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  1. #1

    FDC $79 Colo deal

    100Mbps BGP for $79 a month. Have to admit, it's pretty tempting. They claim they give you enough power to run a server. The only downside I can see is that it's located in Denver. Probably not a lot of good routes to Asia there.

    Haven't seen too many reviews--are people using this? Is it any good?

    I have my doubts because it's so much cheaper than any other price out there. I've seen 10Mbps for $100 a month--how are these guys so much cheaper?

    I've always rented dedicated servers, but for this price, I might be tempted to take the plunge into colo.

    Mike

  2. #2
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    IIRC its not 100mbps dedicated, its shared bandwidth
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  3. #3
    Nice site!

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    Check colounlimited.com - their network is very good.

    Thanh is also very flexible and will accommodate your needs. You can even use the 100Mbps Unmetered.

    Specially 4 U
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  5. #5
    2 amps ain't enough to run a serious server, right? At least he spells out how much power he'll give you. Asia seems like a slow ping to Dallas, probably no worse than Denver.

  6. #6
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    I've used FDC in the past. It was a good service if you know exactly what they can and can't offer you. One of those you get what you pay for.

    On their 100Mbps colo for $79 I actually don't even think they are that competitive. I'd rather pay a bit more to another colo for a better quality service and still get 100Mbps. Could think of at least 2 other colo's I'd use before them on this plan.

    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    2 amps ain't enough to run a serious server, right?
    2 amps should be good for most users. What type of hardware where you looking to colo?

  7. #7
    Don't laugh...
    IBM e-Server 326M 1U Server 2x 2.8GHz Opteron 8gb 73gb $139 Ebay.

    411 Watt PS / 120 V = 3.4 Amps right?

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    Don't laugh...
    IBM e-Server 326M 1U Server 2x 2.8GHz Opteron 8gb 73gb $139 Ebay.

    411 Watt PS / 120 V = 3.4 Amps right?
    The size of the power supply isn't going to tell you how much power it's going to use, but yes, if you maxed out the power supply it would be 3.4A, you'd also likely get a ~3 month useable life out of that power supply at continuous 100% load...
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  9. #9
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    I've had a little under 100 of the ibm 326's. Good cheap platform. With that config I think I know who you got it from

    If I remember correctly I had one with 2 cpus, all ram slots filled, and a 73GB SCSI. On boot up it was under 2 amps measured by a cheap amp meter I had. I think it was around 1.7amps... Don't hold me to that, just going off memory.

  10. #10
    lol the voice of experience has spoken. Small world, eh?

    So, could that server actually push 100Mbps?

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by CGotzmann View Post
    IIRC its not 100mbps dedicated, its shared bandwidth
    Why does this always come up the first time FDC is mentioned?

    Sure, the bandwidth isn't "dedicated" any more than food at a buffet is "dedicated", but you can eat all you can eat. I.E. their 100mbps plans, yes, you can use 100mbps all the time if you want. It's not the best network in the world, the per-stream speeds aren't amazing, but you certainly do get what is advertised to you.

    For the full low-down on FDC, do a search for reviews. Some people love them, some don't. You'll find all the information you need about them doing a search for reviews.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    So, could that server actually push 100Mbps?
    My very general answer to this is it could. How much you can push depends on what your using the server for and a lot of other things. I'm not the best person to talk to about this. I've heard people talk about using atoms to push a lot of bandwidth. If you let us know what you'll be using the server for I'm sure someone we'll be able to guide you. If I don't know an answer and can't back it up I refrain from answering.

    I take it you have opteron 254's in the server. The ones I had I always upgarded to dual core cpus. If you buy a bunch of them you can even get opteron 280's(2 cores at 2.4GHz per cpu) for like $7-$8 each. Cheap upgrade for these servers.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    Don't laugh...
    IBM e-Server 326M 1U Server 2x 2.8GHz Opteron 8gb 73gb $139 Ebay.

    411 Watt PS / 120 V = 3.4 Amps right?
    These are great, we run quite a few of them for our lower end stuff. Nice to have the 15k disks too, and the rails are only like $15. Ours use slightly under 2 amps each.

