Budget bare metal built almost entirely from refurbished previous-generation hardware, sold on aggressive monthly pricing and headline core counts. Cindervale advertises unmetered gigabit uplinks and free DDoS filtering on all plans, with setup fees waived on annual terms. Support is email-based with no published response targets.
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Setup was quick, took about two hours from payment to login which was better than I expected for a manual provider. Box does what it does. My advice is treat it as a machine you can lose at any moment - keep backups elsewhere and dont build anything on top of their support existing.
Look, I pay less per month for this box than for lunch. It is old hardware, the panel is ugly, and support takes days. But it has been up for about seven months running my media library and some seedboxes, and it does that fine. I would never put a client on it. As a personal toy for the money it is hard to be too angry.
RAID1 lost a disk on a Tuesday. I opened a ticket the same hour with the SMART output attached. First reply came on Friday asking me to confirm the server ID, which was in the subject line. The drive was finally swapped the following Thursday. For nine days I was running a production database on a degraded array and getting one-sentence replies. The price is low but this is not a saving, it is a liability.
Whole rack went dark on a Saturday morning. No status page, no email, no acknowledgement on their social account. I found out from a customer. Service came back after about six hours and the eventual explanation was "upstream maintenance", scheduled maintenance that they had apparently forgotten to tell anyone about. Left the following month.
Ran iperf to three different endpoints across a week. Between roughly 19:00 and midnight local I could not sustain more than about 180Mbit. Off-peak it hits close to line rate, so the port is fine, the transit clearly is not. When I raised it they told me the plan is unmetered, not guaranteed bandwidth, which is technically true and completely useless. Also there is no IPMI at all on the cheaper tiers, you email them to press the reset button.
Setup was quick, took about two hours from payment to login which was better than I expected for a manual provider. Box does what it does. My advice is treat it as a machine you can lose at any moment - keep backups elsewhere and dont build anything on top of their support existing.
Look, I pay less per month for this box than for lunch. It is old hardware, the panel is ugly, and support takes days. But it has been up for about seven months running my media library and some seedboxes, and it does that fine. I would never put a client on it. As a personal toy for the money it is hard to be too angry.
RAID1 lost a disk on a Tuesday. I opened a ticket the same hour with the SMART output attached. First reply came on Friday asking me to confirm the server ID, which was in the subject line. The drive was finally swapped the following Thursday. For nine days I was running a production database on a degraded array and getting one-sentence replies. The price is low but this is not a saving, it is a liability.
Whole rack went dark on a Saturday morning. No status page, no email, no acknowledgement on their social account. I found out from a customer. Service came back after about six hours and the eventual explanation was "upstream maintenance", scheduled maintenance that they had apparently forgotten to tell anyone about. Left the following month.
Ran iperf to three different endpoints across a week. Between roughly 19:00 and midnight local I could not sustain more than about 180Mbit. Off-peak it hits close to line rate, so the port is fine, the transit clearly is not. When I raised it they told me the plan is unmetered, not guaranteed bandwidth, which is technically true and completely useless. Also there is no IPMI at all on the cheaper tiers, you email them to press the reset button.
Ordered what was listed as a 16-core Xeon build. What arrived was a two-generation-older part with the same core count and considerably worse per-core performance. Their reply was that the listing says "or equivalent". It is not equivalent, that is the entire point of buying dedicated hardware. Got a partial credit after arguing for a week, cancelled at the end of the term.