Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
@kolaente thought the same when I read Ger + Fin locations
-
Anyway, here's my shot at a decent response to @Aldar.
Root server: it means you get direct access to all the hardware in your machine, with no virtualization preconfigured by the host (but you can install it later if you need to). This gives you access to the full computational power of the cpu, since virtualization has small performance overhead.
This is opposite to a VPS, in which you already start within a virtualized container.
i9-9900K vs big server cpus: there are some types of numerical algorithms and applications (some databases, trading software, vanilla minecraft servers) that don't parallelize well due to their inherent nature. In those cases, if you want performance it's actually better to use fewer, faster cores - and a 9900K can be >50% faster than a large server cpu with many cores.
Same thing for ECC ram: it's good for large, stable, safety-critical machines, but it has worse speed/latency for performance-critical applications.
All those performance penalties add up. -
Enterprise SATA HDDs: while it is mostly marketing, it does tell you that they pick higher quality hardware rather than pick the cheapest crapware on the market, slap it in a raid, and call it a day.
100GB backup space: typically, that's just for the OS and the software and config stuff. Typically, the large datasets that you feed into the big HDDs are either expendable, or you keep them stored elsewhere and just copy them on the worker machine.
Also, that's just the "included in the package" space - you can always get more, but at extra cost.
Traffic unlimited: any hosting provider makes you pay for the outbound web traffic. Hetzner VPSs are nice, they have 20TB included monthly traffic per VPS (you only pay extra for the excess). Other providers are far less generous: on AWS you have 15 *GB* of free monthly traffic *per account*, and you pay (a lot) for any extra GB. Having unlimited traffic at gigabit speed for a flat fee is quite nice. -
Minimum contract vs setup fees: as you said, somebody has to actually physically build your machine and place it in their racks. This is a costly, time-consuming job, that requires actual people doing it. Therefore, a physical machine is not as easily "expendable" as a VPS, which you can create and delete as many times as you want with just a few clicks.
Also, when you decommission the machine, they have to figure out if they can resell it to someone else as-is (which they try to do in their "auctions" page), or if they have to send a person to disassemble it - again, multiple man-hours required.
Hence their offering: they don't force you to a minimum contract length (typically enough to recoup the hardware and man-hour costs), but you pay an extra setup fee at the start, to discourage people from buying machines they don't need and then getting rid of them immediately (which would make Hetzner lose money if that hardware went unused afterwards). -
Lastly, VAT pricing: for a bigger multinational company it's actually more convenient, since they can easily compare different VAT prices based on which country/region they're based in.
Also, when you log in with your account and pick a region, they give you the full price with VAT included.
I hope the explanation was clear and thorough enough! :) -
@endor Wow, okay, I did not expect someone to actually take the time and effort to explain all this to me, ++ for you for that good sir!
And, I guess I got a little ahead of myself, but I did cast judgment based on the company where I work at now (My first fulltime as an admin).
Never heard the term root server in this context, here, we call physical machines simply "dedicated server" or "managed" if the client pays for us to manage the system part and anything that needs root permissions for them. -
@Aldar you're welcome! And yeah, that's exactly what they mean by 'root server', no idea why they went for that name
-
@endor As for the CPUs, I understand that there is software that's less thread-happy, but... Again, judging based on what I came to deal with so far, I'd dare to say that its a minority in the enterprise sphere - After all, it was an ad that striked me as aiming higher than for someone wanting to host a Minecraft server... But, I guess, even the large servers out there have to be hosted somewhere.
Backups - I also didn't think of it that way. Firstly, the system itself, unless heavily modified, does not need to be backed up at all. And as for the configuration... Sure, backing that up is very important, but can be done by using etckeeper for the global settings, and and it takes up little to no space, even deep into the past.
Traffic - Again, I judged based on where I work, we give our clients unlimited traffic, and only limit the bandwidth. Though not sure what the standard is. It sucks really hard when your app is traffic limited, I never thought any server hosting did that. -
@endor And all the rest, the fees and VAT, can be summed up as me not realizing those details, or deciding to overlook them. I just didn't like the part of ad where they print in big, bold letters the cost per month, and then, you have the smallprint mentioning its without VAT and setup fees.
And just to confirm, yes, it is Hetzner. -
@Aldar the Minecraft part was just me poking fun at how inefficient Minecraft is :P
Complex numerical simulation and financial trading software are very specific niche applications, and the companies/people who need then typically buy the machines for longer periods of time.
Hetzner's offer is as close as you can get to having your own dedicated machine without having to worry about buying and assembling the parts yourself (with all the related headaches). Basically colocation with hardware assembly on top.
As for the backups: yes, etckeeper can take care of most stuff, but when redeploying a machine you have to redo the whole deployment manually or develop a way to automate it, and if software changes in the meantime you will get many headaches.
Having a one-click image that you can redeploy on a moment's notice is a nice perk, and if people are willing to pay to be lazy, Hetzner's definitely not gonna say no to their money :P
when your code is a mess but everything work out in the end
When you keep getting +1s on a rant you posted a month ago.
Go big or go home.
Can someone help me understand?
I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!
An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.
But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.
Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.
Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.
"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.
"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.
"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)
This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!
"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.
"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!
"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...
The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.
Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!
I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...
rant
core i9
root server
advertisment rant