's pretty much a rat race and the pricing is within a few £ across all providers in the UK.

You can get live pricing on any providers website worth their salt. Any that say "call for quote" (as opposed to just giving you a base figure online) on something as simple as dedicated servers or colocation should be automatically removed from any list of contenders you're looking at as they just want to get you on the phone and start selling the world to you.
Rackspace pricing I can understand as there's a lot of factors that makes up the price but there are still a lot of providers out there that publicly list prices and features to give you a good idea of if they're having your pants down!

I think I sent you a trust message but I'm not sure if it got through. I'm not used to using trust on these forums. Let me know if you didn't get it, please. If you did get it feel free to give me honest feedback.

 

[Cromulent]

Well, the business side of things is up and running. Now I just need to put the finishing touches on my business plan and apply for a startup loan. There is still a long way to go but I'm getting closer every day.

 

[Cromulent]

This is a mega bump of an old thread I made last year. Due to health issues and other boring stuff, I had to put my business plan on hold, but I'm now back and ready to go! I should hear if I get my business loan by Thursday next week which means I will be buying at least one server and will be needing to host it in a DC in either Surrey or London, but it is likely to start as a simple 1U affair. I could get more servers on finance, but my business advisor said I should probably pay outright for the first server, so we'll see what happens.

 

[Cromulent]

It would be interesting to know why you chose bare metal rather than a cloud provider? You don't need the ability to quickly scale up I expect.

Well, I'll be providing my own VPS instances with a slightly unique twist which will help me compete with companies like Linode and Digital Ocean. We'll see how it works out. If the worst comes to the worst then I have other projects on the go that would benefit from a dedicated server.