Hosting vendor analysis
Introduction
This document contains an evaluation of current hosting vendors with their offers. The goal is to select the hosting vendor we'll use in 2025.
Current subscription
We currently use OVH for hosting, with the following offer:
- Name: RISE-LE-2 2021
- Gross price: 926.50€/year (77.21€/month)
- CPU: Intel Xeon-E 2274G - 4c/8t - 4 GHz/4.9 GHz
- Usage: high, between 50% and 100%
- Geekbench v6: 1603/5222
- RAM: 64 GiB ECC 2666 MHz
- Usage: medium, about 20%
- Storage: 2×960 GiB SSD NVMe
- SAMSUNG MZQLB960HAJR-00007
- Raid 1
- Usage: about 350GiB
- 250GiB for the Postgres DB
- 50GiB for Clickhouse (logs, traces, metrics)
- 50GiB for applications
- Network:
- Usage:
- up: 16Mib/s up = 2MiB/s
- down: 1Mib/s = 0.125MiB/s
- Usage:
- Region: Europe (France - Roubaix)
- OS: Linux 6.10 (Arch)
We subscribed on 2021-12-14 for one year. We then renewed twice for a duration of a year each time:
- 2021-12-14: 842.27€/year (70.19€/month)
- 2022-12-14: 926.50€/year (77.21€/month)
- 2023-12-14: 926.50€/year (77.21€/month)
The current subscription expires on 2024-12-14.
Requirements
- CPU: We need a stronger CPU, this is the current bottleneck for the server.
- RAM: 64GiB seems good enough currently, 128GiB would be nice to have but not required
- Storage: Having 1TiB available currently seems good enough, 2TiB would be nice to have some headroom as we add more games
- Network: This should not be a bottleneck
- Region: Europe, most of our users are in Europe
- Extra: we don't need much extra support, we are able to manage everything ourselves.
- Budget: let's keep it below 100€/month if possible
Offers
The main vendors compared were OVH and Hetzner as they are reliable vendors with good prices.
OVH RISE-2 2024
- https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/bare-metal/rise/rise-2/
- 889.20/year (74.10€/month)
- CPU: Intel Xeon-E 2388G - 8c/16t - 3.2GHz/4.6GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×512GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
- Out of stock
OVH RISE-Game-1 2024
- https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/bare-metal/rise/rise-game-1/
- 1025.88/year (85.49€/month)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X - 6c/12t - 3.7GHz/4.6GHz
- RAM: 32GiB
- Storage: 2×512GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
OVH RISE-3 2024
- https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/bare-metal/rise/rise-3/
- 1368.00€/year (114€/month)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - 12c/24t - 3.7GHz/4.8GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×512GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
OVH Advance-1 2024
- https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/bare-metal/advance/adv-1/
- 1162.68€/year (96.89€/month)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 4244P - 6c/12t - 3.8GHz/5.1GHz
- RAM: 32GiB
- Storage: 2×960GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
OVH Advance-2 2024
- https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/bare-metal/advance/adv-2/
- 1641.48€/year (136.79€/month)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 4344P - 8c/16t - 3.8GHz/5.3GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×960GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Hetzner AX42 2024
- 699.72€/year (58.41€/month)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8700GE 8c/16t - 3.65GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×512GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Hetzner AX52 2024
- 913.92€/year (76.16€/month)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700 8c/16t - 3.8GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×1TB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Hetzner EX101 2024
- 1270.92€/year (105.91€/month)
- CPU: Intel Core i9-13900 24c/32t - 2GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×1.92TB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Hetzner AX102 2024
- 1556.52€/year (129.71€/month)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16c/32t - 4.2GHz
- RAM: 128GiB
- Storage: 2×1.92TB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Scaleway Pro-7-M
- https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/dedibox/#pro-range
- 1199.88€/year (99.99€/month)
- CPU: Intel Xeon E-2246G 6c/12t - 3.6GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×960GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Scaleway Pro-9-M
- https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/dedibox/#pro-range
- 1919.88€/year (159.99€/month)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 7272 12c/24t - 2.9GHz
- RAM: 128GiB
- Storage: 2×1TB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Scaleway Core-10-XS
- https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/dedibox/#core-range
- 1439.88€/year (119.99€/month)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 8024P 8c/12t - 2.4GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×960GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Scaleway Aluminium EM-A410X-SSD
- https://www.scaleway.com/en/elastic-metal/aluminium/
- 659.88€/year (54.99€/month)
- CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5 1650 6c/12t - 3.2GHz
- RAM: 64GiB
- Storage: 2×960GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID
Hetzner colocation 14 units - 1/3 Rack
- https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/13-rack/
- starting from 1547.00€/year (128.91€/month)
- We would have to supply our own hardware. a 3k€ server for ~3 years would be amortized by adding ~84€/month
Current conclusion
- Hetzner has by far the best perf/price ratio.
- Hetzner AX52 (~700€) would be a nice improvement over the current server, at roughly a similar price. It would probably still be limited to supported expanded games.
- Hetzner EX101 (~1270€) is in an awkward spot, it uses the CPU that had thermal issues and has to run slower
- Hetzner AX102 (~1550€) is a strong contender if we want to raise in tier; we could afford it if it let's us merge hosting costs with MyHordes (currently paid independently)