VDS vs Whole machine

[TacTicToe]

My current setup.

VDS
Eight core: Even more power.
Eight full, dedicated HT CPU cores (Nehalem or better)
10240 MB of RAM
800 GB of RAID-protected storage
8000 GB of InterNAP bandwidth transfer
2 IPs
Monthly cost - $161.97

I average currently about 100-110 players on the servers across all games at any given time.


Whole machines

Low end:

E3-1270: Screaming-fast Sandy Bridge-based machine
Intel Xeon E3-1270 processor (four physical 3.4ghz cores on QPI + hyperthreading + turbo->3.8ghz)
16 GB DDR3-1333 ECC memory
1000 GB, 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
5000 GB of InterNAP bandwidth
Able to host around 250-300 connected players at once
Costs $199 monthly

What I am thinking of moving to:

E3-1270 w/32 GB + SSD: A beefy machine perfect for Minecraft
Intel Xeon E3-1270 processor (four physical 3.4ghz cores on QPI + hyperthreading + turbo->3.8ghz)
32 GB DDR3-1333 ECC memory
160 GB Intel SSD
5000 GB of InterNAP bandwidth
Best for particularly memory-intensive tasks
Costs $259 monthly


Now here is my dilemma.

Is there any real advantage to making the switch? I would be paying more then $100 a month more for half the CPU's but more memory and SSD. Not to mention the initial setup costs. Is the machine Im thinking of moving to that much better, with half the cores? Why should I make the move?

I'm figuring the cost difference as

New machine - $259.99, minus current - 167.91, minus cost of IPs and memory is a difference of $114.06. So for the additional $114.06 a month, is it really worth it to make the switch?

[kraze]

Hi,

You are not actually getting half the cores. Our VDSes are using HT cores. There are two HT cores per physical CPU core. If anything the E3-1270 will provide a good performance boost. I would recommend you stay at the low-end machine(even though it really isn't low-end). Unless you are running MC or another type of configuration that is memory/disk intensive our normal E3-1270 configuration is perfect.

Switching to a full machine would take away the overhead you are seeing from being on a VDS now, even though it is only a slight performance decrease some games handle it in different ways. On top of this having a machine dedicated to you and only you can provide increased performance in other ways.

The biggest thing I can see now is do you need the upgrade? How are your servers running now? Are they maxing out or stressing any current limits on your VDS?

[Edge100x]

I agree with kraze that the base E3-1270 w/16 GB option would likely be an excellent choice. It doesn't sound like you need the extra RAM or SSD, based on your current specs. The base model is similar to what you have now, but faster; the extra speed comes from not having to share any resources with others and not having to worry about virtualization overhead.

If you're already doing well on your VDS, you could also stick with that, and expand to a second VDS if you need to run more servers.

[TacTicToe]

Monitoring my server via FireDaemon, I am using an average of 25-30% CPU and 5.5-6.5 GIGS of RAM. RAM usage went up a bit more when I installed a NS2 server to test. NS2 used about 980 megs of RAM which is ridiculous. I have seen the CPU peak around 38% usage when servers fill up. I have 5 Chivalry server that get a lot of use. They are running on the Unreal engine which is a bit of a resource hog.

The only thing I have that probably uses a lot of HD read/write are the several Big Brother Bot's that I have running. They do not use a lot of memory, but they constantly read the HD for commands and things taking place in the game server logs. That was the only reason I was considering the SSD.

I was trying to think long term, as once the machine is setup, it is impossible to upgrade without incurring a bunch of extra costs, or getting a whole new machine.

I have decided definitively, that when I win the lottery I will have that 96GIG beast I drool over online.

[kraze]

In your case, sticking with a VDS may be your best bet. A VDS will allow you more customization's such as being able to add/remove SSD if the need every arises, being able to upgrade downgrade memory..etc.

That type of freedom is priceless especially if you aren't running in to any performance issues.

Eventually you may want to consider putting B3/MySQL on an SSD. I recently had an issue with a customer who was having serious problems with his servers and after a very long troubleshooting session it was determined that his B3 constantly writing/reading from the HDD was causing it.

The only other thing that I can see effecting you would be fellow customers on your machine. As I mentioned above if another customer was hit with a large attack you would feel the effects, or if another customer is also doing a lot of reading/writing to the HDD. A dedicated machine would remove those from the equation but in the process it is also taking a lot of freedom.

I would say if you and your community are in a place to pay for the machine then definitely do it, but if you can't commit to several months for sure then don't do it, because if you need to switch back to a VDS it could cause a lot of problems and downtime for your servers.