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Dedicated server in Russia: hardware, the law and paperwork for accounting
The Russian dedicated server market works differently from the European one. There are many machines of previous generations, a noticeable share of servers with hard drives for storage, and almost no one-off setup fees. The main reason companies take a physical server in a Russian data centre is not price but the personal data law and payment methods convenient for accounting.
Moscow, St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kazan
Almost all plans in the table are located in Moscow or St Petersburg, and one host often offers both cities. There is about 10 ms between them, so for an audience in the European part of the country the choice of city barely affects site speed. It matters for redundancy: a primary server in one city and a copy in the other protect against an outage at a single site.
Novosibirsk and Kazan are less common. A Siberian site is needed when users live beyond the Urals: from Moscow to Novosibirsk it is usually 40–60 ms, and for people in Siberia and the Far East latency to a local server is several times lower. Kazan is chosen as a second point in the Volga region or as a more moderately priced alternative to the data centres of the two capitals.
152-FZ and physical isolation
Russia's personal data law (152-FZ) requires databases with data of Russian citizens to be recorded and stored inside the country. For an online shop, CRM or accounting system with a customer base, this is a direct reason to keep the database server in a Russian data centre. If your users are not in Russia, this requirement does not apply to you. A dedicated machine adds what auditors often ask about: there are no other people's virtual machines on the hardware, and only you and the site staff have access to it. Requirements for data protection, threat models and protection levels are covered in the selection of servers for 152-FZ; it also shows when a virtual server is enough.
What hardware Russian plans run on
More than two thirds of the configurations are built on Intel Xeon, and a large part of them are Xeon E3 and E5 generations that are eight to ten years old. Such servers are cheap and reliable, and dual-processor E5 machines have many cores and memory slots, but their per-core performance is noticeably lower than that of modern EPYC and Ryzen. For file storage, backups, a test bench or a small website this is more than enough. For a busy database or 1C (a popular Russian accounting suite) with dozens of users, look at newer generations; you can compare models on the dedicated servers on Xeon page.
A separate feature is servers with HDDs. In roughly two out of five Russian plans the main storage is hard drives, often several of 4–16 TB each. These are storage builds: archives, video, backups of other servers. If you need speed rather than capacity, filter by NVMe and check whether there is a hardware RAID controller or RAID is assembled in software.
ECC memory is standard in Xeon and EPYC servers, but inexpensive Ryzen and Intel Core builds may lack it. Check this if the machine will hold customer data.
Port, traffic and delivery
Most plans come with a 1 Gbit/s port, but about a tenth have a 100 Mbit/s port. A hundred megabits is enough for a site with average traffic, but for distributing files or video or replicating a database between cities a narrow port becomes the limit before the processor does. Unmetered traffic is more common than in the US, but terms differ between hosts: sometimes unmetered applies only to traffic within Russia.
A one-off setup fee is rare in Russia, a notable difference from Western Europe. About half of the configurations are delivered from stock within a few hours; the rest are built to order in one to three business days. Network-level DDoS protection is listed for almost every plan, but basic filtering and protection with guaranteed bandwidth are different services, so clarify this before paying.
Payment for companies
Russian hosts accept MIR cards, SBP (the fast payment system) and YooMoney, and for companies and sole proprietors, payment by invoice with a contract and closing documents (acts or UPD). Payment by invoice is available for most plans in the table, as shown in the "Payment" column. If a company is buying the server, check in advance whether the host works with VAT and issues closing documents monthly or quarterly. If Russian jurisdiction is not required, compare the terms with dedicated servers in the Netherlands.