Server Pals relaunched this month as a marketplace: a catalog of servers and IT services from providers we have checked out, with one place to compare them, configure them and order. The catalog is small today, on purpose. This is a short account of what is live, how a listing gets onto the site, and what we are working on.

Where the catalog stands

  • One dedicated server listing is live, with a full configurator (memory, drives, bandwidth, operating system) and a monthly price that is the price you pay.
  • Stores are set up for the first group of providers, so each one's listings have a home of their own as their inventory is added.
  • Five categories are open: dedicated servers, 10Gbps servers, cloud servers, colocation and IT services. Several are empty today. That is the work in progress.

How a vendor gets on the site

Most of our time right now goes into procuring vendors rather than writing listings. Before a provider's stock goes up, we go through the same questions we would ask if we were buying for ourselves:

  • The facility. Where it is, how power and cooling are provisioned, what is redundant, and who can walk in.
  • The network. Upstream carriers, port speeds, included transfer, DDoS mitigation capacity and the null-route policy. A provider that cannot answer the last two is not ready for our customers.
  • The hardware. Which server classes they stock, what is configurable, the replacement window when a part fails, and whether every box has a remote console.
  • Support. Response and resolution times, what "managed" covers, how escalation works, and what remote hands cost.
  • Commercial terms. Whether we can resell at a real price and stand behind it, setup times, billing and cancellation terms, and whether we sell their stock directly or refer you to them. Referral listings are labelled as such.
  • Track record. How long they have operated and what their existing customers say.

We would rather list a few providers we can vouch for than a long list we cannot. Some of these conversations take weeks, which is why the shelves fill slowly.

How a listing is built

Each listing is written from the provider's specification and our own questions: processor class, memory, storage, port speed and transfer, location, setup time, what is included (remote console, backups, DDoS protection), the configurable options with their price changes, and a plain summary of who the machine suits. Prices are per month in US dollars, and there is no separate marketplace fee on top.

There is no automated checkout yet. You configure the server, send an order request, and a person on our team confirms availability with the provider, checks the configuration and comes back to you with the next step. It is slower than a cart. It also means nobody is sold a server that is out of stock or a configuration the provider cannot build.

What is being added

The inventory work falls into four groups, in roughly this order:

  1. More dedicated servers from the providers already on board: entry-level single-socket machines, high-memory and all-NVMe configurations, and servers on 10Gbps ports.
  2. Cloud servers and colocation in more locations, so there is a real choice of region rather than one city.
  3. GPU servers with one or two cards, for people who want to run their own models without renting a cluster. Our guide to the hardware that needs is on this blog.
  4. IT services from partners: migrations, managed operations and monitoring, sold the same way as a server, with a clear scope and a monthly price.

None of these have dates attached, because each depends on a provider agreement being finished. We will post here as they land.

If you need something now

If you need a server and do not see it, tell us through the contact form or by sending an order request on the closest listing with a note about what you actually need. We can usually source it from a provider we are already talking to, and every request tells us what to list first.