What it costs. And when it exists.

The register

How soon it is ready, and what decides that.

Not one number. The same specification is five minutes or three weeks depending on where its parts are standing when you order — in the rack, in our store room, or at a distributor. This is the whole ladder, so you can see which rung you are asking for before you commit.

1. ~5 minutes

   It is already racked and it already matches

   The specification you asked for is a machine standing powered in the room. Nothing is fitted and nothing is moved; it is handed over.

2. ~30 minutes

   It is racked, and it is rearranged

   A machine on the shelf is close but not exact -- memory added, a drive swapped, the array rebuilt. Done in place, without the machine leaving the rack.

3. 4–24 hours

   Parts we hold are fitted

   The ordinary build-to-order case, and everything on the bench above. The parts are in our own store room; a technician assembles, arrays and installs.

4. 5–10 working days

   Parts have to be bought in

   Something on the list is not stock we carry -- an unusual capacity, a card outside the catalogue, more addresses than the configurator offers. We order it, then build.

5. 10–15 working days

   The part is scarce

   Current-generation accelerators and the largest drives run on allocation. We will tell you which part is the long pole before you commit, not after.

Every rung starts when the order clears payment and fraud review, which is the one step we will not put a promise on: most clear inside a couple of hours, a first order from a new account can take longer. Where hardware is bought in for one customer we ask for three months up front, because it is a machine we cannot re-let if the account closes in week two.

What moves, and what it costs

The parts of the price.

The middle column is how many of the 18 buildable lines offer that option. It is there because they do not all agree, and a table that hid the disagreement would be false about whichever half you were not thinking of — a gigabit port is included on some of these boards and an extra charge on the rest.

US dollars per month, before VAT or sales tax. Memory and drives are priced per line rather than across the catalogue, so they are on the bench above where the line is known, not in a table that would have to average them.

The parts book

How far each axis goes.

Memory

8 GB to 2 TB, registered ECC, in 10 steps across the catalogue — including the rungs a fixed plan skips, so a machine that wants 48 GB is not sold 64. Priced by capacity, from about $0.13 a gigabyte on the cheapest board. The figure replaces the previous one; it is not an upgrade fee on top.

Drives

27 options, from a SATA-SSD 32 GB up to a SAS-SSD 30.72 TB, in SATA-SSD, SATA, SAS-SSD, NVMe, SAS. Priced each, so the count is a number you set rather than a tier you land in.

Arrays

RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, up to 24 drives on the largest controller — or JBOD if you would rather the array were your operating system's problem. Controllers: JBOD, Embedded Disk Controller, 6 Disks Controller, 12 Disks Controller, software RAID, 24 Disks Controller. The controller comes before the drive because it decides which shapes exist at all.

Network

500 Mbps to 100 Gbps, unshared and unmetered at every step. Nothing counts the traffic and there is no overage line on the invoice, which is the part of this catalogue that is genuinely unusual rather than merely competitive.

Processors

45 parts across 1/2/4 sockets. Mostly previous-generation enterprise silicon, on purpose: four sockets of it out-work one current desktop part for the money, and a warm standby does not care how old its cores are. The blade and rack lines among them, with hardware RAID and a remote console, are our enterprise dedicated servers.

Response

5 tiers, the included one on every line and the fastest committing to a first response inside 30 minutes. Hardware replacement is a separate clock, stated per tier in the table above.

Past the form

Things you ask for rather than click.

The bench covers what every buildable line takes. These are real and orderable too, and they are not on it — a card changes which board you are on, and a licence is a contract with somebody else that we hold on your behalf.

Where it runs

5 rooms, one network.

Any build, in any of them: New York, Bucharest, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Miami. Somewhere else is usually possible inside thirty days — it is a conversation about transit, hands and hardware, and it is worth having before you rule it out.

New York Miami San Francisco Amsterdam Bucharest

Asked before

The questions this page exists for.

Can I really choose every component?

Every one the board takes: the processor and how many of them, the memory, the controller, the drives and their count, the array level, the port speed, the addresses, the response tier, the room and the billing term. What you cannot choose is a part that will not physically seat — which is why the platform comes first and the rest of the bench changes under it.

Is the estimate the price I pay?

It is the checkout's own arithmetic on the checkout's own catalogue, so it lands on the same figure give or take a cent or two on a multi-drive array, where the billing system rounds a per-drive price its own way. Tax is added at the checkout for your country. It is called an estimate for those two reasons and no others.

How long does a build actually take?

Between about five minutes and about fifteen working days, and which one depends entirely on where the parts are standing when you order. The register above is the full ladder with what triggers each rung. Anything you can specify on the bench is stock we hold, which is the 5-tier catalogue's ordinary case: four to twenty-four hours.

Is there a setup fee, or a contract?

No setup fee on 17 of the 18 buildable lines; the cheapest entry machine carries a one-off charge and says so in the checkout. No contract: monthly is the default and it stops at the end of any month. Paying further ahead takes up to 15% off the same machine.

Can it be changed after it is live?

Memory, drives, the controller and the port speed, yes — scheduled around your maintenance window and normally finished inside the same four-to-twenty-four hours, once the parts are on hand. A different processor usually means a different board, so that is a migration rather than an upgrade, and we will say so rather than quietly rebuilding you.

Is port 25 open? Can the machine send mail?

Open, and nothing is blocked in advance. What we do is sweep the addresses we hand out against the public blocklists: if one of yours is listed for actually sending spam, outbound port 25 on that one address closes for thirty days. A listing against the whole range does not trigger it and neither does a policy listing, because neither is an accusation about you. Say so when you order if mail is the machine's job and the addresses are picked with that in mind.

How clean are the addresses?

Checked against the public blocklists before they are assigned, and a listed one is swapped rather than handed over. The sweep keeps running afterwards, which is the half that matters: it is what stops a neighbour's reputation quietly becoming yours. Ask us to look at a particular range before you order and we will.

Can I get at the firmware?

Yes — every machine exposes its own management controller, which is the console, the power button and the boot order all working when the operating system is not. It reaches the firmware settings too, so virtualisation extensions and SR-IOV are yours to turn on rather than ours to be asked for.

What if the part I want is not listed?

Ask. A good deal of what we fit is not in the configurator, and the honest constraint is lead time rather than possibility — the two slowest rungs of the register exist precisely for parts we do not stock. We will name the long pole before you commit.

Do you build outside the 5 rooms?

Often, inside about thirty days. Those 5 are standing capacity where we hold hardware and have our own hands; anywhere else means arranging transit, remote hands and the machine itself, which is a conversation worth having early.