Kimsufi KS-1 vs Online.net Start-2-S-SATA
There are not a lot of offerings for dedicated servers under 10 EUR. For personal use, development, secondary storage, media streaming/storage, or other non-critical uses, they are good value for money. The two most popular companies for these types of Atom servers are Kimsufi, and Online.net (Scaleaway / OneProvider)
Unfortunately I have been unable to obtain a Kimsufi KS-2, even after many months of trying because they are almost always out of stock. In the last 6 months, according to serverhunter.com they have only been available for 3-5 minutes a month before going out of stock again. Even though the 1TB Kimsufi KS-2 may be cheaper than the Online.net offerings, unless you can actually buy one it isn’t much use!
It is also worth noting that OneProvider simply uses Online.net stock, and so while I have included the entry in the pricing / specifications table below, they are in fact the same server. So far I have had a good experience with OneProvider, contrary to many online reports – they have responded to all of my tickets within 24 hours.
Also, Kimsufi KS-1 was provided with an Atom N2800 CPU (2c/4t), however it can be a mixed bag and some people may get the D425 models. In these tests I have used the N2800.
Pricing and specifications
Benchmark Results
The tool used for the benchmark is nench.
As Online.net and OneProvider are the same stock, I have only included the Online.net results.
UPDATE: Unfortunately the graphs in this article are no longer available due to issues with google drive. However the article will remain online for reference.
Conclusion
The Atom C2350 from Online.net / OneProvider offers far superior network performance (thanks to its 1GBps connection, vs 100Mbps for Kimsufi), along with better CPU performance and is the stronger performer. This is expected as it uses newer hardware, and is slightly more expensive.
The addition of AES instruction set with the newer C2350 explains the significantly better AES performance with the Online.net Atom C2350. HDD performance likely differs between different machines of the same model, and so the relatively small differences here should be taken with a grain of salt. As the KS-1 in my tests uses the same CPU as the KS-2, the performance of the KS-1 and KS-2 are likely very similar. Overall the Online.net Atom C2350 seems to offer better performance, at a similar cost of the KS-2.