    FDC is a budget provider. I don't know what you're using this for, but unless you're reselling dedicated to the budget market, I'd look elsewhere. Shared, vps, etc, it's usually well worth it to go with a nicer facility.

    Not that FDC is bad or anything, we have a number of servers colocated with them, but only for our rock bottom pricing stuff. They don't have a UPS, and the network is decent, but not great.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Jason K View Post
    My very general answer to this is it could. How much you can push depends on what your using the server for and a lot of other things. I'm not the best person to talk to about this. I've heard people talk about using atoms to push a lot of bandwidth. If you let us know what you'll be using the server for I'm sure someone we'll be able to guide you. If I don't know an answer and can't back it up I refrain from answering.
    If you're doing general shared hosting, you're not going to come anywhere even close to 100mbps. 10mbps is probably overkill for a server like this. With general shared hosting that is.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jason K View Post
    I take it you have opteron 254's in the server. The ones I had I always upgarded to dual core cpus. If you buy a bunch of them you can even get opteron 280's(2 cores at 2.4GHz per cpu) for like $7-$8 each. Cheap upgrade for these servers.
    I second that. They are dirt cheap on ebay and if you look at the benchmarks these things outperform the atoms by 3-4x.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    100Mbps BGP for $79 a month. Have to admit, it's pretty tempting. They claim they give you enough power to run a server. The only downside I can see is that it's located in Denver. Probably not a lot of good routes to Asia there.

    Haven't seen too many reviews--are people using this? Is it any good?

    I have my doubts because it's so much cheaper than any other price out there. I've seen 10Mbps for $100 a month--how are these guys so much cheaper?

    I've always rented dedicated servers, but for this price, I might be tempted to take the plunge into colo.

    Mike
    It's definitely a great deal. Even if 90% of the people that take this deal only used 1 Mbps and 1 AMP, FDC servers is never going to get rich selling at these prices.

    I think if you can truly push 50 Mbps or more on your colo'd server you should snap this deal up without question.

  16. #16
    I run a VPN. I have hit 100Mbps on my mid-level Wizzsolutions server. I'm not thrilled with the speeds I'm seeing from the Wizz server, though this may be all OpenVPN is capable of. Certainly the CPU, RAM, and BW are not the constraints, so perhaps the problem is ping/latency. Upgrade the network connectivity with dedicated bandwidth, get more VPN speed, right? My ping now with Wizz is about 120ms.
    They say that OpenVPN forces a lot of CPU context switching, which increases latency and therefor reduces speed. But it's really hard to measure that. The Wizz server turns an 11Mbps cable modem connection into 2 or 3Mbps, with 13% CPU load. Would the IBM server reduce that even further? How many VPN users can such a server support? By the way, Jason, thanks for the great info about the IBM server. Sounds like it's the way to go.
    The Intel Atom server is an interesting idea. That's the Pooled guy's offer--100mbps for $100.
    The solution, therefore, could be to put fewer users on a smaller server, but still maintain bandwidth. I don't want to give away too much of my business model, but I think people will pay for fast speed VPN.
    In a sense, going colo is an experiment. My lab technicians are my hundreds of users.

  17. #17
    For OpenVPN you need high bandwidth *quality*, not quantity. None of the el-cheapo providers are going to give you the performance you're looking for here.

    Quadranet is a great provider for VPN hosts, as the single threaded transfer speeds I've gotten with them, even to Europe, are just amazing. You're not going to see 100mbps colo for $79 though, I have to warn you.

    Are you running OpenVPN in udp mode or tcp mode? You can avoid some of these throughput problems by using udp mode, but I believe the default is tcp mode.
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    I've used FDCservers in the past. There was a point where I rented over 40 dedicated servers. Eventually I started maxing out the capacity on the switch (since all my servers were connected to the same switch) and was told that I had to follow their peak/off-peak hours.

    Today I use Steadfast's Pooled network. If storage and bandwidth capacity all you need, then their atom servers are a good fit for you. It meets all my expectations.

