Why is the Dedicated Servers option a bit too expensive?

[advancebenjamin]

I just want to first say that I'm not here to bash on the price, but to know why it's a bit more expensive than a few other providers.
About 7 months ago, we almost chose nfoservers, but decided to for other the pricing was a bit stiff.

Our budget is $160, and [a specific competitor] offers an E5-1650v3 option with a $20 off coupon (available at all times), making it pretty easy for us to choose them over others. Our option with it comes down to $147.00. To be fair we have our own copy of Windows Server 2012, so it did help reducing the price a bit.

We need a powerful machine that can handle our current magnitude (which is 8 game servers with a few other application servers). E3-1271 v3 should be able to handle it.
Due to a complete overhaul on our internal structure we had some downtimes for awhile. We are pretty happy with our provider, but we now need a second one for expansion.
A few of upper management team suggest we look into options here at nfoservers because their owner friends on the other communities run servers through here.

I looked into the pricing and was surprised that it's $190.
E3-1271v3 from E5-1650v3 is slightly a downgrade (2 less cores), just to pay more monthly going over our budget.
I was wondering why the options are slightly bit more pricey?

[rymax99]

Dedicated hosting isn't really NFO's forte, or main offering, though it's offered. NFO co-locates in all/most of the facilities meaning that they don't have physical access to the servers without paying a premium for remote hands, so they can't constantly change out parts to tailor orders to lower the price of machines.

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=3702

[Edge100x]

I redacted your post slightly because we don't want competitors being advertised here.

Our prices are low compared to other offerings on similarly high-end bandwidth (Internap), in the types of facilities that we are in, and using the same quality of hardware that we use. Here is a more complete list of reasons that you'll see for lower prices at some other companies:

- Slower, less effective service
- Cheaper, lower quality hardware (such as by using consumer components or not using ECC memory)
- Cheaper, lower-end bandwidth (such as by having only one or two upstreams without a route optimizer; Internap has many upstreams at each location and uses MIRO)
- Inexperience with determining pricing levels (many companies go out of business quickly)
- Pricing that looks lower but does not include basics that we do (such as by not including the OS license, by charging extra for the amount of RAM that we use, by charging extra for a 1 Gbps server port, or by charging extra for a solid amount of bandwidth transfer)
- Special, temporary sales
- Fewer datacenters and a much larger amounts of servers. Some very large companies are simply able to take advantage of volume to bring down costs a bit.
- Poor DDoS protection. Though we don't advertise it, we're well-known for having some of the best available, and we spend a lot of time and money on this.

The specific company that you gave puts its main website behind CloudFlare, which is usually a red flag that signals limited in-house DDoS protection. The company also requires special configuration of the machine to get to our minimum hardware specs, and the amount of bandwidth included is small, with extra bandwidth very pricey (getting to the 36 TB that we include for our E3-1270v3s is not even an option, but would be >$100 a month extra). Pricing out an E3-1270v3 there (without the extra bandwidth) actually gives a higher price than our E3-1270v3 here -- and that's not even considering the quality of our bandwidth, hardware, service, etc.

You should definitely factor in the cost of the OS when considering the prices at competitors versus ours. Since you don't have to buy a copy of the OS to use our servers, it saves you money up-front.

Have you also considered a VDS? Depending on your server configuration, it may be a lower-cost option that will work just as well.

(rymax99 posted while I was writing this. The fact that we have many locations, all of which are remote, does influence our choices for packages, because we can't readily swap in/out hardware -- making the hard drives and memory static, for instance -- but that doesn't really make those machines more expensive.)

[advancebenjamin]

Makes sense. The price might be around $15 more expensive than others when right options are met, but it's reasonable.
We are looking into moving in mid-November (at the latest) when we are ready for the migration.

Would the free setup sale be still up?

[Edge100x]

It is difficult to say for certain whether it will still be going on in November, as it depends on availability, but it is likely.

[rlm850]

Whether that sale is still active or not; it would be the best decision you have ever made.

You will not find support, performance or security anywhere else like you would here, even if it's comparable to your local mom & pop muffin shop slogan "top of the muffin, to you!".

But, for real. For the price, and everything you are getting it is very much so worth it.
Just do it now and go with the E3-1270v2 (32GB) in NYC. (If a monthly price isn't a problem for you)

If a monthly price is a problem for you, pay the $40 setup fee and go with the E3-1270 (16GB) in Chicago.
Yes, it is a $20 price difference for 16GB of RAM -- but Chicago has a stronger backbone, and is stronger at mitigation of DDoS attacks.

Lets be honest.. the DDoS mitigation and love is the only reason we buy from you guys. LOL.