The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".
Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)
I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).
Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?
I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.
I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.
I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.
I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.
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The 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".
Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)
I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).
Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?
Pretty niche, but they would likely be good for running CI for ARM. Or just for offloading tests to, it would be much better than emulation.
People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU usage, i.e. static pages and similar.
Surely such cases are better served by offloading to a CDN. As much as I hate centralizing to one company, CloudFlare nails this pretty damn well.
Wouldn't those users be better served by a $5 VPS? They're cheaper per-month, have no setup fee, and probably even get provisioned quicker.
I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.
I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.
I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.
[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/odroid-xu-arrives/
Would it beat a pair of $5 VMs from digital ocean though?
I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.