Server hosting advice (SYS/OVH)

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#1

Hi, Iā€™ve been looking at these servers: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/offers/1801armada01.xml

I was wondering if the ARM Cortex A9 ARMv7 would be able to run NextCloud smoothly for about 10-15 users.

I was also wondering about the impacts of running SATA instead of SSD. How much will this slow down the application.

Thanks, Tom.

#2

No, that will be way to slow, and 2GB RAM is also not great. 250MBit is also not exactly fast for file transfer. 2 TB hard-drive is of course nice but you really need that much?
Also SATA vs. SSD: If you have sufficient RAM and can run all the caching & file-locking (Redis etc.) than a normal harddrive might be ok, but still not great. But without that I would definitely recommend a much faster SSD.

#3

@Krischan

Thanks for the reply. Could you suggest a host (Ideally within Europe) that provides a VPS or other similar servers to host Nextcloud well while working on a budget of around Ā£10/month?

In terms of storage space, 50GB is all I really need at the moment, which would easily be achievable through an SSD at this price I guess.

I did take a look at the OVH range but their bandwidth for VPS servers is only 100mbp/s and single core servers.

#4

I have very good experiences with
netcup.de

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#5

Thanks for the comment. Which plan/package do you use with that host?

Thanks, Tom.

#6

I have an older version of a root server like https://www.netcup.de/vserver/uebersicht_vserver_angebote.php . Depending on your storage requirements RS 1000 SAS G8 or RS 1000 G8 will be more than enough.

#7

netup.de is good advise, yes.

#8

Yeah, happy netcup.de user here as well. Note that for some reason the offers on Netcup.eu are always a bit more expensive as they donā€™t seem to offer the rebates for 12 month payment as on netcup.de.

Also note the additional storage that you can add to the Root servers:
https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/storagespace.php
Anyone has an advise how to link these best to Nextcloud? External storage app?

Oh and I should note: the shared-host offers (Web2000/4000 with SSD) are also able to run Nextcloud, but a bit slow.

#9

Hi @Krischan, so how do you think Netcupā€™s RS 1000 SSD G7SEa3 package would host NextCloud?

Would it make much of a difference if I used the 320gb SAS compared to the 40gb SSD?

What storage/plan are you using and how well does it run?

I will be hosting this for about 10-15 users.

Thanks, Tom.

#10

I have the RS 1000 (but a slightly older version with only 6 GB ram) and it runs great including some other heavy services like the OnlyOffice Document server (I run it via the Netcup provided Ubuntu18.04 Docker image with Traefik installed and the Nextcloud-Apache / Redis / Postgres Docker images). I have the SSD version, canā€™t really comment on the SAS and would be also interested how the storage plan would work out with Nextcloud.

Edit: I am pretty sure it would work with 10-15 users, but my current setup has been only tested up to 5 user or so. Was super fast for those 5 though.

#11

Thanks for the feedback, currently deciding if I should attempt the SAS or just stick with SSD.

Thanks for your help, Tom.

#12

How do you think the usage pattern will be?
I am guessing that if your users are syncing a lot of small files all the time, then a SSD will perform better. If not you are probably fine with the SAS offer (if you set up all the caching and file-locking stuff in Nextcloud). But I am really just guessing here.

#13

Users will be uploading files anywhere from 2-50 mb at a time. Itā€™s not going to be a thing where they upload loads of files every minute, every hour or so they will most likely submit their work/files.

Not that much activity to be honest, itā€™s for a group project to keep all files organised in a central location.

It would be nice to see some sort of graph/visual presentation of the difference but I guess that is difficult as every SAS and SSD drive will have varying speeds.

#14

when you search the netcup forum discussions, youā€™ll see some positive remarks on the SAS storage. For your scenario this should be the best fit. You should tune your db caches and php cache as documented in the nextcloud installation instructions and youā€™ll be sure the bottleneck will be your users home / internet connection rather than anything else. Youā€™ll see you have plenty of RAM for cache purposes.

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#15

be carefull about all those ovh, 1&1 and others offerts ā€¦ the MB cost !!!

My first deployement was to have an OVH virtual server for hosting the web server and channeling the users data to an amazon s3 secure space.
Due to some glitch with nc13, i had to rely on ovh for providing a safe space.
Unfortunatly, the object storage is cheap ( 0,01 ā‚¬ HT/mois/Go), but very very slowā€¦
The STOR-XX server are between 110-450 a month !!

I build a debian server with specific hardware ( icy-box, pci cards ā€¦ ) and bought some hdd to have a 48GO Raid 60 server. The budget and the hosting of this server has been flattened in 14 months ā€¦

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#16

Hi @Krischan,

Can you tell me roughly what bandwidth speeds you usually get with NetCup?

Thanks, Tom.

#17

Sorry, canā€™t give you a benchmark figure. But I think that would be meaningless anyways as Nextcloud isnā€™t exactly known for high speed individual file access/download. The real question is how a system behaves in a multi-user simultaneous access scenario, and so far I have heard no / have no complaints about slow access on my system.

#18

Iā€™ve been running Nextcloud for months on a SYS ARM storage server.

ARM-2T Server - Cortex A9 - 2GB - 1x2To

It suits me fine, as a long-term storage server. All that interests me though, are encryption and consistent, predictable storage. I stagger the access, from VPS, so only one client at a time and run a custom kernel that makes better use of the available network speed.
Upload performance, using rsync mirror, through a davfs2 mount:

2,724,863.79 bytes/sec total size is 19,061,399,207 27m41s

(Just for your benefitā€¦) Downloading an 1.8GB ISO, via Nextcloud web interface, to my laptop at home:

3.4MB/s

Itā€™s a different use case than yours, OP, but may be of interest. Generally, itā€™s a bit sluggish but itā€™s not horrendous, by any means.

#19

Honestly, I would go the other way round. SATA storage is much cheaper, with enough RAM the database and caching will make the whole system pretty fast. Not sure if there are so many cases, where you would see the difference with an SSD.

Are you joking? If these 20 users are not constantly syncing very large files with each other, 100 Mbit/s should be largely enough.

Iā€™d check this:

  • make sure that you run your own system, and that the contract time is very limited, so you can easily change the operator
  • RAM is probably the most critical resource. The less you have, the better you must manage it. 2 GB is probably a bit short, better is 4 GB. 8 GB give you a bit more operating range. But it also depends what you use Nextcloud for and which features you intend to use

And if it gets too cheap be careful about the conditions, for cloud storage if they limit the number of requests, or if it is paid. With vservers you can start small and easily add resources when needed, however these resources are shared.

If you donā€™t need a lot of storage, you can get some nice ARM boards here:

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