Ask YC: Recommendations on a good server? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Recommendations on a good server?

6 pointsiamdave16 comments

I'm in the purchasing phase of my startup where I'm looking for equipment. Most people are saying to just rent space, but I very much like the flexibility and freedom of operating my own server. Financially, I can support the move by leaps and bounds because of my connections with certain people at a local ISP. Plus, I think it'd be great to have an extra server to test products on, roll out some sort of virtualization options and let the other hackers conduct experiments on before we go live.

My question is: who do you recommend for purchasing a good server machine?

View on HN

If you are colocating the box, I recommend either HP servers with iLO or Sun machines like the v20z or x2100 etc. that have a nice Lights Out Management (LOM) feature.

With either the HP or Sun systems you can even do virtual media, where you boot the remote system off an ISO image or a CD/DVD disk stored on your laptop or desktop system,

It will save you a huge amount of time and effort the first time you are miles away from the machine and there is some kind of issue that you need to diagnose.

I'll concur on Sun. Their hardware has come down a lot, and it is nice.

I dunno HP gear too well. I've dealt with a lot of Dell systems, and they aren't bad at all. Get the remote console card, and you'll be pretty well set for emergency problem solving.

get supermicro hardware. siliconmechanics.com is a pretty good provider of pre-assembled supermicro hardware. We use supermicro servers for all of our clusters at engineyard.com

I would second that recommendation.

thirding, I've got over 200 supermicro servers and they're rock solid

I'll add to the supermicro recommendation - I bought from ASA Computers and was happy with the service.

I would go for Sun servers. Sign up for the Sun Startup Essential program and get a certain percent off (40%) some hardware.

But really. Use Amazon AWS. Buying hardware is very 1999

The nice thing about AWS is it takes away many of the hassles of scaling up quickly and headaches of hardware failure, but it is actually cheaper to own and run your own server for a early stage startup as hardware costs are generally covered in the first year (there are many comparisons, Google it).

Plus if you have a good relationship with an ISP (free/low-cost hosting and bandwidth), I would go with that.

If you want to keep costs cheap, I would recommend not buying a new one and instead looking around for a bankruptcy auction. I managed to get 3 pretty decent servers for $400/ea. from a startup that was going out of business.

Other than that, I recommend HP. Dell is cheaper, but you get what you pay for, especially if you are managing it remotely.

I'd recommend you not buy your hardware, and instead let someone else be your hardware guy--the competition is so fierce in the hosting industry, and they buy in such huge quantities, that you can't come out cheaper (even if nothing ever goes wrong with your system). But, if you've got some bandwidth fairy looking out for you, and colo is pretty much free, then I guess you can't resist.

But nobody else should be going into the hardware business, if you're building a software company. Seriously.

seriously recommend using serverbeach or softlayer - userscripts.org gets 4M pageviews/mo (including RSS and bots I get 50K dynamic req/hour) on a $200 box from serverbeach.

softlayer is like serverbeach but a little more expensive. they are more automated though - so if you expect to add more hardware, it only a few hours for new boxes to come online.

that said, they are both monthly and have setup fees (not horribly expensive but not like AWS where you can get a server for a few hours)

We've got boxes at both, and are happy. We also have boxes at theplanet.com. Also happy there.

SoftLayer occasionally has stupidly good deals, if you watch out for them. Usually on bigger hardware, though, so if you're looking for sub-$100 it's not the place. But on really big boxes, they have some incredible deals. We rented a quad core, 4GB RAM box, with 2x250GB drives for under $200/month just a couple of months ago.

I've gone with dell servers, which are sort of fine (cheap at least), but I guess HP with ILO is way better. The Dell lights out management is overpriced and crappier. One way or another is's very nice if you later can add exactly similar machines to take any Linux hardware surprises put of the way (if that's what you're running).

If you can run your server in Europe, I would recommend hetzner.de. At least twice as cheap as the amazon web service.

You may be better able to apply that money - don't buy the server just for kicks.

Seriously, call serverbeach or get an AWS account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com