I see companys offering dedicated servers for around $99 per month. I know a barebones 1U server cost about $600+bandwidth. Even with Cogent bandwidth it takes + 6 months just to break even =/ Is there a trick to this? I would like to know. I still have a ton of rackspace left which I don't need. People don't really trust new companys so not many people are willing to send servers for colocation.

How are people able to offer dedicated servers for so cheap? What's the trick to it?

I've NO F*cking ID...

What I don't understand is we (in Belgium) have to pay around 3$
/GB.


Let's take RS's offer ...
99$/month for
400GB/month,
AMD 1900 server
,...

In belgium, the cheapest would be:
400GB/month = 400*3$ = 1200$
then rackspace = 30$
and .. the server... lets say... 100$...
That makes together 1330$/month for the cheapest colocator
Same package as rackshack gives for 99$....?????

HOW CAN THEY HAVE THOSE LOW PRICES FOR BANDWITH???

people dont pay $3/gb for bandwidth here.... and they oversell the bandwidth alot.

-Brendan

The other part you are missing is that most of the RS servers are white box and not rack mounted, so you can removed $200-$300 from the price of a server for a decent 1U case and PSU. Generally cheap deals don't use decent hardware either (not saying RS use crap hardware).

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
The other part you are missing is that most of the RS servers are white box and not rack mounted, so you can removed $200-$300 from the price of a server for a decent 1U case and PSU.



What????
Are you sure of that????

Just checked their site...
and they indeed don't say they ARE using 1u server cases..

indeed, the servers get cheaper that way, but on the other hand, they can't store the same amount of servers as in rack's.

I don't believe you can store 42 common towers/desktops in that space..

Only the new Compaq servers are 1U, all the others are white box, and you certainly can't fit 42 in a rack.

here are some pictures of the rackshack facility:
http://www.rackshack.net/colo/updatesnew.asp
damn, very impressive.

holy moly.

i'm a sucker for data center photos.

Originally posted by BiGWill
here are some pictures of the rackshack facility:
http://www.rackshack.net/colo/updatesnew.asp
damn, very impressive.

Mmmmmmmmmm.... Compaqs.... Anways I think the only servers they have that are not 1U's are the White Boxes which I think they have the least amount of. The rest are Compaqs, Dells, IBM's and Raqs from what I understand.. Not sure about the P4 systems but I would take a rough guess I would say 85% or so of there servers are 1U ???

hehe how do they do it so cheap
metro bandwidth i believe they like to call it. gig drops for 27k a month pushing 1000 mbps whereas whats a ballpark figure for a 155mbps fibre drop? to the nearest 10k depends on your provider but has to be at least 5-10x the cost. for 1/6th of the thruput. and belgium whilst being fairly well kitted out for europe (germany is prolly the best but they peer very badly thanks to t online) is always going to pay more. economies of scale. look at rackshack like this

a server on average uses 100gb a month at rackshack

bandwidth cost (27000/1000*0.3) = 8.1 bucks for bandwidth.
whoa thats gonna break da bank :)
server cost. say for the p4 in a tower gotta be about 800 bucks minus 250 setup leaves 550 ammortized over a year = 45 bucks.
throw in 20 bucks for power ans thats being generous.
were up 73 bucks. remember the cost of the control panel which they will get serious bulk discounts. whats left is company overheads and proffit. theres plenty of room for error in there and they will have a high turnover of servers. but i dont doubt that at the end of the month tightwad can dive into a scrooge mc duck style pile of dollar notes.

you have to realize that bandwidth in europe is WAY more expensive than the US. you just can't compare them.

then, you have to realize that rackshack is a fairly large company with LARGE buying power. meaning they get better pricing than no doubt many of would see..

sure they oversell, but, they also have enough bandwidth to take care of any REASONABLE foreseeable need. and according to their numbers, they seem to be turning a profit.

yeah 7 - 15 bucks a gb is not out of order for a small dc running off small leased lines. donkyhost charge 10 pounds which is near enough 15 bucks a gb

Many custom hosting solutions we run, use Australian bandwidth if you think Europe is expensive how about you get a load of this!

1 gig inbound = $130 AUD

Or around 15cents per Meb Aud.

