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Anyone actually interested in HK Servers? If so, what are you after?
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
in General
Anyone interested in HK servers? What's most important to you?
What would an ideal (but also realistic!) plan look like for you? Yes yes, I am expecting a string of replies to this post saying $7 for some giant Dual Xeon E5v4 with 1TB RAM and 20TB of SSDs etc.... But that aside, realistically, what are people really after in this region?
Storage Servers?
Good China connectivity?
Cheap bandwidth (without China)?
High RAM?
Very generic, I know. Just looking for some ideas as we are pre-configuring a couple dozen machines, and am curious about the ideal spec for these machines.
Comments
If it's cheaper than Singapore, then yes I'll be interested. Otherwise I'll stick to SG
Good China connectivity
Depends what you need. It's definitely possible to be cheaper in HK than SG but I find both markets to be very similar in terms of pricing. But I think HK is a little more 'dynamic' and has more options.
For the dirty cheap stuff like HE.net and Cogent, both are available in HK and SG, and I'm pretty sure it's pretty much the same price. But if you want some better quality stuff, particularly for Asia region, I think HK has slightly better connectivity and slightly better prices.
Just out of curiosity, what are you getting in SG and at what price? Not that I expect you to 'switch'/'move' but I can give you an idea what the cost would be in HK (at least with our company).
At what price range? This is a contentious issue. We all know that CT have a monopoly on connectivity to CN, so if you don't want to pay the $150/m /Mbit for the dedicated stuff, then there will always need to be SOME SORT of compromise, and it will always be way more expensive USA for the same amount of data transfer.
Using our normal routes, we can often do 100M+ single thread connections, so its popular for VPNs and stuff. But it's way out of LET price range (unless the data transfer is very small).
@randvegeta Well I'm sorry honestly it's quite hard for me to be objective comparing apple to apple, because all my servers right now are from very special deals.
Currently I have DediServe €3.75 1GB in ID(!), and LeaseWeb S$3.5 1GB in SG.
I use it primarily hosting webpages for colleague and family, and personal VPN/proxy servers.
I use VPN/proxy all the time so it must have good connectivity to ID/Asia/US
I should probably have put 'dedicated' server in my title
Good connectivity among Asia region OR good china connectivity
Well I have to say . There are so many providers there providing HK CN2 China route servers.
If you really want to make some money in this market, you have to publish something really competitives,instead of asking "Hey guys im launching HK servers, any one have any ideas", it looks like.you dont have any ideas yet, such as how to do the plan, calculating bandwidth etc.
By the way, "China optimized network"market is big, because we have Great Fire Wall, so people need proxy,so we need optimized network VPSes.
Whatever , hope you can publish something really impressive.
forgive my poor English.....
We are an HK based company operating since 2003. We actually have our own DC in HK, and multiple GBit of connectivity.
I'm not trying to get ideas for selling to general people. I'm trying to get idea for the LET market :-). LET are very demanding with tiny budgets. I'm trying to figure out what is more important for LETers and see if I can create a package that is most suitable for the people who come to this forum.
The stuff we normally sell, I cannot post here as it would be beyond LET rules. $7 for a VPS or $49 for a dedi? What kind of server can you offer in HK for those kinds of prices?
It's a challenge to say the least. But one that I find interesting to take on
Dirt cheap pieces of shit that have been abused all their lives. Atoms, i3s anything you can offer sub $20
Local bandwidth (HKIX, Equinix Hong Kong, BBIX Hong Kong) is enough.
Ide have to run that in another room without air-conditioning for sub $20 :-). Servers will die in less than 2 years, with most failures occurring in the summer. Electricity for the server + AC alone is sadly more than $20/month. $49 would be possible though. Just inside the LET limit.
Easily done. Without China bandwidth, it's easy to provide servers comparable to USA prices (excluding the DIRTY CHEAP stuff that can't even cover it's own power costs).
well ofcourse. i just want to mention that China optimized network is popular.might think about that.
We have a China optimised network :-). Direct routes available! The question is how much do people need with their dedi's and VPSs. VPNs obviously need as much as they can get, but that can't be true of everyone.
Take how many people respond showing interest then half it, that will be your entire market here.
It's not that I am looking specifically for people FROM LET. It is more about the KIND of people you find at LET. I'm not investing in servers to cater for LETers. But I can still create some custom plans to suite them.
Due to HK power pricing and AC needs you likely want:
Per Watt these have the most CPU power and thus least heat generated, which is also nice for the size and density.
Cheap end you could start with G4400 (a Skylake Celeron at 54W with 3.6k bench, 50 USD) which allows upgrades up to i7-7700k (300$, 91W, 12k bench). Middle would be i5 or i3 which range from i3-6100 (100$, 51W, 5.4k bench) to i5-6400 (150$, 65W, 6.7k bench).
This allows to keep the same mainboard for all, albeit not with ECC on i3 anymore - They need DDR4 memory which is however currently cheaper than DDR3 non-ECC (If you have stock of DDR3 DIMMS there are boards with DDR3 as well).
Skylake/Kaby Lake allows 64GB RAM (4x16GB, only on DDR4) which is much better than E3 pre-v5/i7-pre (32GB, 4x8GB) plus Intel slashed pricing on a lot of stuff lately due to AMD catching up.
Table:
Ryzen wise - not my speciality yet - you need more power as start but they end up cheaper per Watt cycle, and per $ much near Intel (if not beating at times):
Low end 1500X (1400 is overpriced, uses same power, and has less cpu power by far) - 65W, 11k(!) bench, 170$ - Mid 1600 (beats the 1600X by price, 65W, 13k bench, 250$). Top empty, 1700X/1800X are overpriced compared to i7s.
They need DDR4 and support ECC depending on board & BIOS, but only unbuffered.
