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Dedicated server on Intel Xeon: from a decade-old E3 to Xeon 6
The word Xeon in the catalogue covers machines more than ten years apart. A quad-core E3 from 2013, a dual-processor E5 v4 platform and a fresh Xeon 6 with dozens of cores on DDR5 sit side by side. Their price and performance differ by an order of magnitude, so a dedicated server on Xeon is chosen by model number, not by brand.
Generations by model number
- E3-1200 v2–v6 (roughly 2013–2017). Four cores, eight threads, up to 32–64 GB of memory. Found in the cheapest plans, good for small websites, mail and monitoring.
- E5-2600 v2–v4 (2013–2016). Up to 14–22 cores per socket, four memory channels, often on dual-processor boards. Russian data centres still have even older E5620 and L5640 from around 2010; take them only for very light tasks.
- E-2100 and E-2200 (2018–2019). Successors to the E3: six to eight high-clock cores, but only two memory channels and a 128 GB ceiling.
- Xeon D. A low-power system on a chip: D-1520 and D-1540 are often put in compact servers for storage and backups.
- Scalable Silver, Gold, Platinum (since 2017). The second digit of the number indicates the generation: 4114 and 6138 are first, 4216 and 6230 second, 6348 third, 5515+ and 6542Y fifth. More on the difference between the lines on the VPS on Xeon Gold page.
- Xeon 6 (since 2024, models such as 6517P and 6527P). A new naming scheme, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0; priced closer to modern EPYC.
Why an old E5 is so cheap
Servers on E5 v3 and v4 paid for themselves long ago, and parts for them are sold in bulk after being decommissioned from corporate racks. Hence the low rent for a solid configuration: 2×E5-2680 v4 gives 28 cores and up to hundreds of gigabytes of memory. The downsides are a low per-core clock, DDR4 at 2133–2400 MHz, high power consumption and SATA instead of NVMe on many boards. For tasks that parallelise well and do not need fast response this is a sensible saving; for a game server or a busy PHP site, a new processor with fewer cores will be faster.
"2×" in the model name means two physical processors. Cores and memory in such a server are doubled, but memory is split between sockets: an application that is not NUMA-aware sometimes runs worse on a dual-processor machine than expected.
ECC, disks and storage
All server Xeons work with ECC memory, usually registered, which sets them apart from desktop processors for rent. For file storage on ZFS or a database that runs for months without a reboot, this matters more than extra cores. A noticeable share of Xeon plans come with hard drives: old platforms with many HDD bays are an inexpensive way to get dozens of terabytes for archives or backups. Check whether there is a hardware RAID controller or the array has to be built in software, and how many free bays will remain for expansion.
Where Xeon is rented and what to check
Russia accounts for the most Xeon servers in the catalogue: Moscow and St Petersburg lead by number of plans, followed by London, Frankfurt, Paris and Toronto. Russian sites readily use Xeon because spare parts are easier to find, and payment there goes through Russian MIR cards, SBP or invoice; that selection is on the dedicated servers in Russia page. A setup fee is noticeably rarer for Xeon plans than for EPYC, and the port is gigabit in most cases.
Before ordering, ask for the exact model and the platform's build year, the memory type, whether IPMI or iDRAC is available, and the BIOS firmware: on old machines without microcode updates, performance drops noticeably after the patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.