Very expensive i agree...

Also a thing to consider is imagine how many 1u servers RS buys per day these prices would be excellent...

Kind regards,

aus does have a wonderful way of paying for bandwidth. incoming is stupidly expensive, outgoing is either stupid cheap or free. it all depends on your ratios as to whether its good for you or not.

Originally posted by BiGWill
here are some pictures of the rackshack facility:
http://www.rackshack.net/colo/updatesnew.asp
damn, very impressive.

Is anyone else thinking "hall of mirrors effect"? ;)

What about people who offer dell power edge servers for cheap? Is it hard to startups to get financing from dell?

Who does that?

My misake. I thought I saw allot of people offering dedicated dell servers. I could only find one for now.

http://servers.econtinents.com/dell/

I know IBM servers aren't exactly cheap either

http://www.webreseller.net

Cogentco.com's bandwidth, at $1000.00 US a month for a 100Mbs unmetered connection allows people like rackshack
to sell a $99.00 dedicated server with 400Gb of transfer. You figure $400 - $800 for a machine depending on whether you opt for 1U or ATX in a rack case and spread that out over a year. Under those conditions a $99.00 server is quite profitable if done on a large enough scale.
That's my $0.02.

Originally posted by omenoracle
Cogentco.com's bandwidth, at $1000.00 US a month for a 100Mbs unmetered connection allows people like rackshack
to sell a $99.00 dedicated server with 400Gb of transfer. You figure $400 - $800 for a machine depending on whether you opt for 1U or ATX in a rack case and spread that out over a year. Under those conditions a $99.00 server is quite profitable if done on a large enough scale.
That's my $0.02.

not that it makes a difference, but, cogent is at/around $3000 a month if you're reselling the bandwidth (ISPs). this is well documented and mentioned on just about every cogent thread on here where someone says it's $1K.

i believe cogent is a valuable asset to the industry and hope the company continues to grow and will be able to stay around for a long time. although, their peering may suck at times, i've been very happy with their performance from europe and hope their peering can get better in the future (or with more acquisitions). even if their prices rise slightly, i think they would still be a great value for people who need large amounts of bandwidth and for companies who want to offer reselling services (but of course not using completely cogent).

just my opinion, not that it's worth anything.

Dont forget that 99$ servers are not the only things offered by a company usually. In fact, a lot of their customers probably end up paying more than 99$ per month..

Think about tech support, add-ons, ip addresses, etc... The profit margin on these is usually higher...

lol tech support ?? what rackshack u been visiting ;) the .com . lol i suppose the restores count as tech support, but yeah they make a nice margin on upgrades

Originally posted by omenoracle
Cogentco.com's bandwidth, at $1000.00 US a month for a 100Mbs unmetered connection allows people like rackshack
to sell a $99.00 dedicated server with 400Gb of transfer. You figure $400 - $800 for a machine depending on whether you opt for 1U or ATX in a rack case and spread that out over a year. Under those conditions a $99.00 server is quite profitable if done on a large enough scale.
That's my $0.02.

yea but this is rackshack here
rackshack doesn't just use cogent..
they have otherb ack bones, look at their site.

and my guess is that they just assume the avg person uses only 50gb
sometimes people only use like 30gb
20gb
etc

lol tech support ?? what rackshack u been visiting the .com . lol i suppose the restores count as tech support, but yeah they make a nice margin on upgrades


Well, I was not refering only to rackshack.

Why is every thread turning out in a rackshack thread? I can understand for this one since it is about 99$ servers but it happens sooo often..

Well, it takes months just to break even on the servers themselves. Maybe if you made everyone sign a 1 year contract it might be worth it.

What's the minimum time for taking a server with RS?

Originally posted by FiberOptic
What's the minimum time for taking a server with RS?
you get a life-lasting contract for free with your server :D

All people like Rackshack know that most of there customers won't use 400GB bandwidth. So there for they pack around 20 servers on a 10mb/sec. connection.

lol they have 6000 servers on 4.2 GBPS connection on a 200mbps quality network. they can burst plenty fast and apart from a slipup with some p4s they burst to 100mbps. only ones on 10 mbps are the cogent only compaqs and i severely doubt anyone puts 20 servers on 10 mbps switches anymore. rackshack servers burn about 100gb each altho i should prolly do the sums again, i got a feeling the average my be getting towards 150 but the 10mbps deal has screwed my maths lol.

and why rackshack, they OWN the 99$ market. there are pretenders but im waiting to see how proven they are. rs are proven.

minimum term, about 30 seconds, theres no contract beyond month to month with them.