Table:
You may want to look into some KVM VPS options in the future instead of restricting your offerings to the dedicated server market. I know how expensive running a dedicated server must be.
I've been looking into HK for quite some time as a storage server (travel photos/videos and backup of essential files). For me, the network is the main deciding factor rather than the price. I look for good connectivity between Canada, Australia, and SE Asia. For example, some HK providers have HK to Australia routing via the US which adds an extra 100ms of latency. Others, like softlayer, go via Singapore and Perth or a more direct route to Australia resulting in a latency as low as 150ms from my test servers.
The routing affects speed as well. I've seen speed as low as 1mbit out of HK to a full 100mbit to my location.
After that I start looking at customer service then price. I've found very few providers that will go the extra mile for the customer. Most seem to just want to set you up on a generic plan and stop responding when you try to ask for it to be customized in any way. Perhaps they feel more than 5 mins spent with a potential customer is a waste of time.
Anyways hope that helps. I'll keep your company in mind if you ever end up offering VPS products in the future
Cheap Nat vps, good connection to Us. I dont care about connection to China.
Wow.. real answers on LET! A happy surprise!
@William. Yeah we already use Microclouds, Xeon E3 and Xeon E5 CPUs (all generations). When is space ever cheap in HK? With that in mind, we are not so much space limited as power limited, so efficiency is our top priority for squeezing in more servers.
The Microclouds are great to save space, but as I said, space isn't the biggest limiting factor. With that in mind, we still use them because they are so much easier to manage and install. Racking 8x 1 or 2U servers is so much more work than racking a MicroCloud of 8 nodes. The shared power supply also provides some efficiency improvements when 4 or more nodes are running at the same time. Cabling is easier (less power cables and easier 'routeing' for network cables). The reduced work load in setting up the servers is substantial, especially when comparing to a DIY server where you buy all the components separately and assemble the server yourself.
Microcloud cost at least US$300 more per server than DIY (new) but the long term benefits are undeniable. Worse thing about Microcloud... only 2 hotswap drives. Fine for 90% of customers who need only 1 or 2 disks, but for the odd few that want RAID-10.. no luck.
Any way.. these days we are deploying mostly Xeon E3v5/v6, but they are far too expensive for LET, really.
Recently we pruchased a previous gen Microcloud for Xeon E5v1/v2. The E5-2650 seems to have very similar benchmark results to the E3-1230v5 (multi-core) and the extra power consumption isn't so bad actually! So actually we were thinking about offering these on the more budget side.
Something like E5-2650, 16GB RAM, 3TB HDD with 3-10TB traffic for around US$150/month. Possibly less. Still way out of LET, price range but I think very competitive for HK.
We actually do VPS and 'Cloud' already. Not so much KVM, but Xen and Virtuozzo. But we don't have very good automation in this area and the volume needed to actually make real money is hard. We've done mostly dedis for 14 years. Cloud is ultimately where we want to be but that nut is proving more difficult to crack than I would hope.
As for routing via USA to AUS, prob to do with cost. I' actually not sure which route we take to Aus. I think it's direct... Will check.
This is actually something we can do. AUTOMATION is the problem here. Still not sure how to provision and deliver NAT VPS automatically. And being so cheap, manual provisioning just isn't viable.
You can see in the picture below just how different it is working with these high density Microclouds. Far less cabling, much tidier, and easier to work on for ongoing maintenance/upgrades etc.
Compare that to one of our older racks, running 2U servers. We can fit 17 servers in a rack in this configuration. Compare that to the 64 you can EASILY using the Microcloud.
You can see in the picture below just how much more cabling work is needed, and that is just for 17 servers. Iimagine if we used 1U chassis and had tried to squeeze in 34 servers!
I loathe cabling work now! Soul destroying stuff!
edit: Why has the orientation of the images changed? :S
Wow that cable job is a mess on the second picture.
Anyway I wanted to chime in about the market in HK. The market is big but just like many others have said it's really what you are after. I think if you are wanting to get into this market and soley with HK in mind you do need to be competitive and come up with a very SOLID business plan. Either offer more services and options, or break down the service and offer something unique that many provider are failing to do in this area. Otherwise.. why would anyone choose you over the next guy? Keep in mind, the next guys been in business for years. Reliable. Your a new company with no history and an unknown future...Think about it.............
Huh? We've been around in HK for 14 years. We're not new or just starting out.
I think you are impressive. Do you have any reseller policy?
Sorry, not sure what you mean by 'policy'. Do you mean like a re-seller programme with discounted and white labelled services? If that's what you mean, then yes we do. We have have a regular line up of 'off the shelf' generic type services, but if you want something custom, it can be arranged. Most of our re-sellers go for their own custom plan.
Our pre-configured servers tend to be from Mid to high end normally. We do sell the low end stuff but have traditionally not pushed those due to low margins, and limited space/power/IPs. But I think that is changing a bit and we can be more flexible with low end serves if that's what you're after!
iirc one of the NAT VPS providers round here described that they precreate all the iptables forwardings and then just auto-provision the NAT VPS with an internal IP. So 192.168.1.10 gets ports 1001 to 1020 + 1021 for SSH, .20 gets ports 2001 to 2020 + 2021 and so on...
IPv6 support for the NAT VPS would be great.
Direct peering to China Telecom/Mobile/Unicom as cheap as possible.
$150 /mbit
It'd be nice to have some kind of alternative to the LES HK NAT VPS. That thing was great, limited traffic, but it actually even had good routes to CM (CT/CU via JP or US afaik).
Some price hike in comparison to "regular" locations would be totally fine, even though that it'd be nice to have a reverse proxy like Haproxy for hosting website.
I know, this has been a consistent annoyance.