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ECC ram vs non ECC ram / Hetzner auction for shared hosting
mustafamw3
Member, Patron Provider
Hi
Is it worth paying extra for ecc ram?
My second question
are hetzner auction servers reliable to use it for shared hosting ?
Best regards
Comments
I don't care if its ECC or Not as long as its RAM !
From what I've seen over the past few years Hetzner is strict on any abuse, so maybe shared hosting on them won't end out well if you have more than a few abuse reports for hosted websites of your clients.
Always go for ECC
Depends on how worried you are about bit flipping, if you've designed for/around it, and if the minor performance penalty is acceptable.
I think Hetzner is fine for shared hosting. Lots of bandwidth available, and a decent network in general (even to the States). The important thing is keeping tabs on the users, and controlling things like process limits.
German providers in particular like to scan your servers and tell you about... 'issues'. Sometimes I disagree with what they find. In a shared environment this might get noisy.
The auction gear tends to be a bit older, and slower as a result. I've noticed a lot of performance drop due to the recent vulnerabilities that mainly hit Intel, especially on the older equipment. Shared hosting can get dicey pretty fast, so it's something to be mindful of.
Thanks , I won't buy very older hardware from hetzner , I want to buy
e3 v5
64 ddr4 ecc ram
2x 512 nvme
Go ECC or go home
Awesome, I think you'll find it works quite well. I don't know what your space requirements are, but I'd suggest against striping data across the drives. With shared hosting that's a lot of 'eggs' in one basket, so to speak. As unlikely as NVMe drive failure may be, I wouldn't want everything to be lost.
I'd do RAID-1 (or a ZFS mirror) with that setup, personally.
I agree , raid 1 software
I don't care if its ECC or Not as long as its PREM !
As soon as you do software RAID via ZFS, always choose ECC RAM. And, if you don‘t have Hardware RAID available, I‘d always go with ZFS.
Without software RAID, the usage of Non-ECC RAM might cause very rare random crashes or other unexpected behavior. But, since it‘s rather rare and most probably just some unimportant bit that flipped, it might be acceptable to you. Software errors, for example, might be much more likely then a bit flip when all you run is standard Apache2/Nginx with PHP.
One more thing to consider when you run software provided by the customer would be „rowhammer“ attacks. A security flaw where the customer intentionally causes bit flips to escalate their privileges. ECC RAM makes those attacks much harder, whereas rowhammer attacks might succeed within an hour of repeated attempts on Non-ECC RAM. Thought, you could notice these kind of attacks due to their permanent high CPU usage and newer Linux kernels are also hardened against these attacks by smarter memory allocation layouts.
However, with software RAID: ZFS makes heavy use of RAM and an unintentional bit flip in the RAM used by ZFS might render your RAID unusable. That‘s something you might want to avoid at all cost.
Long story short: if you don‘t have hardware RAID, use ZFS, but go with ECC RAM. If you can effort hardware RAID, you most probably already have ECC RAM too anyhow. So, just always use ECC on servers.
Without ECC you're flying blind. How are you going to know if/when your memory goes bad? For a PC, when you start seeing applications crashing, you shut it down and run memtest86 for a few hours. How will your clients feel about that? With ECC you just check the logs and say: "Nope, no memory errors, must just be buggy software."