The prices with a sensible amount of storage has skyrocketed in the past 2 months, partially because of the floods causing HDD prices to skyrocket.
Minimum price for 4 HDD system has jumped by 100€ per server now for the previously offering best quality:value ratio. Some outlets still provide at the old pricing from year back but they are mostly out of stock constantly.
In other words 100Tb servers with more than 2 drives are not really available in the market place right now. Especially as WD Black drive price has doubled up or more, if you can even find them.
Also the only provider who offered 1Gbps Unmetered dedicated servers at reachable prices seems to have dissolved now, not completely unexpectedly. My personal opinion was that what they are saying and promising could not be true, unfortunately it seems i were right.
What this means is that new 2011 series nodes are unavailable for the unknown period of time. Only nodes in stock with any provider of any quality are priced over our charging rate.
Even at cheapest we would have to pay same monthly for the servers and still buy our own drives, ramping up costs to bring up a new node to roughly 1500€. In practice it would ramp up the per node costs more than 100€ per month on annual costs.
Therefore we are going to release a new 1Gbps seedbox series within next couple weeks. It will not seem as good offer but it is not without it's merits. Specifics are a little bit open still, but in all likelyhood we are going to use 2x2Tb servers, which means maximum users will be limited to 12 or below. Also these will be lower traffic limited per node, with accounting of 60Tb per server, capped at 80Tb per server. Which i believe still to be vastly more than in practice achievable in general.
The unspoken truth what 1Gbps unmetered providers do not usually talk about is that in general 99% of servers will use 60Tb or less. That is also why having plenty of drives is hard for those offers, or very expensive: They directly increase the amount of data expected to be transferred. In torrenting general rule of thumb is that 1HDD is capable of 25Tb a month max. In general more like 15Tb. Exceptions do occur however from this rule.
We are going to beta test the new offering shortly. Optimally i would like to put 16 users on such a node, but it requires testing to validate performance, that maybe simply too much even with our new measures of stabilizing performance. The problem is that a certain percentage users will try to utilize vastly more than their fair share would be, to the degree they would utilize the whole server themselves unless there were restrictions in place. They are the "power users", who auto unpack everything, uses RSS/IRC autoget to get all the latest torrents and loads up hundreds of torrents.
We have already experimented with code to restrict those users as well, that they simply cannot go beyond their fair share unless there is vacant resources, but that is not ready yet so we still have to work with limits on how many users per node.
Ultimately, we have set performance standards and anything not upto our standards on average will not be utilized in the long term.
Best Regards,
Aleksi
Pulsed Media
Vrijdag, December 2, 2011
