Cheapest cost per CPU dedicated servers for fishnet

[jpeskov]

The main fishnet servers according to the Lichess costs spreadsheet are $40/month at OVH and running the ancient dual Xeon E5530 @ 2.40GHz, 5122 Passmark score combined.

I was looking at the most cost-effective ($/CPU benchmark) dedicated servers in the same price range and came up with a few options based on the Ryzen 5 3600, 17821 Passmark score.

• Hetzner AX41 (34 EUR)
• Scaleway EM-A210R Elastic Metal (40 EUR)

Assuming 1:1 Stockfish:Passmark performance scaling, this would be over 300% the speed for roughly the same price monthly.

Anyone have any better leads?

On the lowest end, I can report that Scaleway Stardust 1-CPU instances (~1.80 EUR/mo) do successfully run fishnet at 550 knps, though the CPU is not dedicated, may trigger acceptable use policy.

[niklasf]

Thanks! We have replaced ushio and indeed see ~2-3x performance for a similar price (despite fewer threads, due to higher clock speed and support for avx2). Now considering what to do with cammy and adele which additionally hold some data that we would have to find a new home for.

[niklasf]

We will likely retire the other two servers in about 1 month.

[jpeskov]

Cool, glad it's working out!

The Hetzner AX41 does have a "storage" option for the same price that has 2x2TB HDDs in RAID 1 (2TB usable).

[jpeskov]

Also, the Hetzner AX101 @ 103 EUR has a Ryzen 9 5950X (32 threads), 128GB RAM, 3.84TB SSD.

On paper, looks like a spec upgrade for half the price of talos ($228, 24 threads, 64GB RAM, 1.92TB SSD), but not sure of requirements for monitoring server.

[niklasf]

For fishnet, computing power is basically all that matters. For the other servers:

• We're happy to pay a premium for reliability, and we've had a much better expierence with OVH than with Hetzner.
• Most other services require or strongly benefit from a low-latency private network (called vRack at OVH). So we cannot easily mix hosters.