VPS vs dedicated server

[w1ve]

I'm a home/office PIAF user; internet is 7.1/768 ADSL.

After looking at my electric bill the other day while reading this forum, I did a little calculation...

I live in New Hampshire, where electricity is costing me 15.81 cents per KWh.

My server is an IBM Xseries, drawing about 400w.

Hmmm.... 0.4 x 15.91 = 6.324 cents/hour, or $1.52 a day/ $45.60 a month just for electricity...

Then I looked at Synapse Global VPS offerings:

http://www.synapseglobal.com/voip_vps.html

For $30 a month/no setup, I get a dedicated virtual PIAF 1.3 server with 300GB of transfer a month -- unlimited extensions and a very fast connection to the net.

I setup my virtual PBX in about 30 minutes!

That's a no-brainer to me!
- Better network connection
- 24/7 service and support
- Don't tie up my DSL bandwidth
- Automatic backup

The server has only 256Mb of ram, burstable to 384K -- but last night I ran a conference with 21 people in it -- and the PIAF console was showing 4% CPU usage and only 70% memory requirement!! The quality was excellent.

Now I'll use the IBM server for another project. I'm very happy with synapseglobal, and my pocketbook is a little richer.

Gerry

 

[stuck]

Thank you for your post... Makes me think about my own carbon impact with my home Piaf machine.
Your IBM draws 400W 24/7? searching around on the web ppl seem to say that my Dell GX270 P4 only draws about 60W at idle.

Very good to hear that your VPS was able to handle 21 concurrent callers in a conference call. Were any of those on gsm or g729? I wonder if you were using compression whether the CPU can handle all those calls?

 

[psychoboy]

Gerry,

My biggest problem was the reliability of my internet connection. At the time I had given up on my paid for connection, and was using a 15"x15" 18dbi patch antenna to link to Duke's wireless network here in NC. It worked great for about 4-5 months. But, I think they caught on and didn't like that too much, at which time I started getting dropped after so many hours of usage.

I went the same route as you with those calculations and whatnot. Ended up with Lylix for $30/month. Totally happy! Even though I still have intermittant internet problems here at my home, I know that at the very least my calls will be answered by my box. Now using my old server as a media box, so I guess the power is still being used.

 

[etech3]

Thank you for your post... Makes me think about my own carbon impact with my home Piaf machine.
Your IBM draws 400W 24/7? searching around on the web ppl seem to say that my Dell GX270 P4 only draws about 60W at idle.

Very good to hear that your VPS was able to handle 21 concurrent callers in a conference call. Were any of those on gsm or g729? I wonder if you were using compression whether the CPU can handle all those calls?

Stuck
How much mem in your 270?

 

[w1ve]

My IBM is an XSeries 330 1RU -- Dual PIII/3 GB Ram, Dual 320GB Raid, Dual PS.
OverKill for a home PIAF.

I also have Dell GX260s that I've run for PIAF, and they are more like 60w. Typically running 512K Ram on the GX260s.

21 calls on my VPS were all uLaw calls; if any transcoding was involved, I'm sure things would have gone downhill quickly.
I was so impressed, I captured the status screen. Check out http://pbx.telosity.com/conf.png
That's 4% CPU and 63% of 256K Ram.

 

[jroper]

Hi

What I find interesting about that snapshot is the relatively low amount of bandwidth being reported as used, despite 21 calls in progress, and you are using an uncompressed codec.

It makes you wonder if compressing the call in most cases is actually worth it.

Joe

 

[Fortel]

Headed in the same direction...

I just added a second VPS setup with Lylix, and will likely add more.

It's liberating to pull the plugs on my home / office servers and not have to be concerned about power, etc. I won't miss the fan noise- (HP DL360 1 U servers.)

Lylix, in the brief time that I've been with them, has worked out well. Before making the move, I had pondered the idea of setting up a vserver. It looks intimidating...

Peter

 

[stuck]

Stuck
How much mem in your 270?

it has 512mb
BTW, as Joe mentioned the ethernet traffic on that screen shot seem awfully low for 21 ulaw channels... I wonder if that is accurate?

 

[bucasia]

Hi,

I also have Asterisk/FreePBX running on a server at SynapseGlobal.

I was interested by the figures/graphs too as I've always wondered how many calls my server would handle.

It looks like the "Networks" figures in FreePBX are kilobytes/sec rather than kilobits/sec and also I guess, with 21 folks in a conference, not all of them are speaking at once

So if you take the transmit figure (132KB/s) and times by 8 to get bits/sec that's just over 1mb/s. So, that's around 50kb/sec for each of the 21 outbound calls. So the figures could be correct.

Pretty impressive to handle that many calls - especially in a conference as I guess Asterisk is having to combine all of those streams.

Thanks for sharing your experience

Matt