5.15 confirmed. Thanks
Auction servers in 2026 — still the best $/perf or a trap?
Retired from the ISP game but we used to buy decommed Dell R720s by the pallet. Same era as these E5 v3/v4s.
Thing nobody mentions: IPMI on auction gear is often ancient. Contabo ships with iDRAC 7, no HTML5 console. Java web start or bust. OVHcloud at least has a modern iKVM on the SYS line.
For remote management this matters more than disk speed. I spent too many nights driving to a datacenter because someones old iDRAC keeled over.
steveipw said:
Hetzner auction has E5-2680v4 now for 27 eur with 256GB
Hetzner FI-02 is where my E3-1230v5 lives. Their Helsinki DC has good peering but the auction stock turns over fast. That 2680v4 deal was gone in four days last I checked.
Also: Hetzner bills in EUR but wires from US banks cost me 35 USD each time. Contabo takes PayPal, no wire fee. Small thing but on a 31 eur/mo box thats an extra month of cost per payment. I use https://contabo.com/en/vps/ for that.
Pallet note: Hetzner uses EU-standard 1200x800mm. Doesnt fit US pallet jacks without adapters. Ask me how I know.
visit twice: install and decom
From Paris: OVHcloud Gravelines is 8ms away. Contabo is 22ms to Nuremberg or 18ms to their new Paris location. Wait, Contabo has Paris now?
Checked their site: yes, VDS and cloud, but auction servers still only DE and US. So for auction hardware its Nuremberg or nothing for me.
OVHclouds French DCs are their own network though. Routing to Germany is worse than routing to London from here. Weird but true.
Bangkok perspective: we have four servers, all cheap. Two Contabo SG, one Hetzner SG, one Vultr SG.
Contabo Singapore auction: E5-2650v3, 64GB, 480GB SSD. 22 SGD/mo. Same specs as DE but 30% more expensive and the disk is slower. 340 MB/s read.
Hetzner Singapore: no auction servers. Cloud only. So Contabo wins by default for bare metal in region.
Network out of SG to my customers in Thailand: Contabo 12ms, Vultr 9ms. Vultr costs 2.5x. I keep Contabo for non-latency-critical workloads.
Lou1
Member
Toronto here. Vultr Toronto has bare metal now: Ryzen 9 5950X, 128GB, 2x1.92TB NVMe for 120 USD/mo. Not auction pricing but no setup fee and you can cancel monthly.
Compared to OVHcloud Beauharnois: E5-2680v4, 64GB, 2x480GB SSD for 45 EUR/mo. Slower disk, older CPU, but half the price.
I run a small SaaS. Chose Vultr for the NVMe database performance. If I was storing logs Id go OVHcloud and eat the latency.
Auction servers arent available in Canada from anyone I can find. So this thread is academic for me.
Anyone used RackNerd dedicated recently? Their website says out of stock on everything above 4TB.
steveipw
Member
RahulFunky said:
Anyone used RackNerd dedicated recently?
My PL-01 box is from 2023. E5-2683v4, 256GB, 8x2TB SAS. 45 USD/mo. Took three weeks to provision because they had to find the chassis.
Tried to order a second one in January. Still waiting. Their dedicated is basically unobtainium now. VPS stock is fine but the auction-style dedicated listings are ghost inventory.
For actual available auction stock: Hetzner and Contabo. OVHcloud SYS line if you can navigate their terrible website. Thats the list.
zfs send | zfs receive. repeat.
LichunLars
Member
steveipw said:
OVHcloud SYS line if you can navigate their terrible website
So bad. The Kimsufi redirect maze, the SYS vs SoYouStart branding confusion, the checkout that rejects valid VAT numbers. Ive abandoned carts three times.
And yet: their network is good, the hardware shows up working, and the price is real. OVHcloud is the Ryanair of hosting.
1ms or I don't want it
Tallinn. No local auction market to speak of. We use Hetzner FI-02 for most things, ping is 15ms.
One data point: Hetzners Finnish DC has had zero downtime I could detect in two years. Contabo DE-01 had one routing flap that lasted 20 minutes, no explanation. OVHcloud NL-02 had a scheduled maintenance window that wasnt announced until 12 hours before.
For production stuff the extra 5 eur for Hetzner is worth the reliability. Auction or not.