  19. #19
    OpenVPN is a mysterious beast. I agree that routing probably has a lot to do with speed, so as you say funkywizard, "good" networks are probably faster than "bad" ones.
    I have conducted almost every OpenVPN experiment possible, including of course UDP. Haven't changed distributions, but I'm thinking about it.
    What is OpenVPN really doing? Not much, I think. It sets up the tunnel, negotiates a SSL session, and then pretty much sits there.
    Now netfilter has to be busy shuttling packets with NAT, and I think that's one bottleneck. How does one performance profile netfilter?

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Hostizzle View Post
    OpenVPN is a mysterious beast. I agree that routing probably has a lot to do with speed, so as you say funkywizard, "good" networks are probably faster than "bad" ones.
    I have conducted almost every OpenVPN experiment possible, including of course UDP. Haven't changed distributions, but I'm thinking about it.
    What is OpenVPN really doing? Not much, I think. It sets up the tunnel, negotiates a SSL session, and then pretty much sits there.
    Now netfilter has to be busy shuttling packets with NAT, and I think that's one bottleneck. How does one performance profile netfilter?
    Packet loss, latency, jitter, and congestion are your constraining factors with OpenVPN, i.e. network quality. CPU, ram, etc is a much smaller factor, and it sounds like you're not getting near that limit anyway.

    UDP openvpn isn't so bad because not everything has to be single threaded, and you don't have the same issues with tcp-encapsulated-inside-tcp that you have with the default configuration. With tcp-in-tcp, even the smallest network problems will be magnified dramatically, whereas with UDP, you should see about the same performance you would see without the encapsulation. With TCP openvpn, everything going over the tunnel is inside a single threaded TCP connection, no matter how many connections the user's PC makes over the tunnel, so you're extremely limited on throughput there unless the connection between you and the target network is insanely good.

    Even with UDP, as you've seen, the performance of a VPN can suffer on cheap bandwidth. Unless your margins are really really low, I would stick to top notch providers rather than bulk providers. Bulk providers like fdc, 100tb, wizzsolutions etc, are great for a number of things, such as bulk video traffic, general website hosting, file hosting, etc, but I wouldn't put a paid VPN on them if I could help it because the inherent limitations in the technology demand the best network performance possible if your customers want to have a decent experience.
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    openvpn on windows? Because I duno what it is about openvpn on windows but speeds are pretty crappy. On linux I can push 80 meg over two openvpn connections (bonded).

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave Thrust View Post
    It's definitely a great deal. Even if 90% of the people that take this deal only used 1 Mbps and 1 AMP, FDC servers is never going to get rich selling at these prices.

    I think if you can truly push 50 Mbps or more on your colo'd server you should snap this deal up without question.
    Yeah that's the truth... Even if it were $80 bucks a month in pure profit, still hard to imagine.
    Dan Buyer
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by Acozilla View Post
    I've used FDCservers in the past. There was a point where I rented over 40 dedicated servers. Eventually I started maxing out the capacity on the switch (since all my servers were connected to the same switch) and was told that I had to follow their peak/off-peak hours.

    Today I use Steadfast's Pooled network. If storage and bandwidth capacity all you need, then their atom servers are a good fit for you. It meets all my expectations.
    Can you explain the peak / off-peak hourly rule? I've never heard of a hosting company offering that.
    Dan Buyer
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  24. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by dbuyer0 View Post
    Can you explain the peak / off-peak hourly rule? I've never heard of a hosting company offering that.
    For example they'll do 100Mbps PEAK, 500Mbps OFF-PEAK. I forget what hours they call peak time and off-peak, but regardless you can't do 1000Mbps all day is all they're saying.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SamBarrow View Post
    I second that. They are dirt cheap on ebay and if you look at the benchmarks these things outperform the atoms by 3-4x.
    Even at 3 times the performance it uses 6 times the power, so the Atom still gets you twice the performance per watt. As a data center operator, that is what I look at, as power is the main limiting factor and cost.
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