The low-end of the dedicated server market

March 22, 2011 6:17 PM

Alternatives for cheap bare-metal dedicated servers (not VPS): Sub $25 a month! What is happening in France?

I was reading a news blog about datacenter/hosting and came across this article which links to this video showing a walkthrough tour of the datacenter operated by online.net in France . Apparently online is a subsidiary of Iliad and free.fr, and claims to be the second largest colo/hosting company in France. They're offering a package for 15 euro per month dedicated servers, in which you get a tiny thing with a Via Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB 5400 rpm laptop HDD in a blade type server. This is a dedicated thing and not a VPS. You can see the things in their datacenter at about 1:40 in the video linked above.

My french is quite rusty but it appears that you can choose from one of the common distributions of 32-bit Linux to be loaded onto the server.

It seems like something in this price range would be ideal for testing purposes, and anything that needs a bit of geographic redundancy such as a secondary nameserver. What other companies would I want to be looking at for extremely cheap dedicated server packages? Who would be the top 3 competitors at this extremely cheap price?! Does competition even exist in the USA? I was expecting to see a price more like $95 a month.

posted by thewalrus to Technology (1 answer total)

Response by poster: OK I'm going to speculate on one thing. As a FTTH and ADSL2+/VDSL2 residential ISP, free.fr is a massive eyeball network. It probably has traffic ratios with its peers in excess of 80% downstream, only 20% upstream. That leaves a lot of unused upstream capacity on full duplex 10Gbps connections with peers. The solution was to set up a hosting operation to even out their traffic ratios.

RIPE says:

mylaptophostname:data myusername$ whois 88.190.253.92
#
# Query terms are ambiguous. The query is assumed to be:
# "n 88.190.253.92"
#
# Use "?" to get help.
#

#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=88.190.253.92?showDetails=true&showARIN=false
#

NetRange: 88.0.0.0 - 88.255.255.255
CIDR: 88.0.0.0/8
OriginAS:
NetName: 88-RIPE
NetHandle: NET-88-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Allocated to RIPE NCC
Comment: These addresses have been further assigned to users in
Comment: the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can be found in
Comment: the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
RegDate: 2004-04-01
Updated: 2009-05-18
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-88-0-0-0-1

OrgName: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgId: RIPE
Address: P.O. Box 10096
City: Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country: NL
RegDate:
Updated: 2011-03-15
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/RIPE

ReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43

OrgTechHandle: RNO29-ARIN
OrgTechName: RIPE NCC Operations
OrgTechPhone: [phone]
OrgTechEmail: [e-mail]
OrgTechRef: http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/RNO29-ARIN

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#

% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: this output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to '88.160.0.0 - 88.191.255.255'

inetnum: 88.160.0.0 - 88.191.255.255
netname: FR-PROXAD-20051003
descr: Free SAS
country: FR
org: ORG-PISP1-RIPE
admin-c: ACP23-RIPE
tech-c: TCP8-RIPE
status: ALLOCATED PA
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-lower: PROXAD-MNT
mnt-routes: PROXAD-MNT
mnt-routes: PROXAD-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

organisation: ORG-PISP1-RIPE
org-name: Free SAS
org-type: LIR
address: Free SAS
Rani ASSAF
8 rue de la Ville l'Eveque
75008 Paris
FRANCE
phone: [phone]
fax-no: [phone]
admin-c: ACP23-RIPE
admin-c: TCP8-RIPE
mnt-ref: PROXAD-MNT
mnt-ref: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

role: Administrative Contact for ProXad
address: Free SAS / ProXad
address: 8, rue de la Ville L'Eveque
address: 75008 Paris
phone: [phone]
fax-no: [phone]
remarks: trouble: Information: http://www.proxad.net/
remarks: trouble: Spam/Abuse requests: mailto:[e-mail]
admin-c: RA999-RIPE
tech-c: FG4214-RIPE
nic-hdl: ACP23-RIPE
mnt-by: PROXAD-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
abuse-mailbox: [e-mail]

role: Technical Contact for ProXad
address: Free SAS / ProXad
address: 8, rue de la Ville L'Eveque
address: 75008 Paris
phone: [phone]
fax-no: [phone]
remarks: trouble: Information: http://www.proxad.net/
remarks: trouble: Spam/Abuse requests: mailto:[e-mail]
admin-c: RA999-RIPE
tech-c: FG4214-RIPE
nic-hdl: TCP8-RIPE
mnt-by: PROXAD-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
abuse-mailbox: [e-mail]

% Information related to '88.160.0.0/11AS12322'

route: 88.160.0.0/11
descr: ProXad network / Free SAS
descr: Paris, France
origin: AS12322
mnt-by: PROXAD-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
posted by thewalrus at 6:47 PM on March 22, 2011