If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ:
The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)
That's correct, we offer largely older gear. We had a stack of E3-1225v3's at $39 recently though. We primarily offer services in Atlanta right now, but we're expanding to Los Angeles & NYC this month.
We have a few customers who purchase servers by the chassis (16 blades) to use for crawlers and other applications where they can scale horizontally. When you compare the E5420's at $20/month to even a lot of cloud hosts, you're getting quite a bit of dedicated resources vs. smaller allocations on newer shared gear.
I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable. Yes, the cores are relatively slow, but you get plenty of them.
> OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware
I see one dual socket Westmere Xeon that's actually slower than the two you're complaining about (1/3rd as much cache, 5-20% slower clock), and a bunch of similarly ancient consumer-level junk.
I even spy an i7 920 in there. A 2008 first-gen Nehalem. That's a 130W CPU with terrible power management, how on Earth is that economical for them to deploy?!
> I'm running a pair of L5639's in my main server. Perfectly usable.
Disclaimer: I run Delimiter
That's absolutely what we're going for with our offerings. Gear that's off lease and long paid for, which allows us to slap some new drives in it and rack it at a low monthly price. But we only use proper server gear - so that means HP blade servers, ECC memory, dedicated ILO/KVM with each box, etc.
To be fair though: I'm a big fan of Kimsufi stuff, along with OVH's SYS lineup. Great for backups/testing/etc. The guys at OVH are great.
Kimsufi is good (used to be with them), but there are a few drawbacks:
1. Only one IP allowed. No way to request more.
2. No KVM access-- Delimiter has HP iLO
You can choose how many months you pay for (1-12), and sometime before that runs out they email you. Either you pay for some more months or the server goes away.
The servers are based on: http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E54... and http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon-Processor-L56...
These are super ancient.
If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ:
https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/
The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)