I would consider an eight month break even, with a total of 12-24 months of lifespan for a server completely acceptable. Especially since it works well when scaled. Sure, doing 10 dedicated servers at a $100.00 price point isn't really worth the effort, but several hundred clearly could be, especially if hardware only tech support is supplied. If I sold a hundred servers this way, and after the eighth month I was making $100.00 a month - expenses ea., that would be enough income to replicate the process without any cash injections. If I can make my investment back, plus a generous return in two years or less, I can't see how I could be unhappy.... Also, people are unlikely to move as long as the service provided is good enough to make the effort required for a transition to seem unnecessary.

It seems almost impossible to get someone to colocate with me. I am thinking about offer dedicated servers but I know it will be a big investment and will take a long time just to break even on it.

I don't know what to do. I got allot of spare rackspace and lot's of excess Cogent bandwidth.

Some way's rackshack does it...
Rackshack's parent company is ev1 (A quite large dial up company), they already have big lines.. We all know when you buy in bulk you get it cheaper. Same as the compaq servers, when you order a thousand of em they are much cheaper than 1 at a time....
AMD costs less than a Pentium, they went with AMD
Tower case costs MUCH LESS than a rack mountable case, I can't find a 1u case under 200 bucks!
They own their own facility, they don't have to pay someone else for rack space.
Because it is an unmanaged solution, tech support can be minimal, you don't have to have tons of guru tech people goin 24/7...
Also, back on the ev1 pipes, from what I hear (would appreciate someone clarifying) for all the incoming bandwidth you have you get some outgoing free or at a lower cost. There is quite a bit of incoming from the dial up customers.

What irritates me...
People assuming Rackshack's network is all cogent, when I think its only 25% or less. From what I've downloaded and seen, its a very nice network.

People getting so pissed about the support, its an unmanaged solution and you are paying a TON lower than anywhere else... but hey, people will always want the world plus the moon...

Originally posted by Rewdog
People getting so pissed about the support, its an unmanaged solution and you are paying a TON lower than anywhere else...

Couldn't resist to post something...
Of course, an unmanaged server is unmanaged, but as far as I read most complaints are about hardware issues or about issues with the installed software, or am I wrong?

Not sure, I skip over many of those posts :) I agree, with a unmanaged service the server and software should be good and stable...

Originally posted by Rewdog
Some way's rackshack does it...
Rackshack's parent company is ev1 (A quite large dial up company), they already have big lines.. We all know when you buy in bulk you get it cheaper. Same as the compaq servers, when you order a thousand of em they are much cheaper than 1 at a time....

Also, back on the ev1 pipes, from what I hear (would appreciate someone clarifying) for all the incoming bandwidth you have you get some outgoing free or at a lower cost. There is quite a bit of incoming from the dial up customers.


Generally when you buy a pipe in the US, you get the bandwidth both ways. If they buy a 45Mbps pipe, they get 45Mbps in and 45Mbps out. So, because of their 50,000 dialup customers (which use mostly incoming bandwidth), they essentially got the first X amount of outgoing bandwidth for free. With that being said, I believe their outgoing bandwidth Greatly exceeds their incoming these days, so this point doesn't really matter anymore. I guess a good way to think of it is "By offering dedicated servers this cheap, they don't have to pay for their incoming dialup bandwidth". It does save them some money everymonth, but shouldn't really be considered as a reason why their dedicated servers are profitable.

Is equipment to offer dialup services very expensive?

going to rewdog, i've seen a 1U case at www.newegg.com that i think was around $185 + $20 FEDEX shipping or something like that. close to $200. 200-watt p/s.

also, i won a brand new 1U with a 300watt p/s for $135 + $18 shipping on ebay once. the company put up another immediately at the same starting price as well. this was a few months ago however.

i've seen them offered elsewhere fairly cheap. i can't remember the brand at the moment..