I was browsing around today and stumbled upon Gigenet’s “Bargain Basement” section. I was pretty impressed with what I saw- 2.2GHz Athlons with 2GB of RAM starting around 99$ per month, with around 2000 GB of bandwidth. I’m not sure how managed the servers are- Gigenet claims something called “Pinnacle Support”, and they don’t make distinctions as to which server packages it applies to. It would probably be a safe bet to assume said support extends to the Bargain Basement, but I would check before purchasing anything.
Barring that, however, 99$ a month is a great option for breaking into the dedicated server arena. It’s vastly more powerful than a virtual private server and only 30$ more a month (Compare it to LiquidWeb’s 100$ a month VPS solution, which sports only 768 MB of RAM and 40GB of hard drive space compared to Gigenet’s 80). I like the idea that old servers aren’t forgotten, only re-imagined; Gigenet’s solution makes sense. After all, why pay close to 200$ a month for hardware too powerful for you? The Bargain Basement is both efficient and ingenious. For someone with a smaller website or a small gaming server, the Bargain Basement seems to be quite a bargain, indeed (possibly- I’ll let you know about the support!)
It also brings up the old point about old hardware (a brief sermon, I promise). If you’re colocating or have old hardware laying around, don’t think you have to throw it out simply because it’s seen its years in service. Re-imagine it like Gigenet does, cutting costs and flexing your creative muscle at the same time. You might be glad you did!