Bare-metal providers to talk to

kaustavdm commented 7 years ago

Carrying on from the problem mentioned in #23, here is a list of bare-metal infra providers we'd want to reach out to, listed almost in order of preference. Ideally, we should deploy workloads on all of these infrastructures and do an actual testing, but would want to get some conversations going to get cost estimates, and if possible some advanced credits.

Same as #23, we should explain our use case and resource requirements to each of the infra providers so that we can get better recommendations from them along with predictable performance and billing, all without violating terms of services.

We are looking for servers:

which are leased, with the companies owning the hardware
with 1Gbps network ports, preferably unmetered or very low overage price for network traffic
with quad core i7 or xeon series CPUs
with > 16GB RAM
with as low network transfer fees as possible
in regions:
- APAC: Singapore, Hong Kong
- EMEA: Northern EU (Amsterdam/Frankfurt/Paris), UK (London)
- US/Canada: US East, US West
on monthly contract terms with SLAs

Internap

The leading folks. TokBox and Wowza run parts of their infra on INAP. Their peering is excellent and server qualities are really good. But bandwidth costs can tend to be on the higher side. Worth a negotiation. Live chat guy on their website told me they charge overage traffic at "$0.1/GB" for both egress and ingress traffic. That sounds steep and I'm sure the price will drop if you talk to sales.

OVH

They are big in terms of network peering capacity. Need to get cost of overage. I think they bill by 95th percentile, but not sure if they meter your traffic. They even have a startup program. Better, transparent pricing. Data centres in US, EU and SG. Mixed reviews about support, primarily because they are self-served (even the startup program).

Hetzner

Germany only data centres, I think. Nice prices. Well known in media world for handling heavy traffic. Very low network traffic prices. Mixed reviews.

10GBPS

Rock-bottom prices. Aggressive marketing. Often means crappy product. But worth a shot trying to reach out to them. Given their unmetered connections, need to clarify exactly how much traffic per month they would allow per server.

IBM bare-metal (previously Softlayer)

Do they even exist? Quick provision and runs on an established infra. But, bandwidth cost is among the most expensive of all bare-metal providers. Still, worth a shot.

kaustavdm commented 7 years ago

Add 2 more to the list:

FDC

Cheaper servers. Unmetered bandwidth. Reasonable quality.

Scaleway

Dirt cheap. Unmetered networking. Something we can possibly finance out of our own pockets :-P Reach out to them for quota increase and any startup credits they may have. Meanwhile, I'll do a test run.

dolftax commented 7 years ago

Packet - https://www.packet.net/

https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/network/bandwidth/
$.05/GB (we only charge for egress, of course)
Simple economics matters with bandwidth at scale. So if you're pushing a lot of bits, we can help each other.

kaustavdm commented 7 years ago

On packet.net:

Compared to the perf you get on cloud services, it's actual premium grade bandwidth (no congestion, high peering etc).

Going by the basic rates of Packet:

single stream egress at 6000Kbps would cost $0.129 per hour (2.58 GB at $0.05/GB)
3 streams egress at 6000kbps for 50 hours = $19.35 in bandwidth cost

Considering this is premium bandwidth, this is really cheap, because this would mean no stuttering, no glitches + bare metal routers, hence A+ grade experience.

applait / meta