They get slightly cheaper for large customers like us, plus you can get hardware upgrades like the 2x CPUs by paying for the difference upfront. So yes, it's $400 monthly + $2000 once, but those $2k don't really make much of a difference over the years that we've been running the system ^^

Collocation can be a great deal at scale, but I don’t see a way to cheaply rent a handful of servers for substantially less than Amazon would charge. VPS providers maybe, but even the quintessential cheap American VPS (DigitalOcean) has a bunch of cloud features these days.

The last big dedicated provide I know of was Softlayer, which is now $2100/mo for a 242GB and 56 core dedicated box under IBM Cloud. Amazon’s m5 is around the same capacity at $3700/mo.

And when we tried to rent a Verizon 1gbit dedicated line to our Boston office, they quoted us $15k monthly.

In Germany, we paid first €199 then €499 for a dedicated 1gbit fiber line from 1&1.

An Amazon m5.12xlarge with a 1-year reservation is $1,075/mo, about the same as OVHCloud's top-end HG3 in the US at $975. Both are 28 cores / 56 vCPUs and 192GB RAM.

Wholesale lists with a transfer limit on their price page but on the server config page you can upgrade to an unmetered Gbit port. And the low end boxes have an unmetered 100mbit port already. My experience has been that they really don't mind you heavily using that bandwidth either.. did have a point a few years ago where they were bandwidth limited until more fiber could be turned up in their datacenters, but you're going to occasionally have that sort of thing with any single datacenter provider.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with them for their specific niche of CONUS cheap dedicated servers.

SoYouStart wins for use cases where being located in France or Canada is acceptable, largely because they have basic DDoS protection on their bandwidth and I host some game related servers - anything gaming related and you will get DDoS attacks semi-regularly. And game servers can't run behind CloudFlare which is my other go to for basic DDoS protection.

> We recently discussed new logging tools at work. It was either a redundant Amazon EC2 cluster with ElasticSearch for $50K monthly, or two large bare metal servers with rsyslog and grep for $400 monthly. The log ingestion and search performance was roughly the same...

If grep has the same search performance as elasticsearch, you should not be using elasticsearch and any comparison is bullshit.

But yeah, even ripgrep should get out-performed by any db/search daemon with a decent index.