Dedicated servers in the USA

The American physical server market is the most varied in the catalogue. Low-power machines on Intel Atom and Celeron with a couple of gigabytes of memory share one table with dual-processor Xeon Gold builds with hundreds of gigabytes. Plans are sold by more than twenty hosts with legal entities in different countries, so terms for traffic, payment and support differ widely even for similar hardware.

Cities: the coasts and the centre of the country

Servers in the US are spread across the country, and the city should be chosen for the audience, not the price.

• East Coast: New York, Ashburn, Miami. This is the closest to Europe and Russia: usually 110–140 ms from Moscow and considerably less from Western Europe. Miami is also well connected to Latin America.
• Centre: Chicago and Dallas. Roughly equal distance to both coasts, convenient for a project with users across the country.
• West Coast: Los Angeles and Seattle. 170–200 ms from Russia, but closer to Asia and the Pacific region.

If the server is for a team in Europe or Russia or for backups from there, take the East Coast. For games and voice chat with users in Russia, no American city will do: the latency is too high.

Range of hardware

The low end of the American list consists of small servers on Atom and Celeron. These are real physical machines, but in power they are closer to an average VPS: two to four weak cores, little memory, one disk without RAID and a narrow port of a few dozen megabits. They are taken for a personal website, monitoring or a small file node, where isolation matters more than speed. Compare such a machine with virtual servers in the USA: a VPS at the same price is often faster.

The middle is occupied by single Xeon E3 and E5 and Ryzen 9, the top by dual-processor Xeon Gold and EPYC with large amounts of memory. A typical configuration in the US is more modest than a European one: fewer cores and a smaller disk, but more than half the plans have an SSD and roughly one in seven an HDD. For multithreaded tasks and large databases, look at dedicated servers on EPYC.

Traffic: the main difference from Europe

In Europe unmetered traffic on a gigabit port has become the norm; in the US it has not. Fewer than a third of American plans list unmetered traffic; the rest come with a monthly quota. A 10–30 TB quota seems large, but a gigabit port under constant load uses it up in a few days. Before renting, check:

• whether inbound traffic is counted or only outbound;
• what happens when you exceed it: a per-terabyte charge, a speed cut or suspension;
• whether the port bandwidth is guaranteed or shared across the rack.

There are 10 Gbit/s ports in the US too; a selection across all countries is on the servers with a 10 Gbit/s link page. A setup fee is rare in American plans, and a little under half of the configurations are delivered from stock within a few hours.

Legal environment and payment

American hosts operate under US law, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Copyright holders' complaints go to the host, which forwards them to the customer and asks for the disputed material to be removed; after repeated complaints the server may be disconnected. This is a routine procedure, and for projects with their own content it changes nothing, but keeping backups off the server is wise in any case. American companies also comply with sanctions requirements and may refuse service.

Russian MIR cards and SBP are almost never accepted in American plans. The main methods are international cards, PayPal and bank transfer by invoice. The "Payment" column shows this for each plan. If you need North America with different traffic and legal terms, look at dedicated servers in Canada.