What data centers do to offer cheap dedicated server?

What can and should be done

Power usage. There is a lot of information about the reduction in operating costs of a data center is reduced precisely to improving energy efficiency. To measure it, even a special PUE coefficient has been introduced, which is defined as the ratio of the total energy consumption of the data center to the consumption exclusively by servers and network equipment. And besides them, the energy goes to the lighting, cooling, is lost due to various transformations.

The second after the host a dedicated server itself the cooling system use lots of power . Proper cooling can save up to 20% on electricity bills. One of the ways to save could be using “free cooling”: cold air, cold water, etc.

Proper location. Competent and careful selection of a location for the construction of a data center can provide savings on several parameters at once.

1. The presence or proximity of the necessary infrastructure (channels, premises, specialists) will reduce initial and operational costs.

2. The cost of electricity may vary from country to country or even within a country.

3. Some places have an abundance of renewable energy sources or climate features that allow the use of free cooling for most or all of the year.

What is not worth saving

Upstreams. In one article by the American authorship, it was mentioned that one 10 Gb / s connection is enough to connect more than 1000 pieces of equipment to the network. If some people's delok listens to this opinion, we have a chance to get a situation in which the network will work extremely slowly.

A set of services. This may be, for example, a mixture of a set of useful features with one useless: enough memory and screws, but a single-core Pentium processor. Or a normal processor and memory, but only one hard drive. And the channel is 1 Mbit / s. Of course, you can deliver another screw, raise the RAID, and expand the channel to 100 Mbit / s, but in the end nothing is left of the cheapness.

Support. This is what distinguishes good service from bad. With cheap dedicated server solution you can get gray hair while you wait for a response to the ticket, since The answer can wait a few days. At the same time, the probability of getting an answer is dry and useless. If your iron fails, you still have to prove it. One can not even hope for advice on problems not related to iron. And if your server was unavailable for 5 hours, in two days you will be proud to say that at the moment there are no problems, and they will even offer to check something.