For more than a decade,
Hostkey has been leading the market with competitively priced colocation services, equipment leasing, and reliable cloud solutions for clients across Europe and North America. We spoke with
Dmitry Asafyev, head of marketing, about their solutions and their customer care team of tech experts who are dedicated to customer service and market-leading solutions. Whatever help you need – they’re there to leverage their deep industry knowledge to create bespoke solutions to get you ahead.
What are your Hosting plans?
We offer our customers standard Dedicated and Cloud hosting or individualized, personal server solutions based on their needs. We also provide a set of tools to remotely manage these servers or cloud solutions as well as specialized software for their needs.
With over ten years in the business, we can offer a custom priced solution for each customer based on his specification. We can also help by setting up, testing, and supporting non-standard hardware solutions.
We also offer flexible solutions allowing customers to rent a dedicated server by the hour.
What is a GPU Server?
It’s always good to have a fast server with a powerful CPU, but it’s
even better with a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate the process many times over.
Hostkey uses only high-performance GPUs – NVIDIA GTX 1080/1080Ti and RTX 2080Ti and NVIDIA TESLA V100/P100 – powerful units to suit anyone’s needs.
Since the advent of GPGPU (General-Purpose Computing On Graphics Processing Units), the usage of GPUs in servers has become increasingly popular. A GPU can process data faster using its many cores as compared to a CPU, which has fewer but much more powerful cores. The idea is that GPUs can have hundreds or even thousands of cores to process multiple streams of data in parallel and at the same time. Though GPU cores are slower than most CPU cores, together, they can process the data simultaneously at a higher rate, saving you time and money.
– Graphic processing
If you are into graphics rendering, whether picture or animation, you will invariably want the process to consume as little time as possible. So, let your graphics card do the job it was designed for! Combined with a powerful CPU, you will get the best results when rendering. In an industry test where an 8-core 3.4GHz Xeon rendered the same image via V-ray versus a high-end NVIDIA GPU with about 2700 CUDA cores. Render times were about 19 minutes for the CPU and about 3 minutes for the GPU to produce a picture of the same quality.
– Neural Networks
Even if it is not necessary to use GPU servers to train neural networks, it makes business sense to accelerate the process. Therefore, if you need to train substantial neural networks, a server with a GPU on board is strongly recommended. Using powerful graphics cards will drastically reduce the amount of time required from months or weeks to days. We offer servers with TensorFlow, Theano, PyTorch and other libraries pre-installed and ready to go. These large networks help people all over the world to predict extreme weather, transcribe medieval texts, and with image/face searching/recognition.
We process petabytes of data 10 times faster with GPU servers than using classic CPU servers.
Our IT team made research and compared different GPU platforms. We trained the same AI model (a neural network which could recognize cats and dogs on photos) on HOSTKEYs GPU servers, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and realized that the cost of training the same model is 8 – 12 times cheaper with HOSTKEY than training on AWS and Google Cloud. Moreover, the client pays less money, but the calculation speed remains as high as that of AWS and Azure.
– Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Do you need a robust and secure server that can provide streaming video or use applications such as ArchiCAD that require a GPU to process the data? You are definitely looking for a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) server. Not only will it save on costs for workstations in your office and improve security, but it will also be available for you to connect remotely, anywhere, anytime, at light speed, and from almost any device.
Some of the other tasks that benefit from having a GPU onboard are video transcoding, telemedicine applications, facial recognition, mining, data science, and many more…
Hostkey offers GPU dedicated servers with VPS NVIDIA GTX 1080/1080Ti and RTX 2080Ti and NVIDIA TESLA V100/P100 GPUs that can process any given task at an affordable price.
Do your hosting plans include SSL?
Customers can order SSL certificates quickly and affordably.
What are the advantages of Server Load Balancing?
Load Balancer allows you to distribute tasks across multiple devices connected on a logical level or physically. This service will increase the resilience of projects due to their redundancy, optimized scalability, and improved fault tolerance.
What are the advantages of a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a geographically dispersed network infrastructure that allows you to optimize content delivery to end-users on the Internet.
In fact, CDN is a set of servers that transmit the most popular content on your webpage or duplicate the entire resource. Servers are placed based on geographically distributed switching nodes — this way, the user will receive the content from the nearest server when accessing your resource. For example, if the primary server is in Moscow, and the user is in New Orleans, he will get the page from the server located in Paris.
Advantages of CDN:
- Reducing the load on the main resource — you do not have to choose a hosting service based on the peak load.
- Availability of resources from the network — the geographical distribution reduces the load on communication channels.
- Increased loading speed — the user will get the content in a shorter time. And search engines will appreciate that.
- Mitigating DDoS-attacks — despite high power attacks, resources will remain available through flexible routing changes.
Where are your data centers located?
Our servers are in the Netherlands, New York, and Moscow. All our datacenters have TIER III level. HOSTKEY’s network is built on Brocade equipment and connected to the largest carriers and traffic exchange points, which guarantees the availability of resources. Recently we have improved connectivity for our NY1 (USA) and the Serverius II (the Netherlands) Data Centers. We significantly improved the integrity and quality of communications between North America, Europe and Asia.
How are your data centers kept cool?
Our liquid cooling system is a new technology that will change the server marketplace.
Data centers work and resolve various problems, so their customer’s projects operate without issues or delays. One of the main issues is cooling. Currently, expensive cooling solutions create the need to pass the expense on to the customer, raising server prices.
To fix the cooling issue while keeping our prices low, we are working on a compact mobile liquid cooling solution that can be used to deploy a local data center and allow us to physically control servers near our customer’s project. Mobile containers that take up little space will be liquid-cooled and the cost for their maintenance will be less than renting servers in a data center. There are similar solutions on the market right now, but ours will be simpler to use and easier to support.
Our liquid cooling system will improve communication speeds, and critical data will not go to third-party servers. But most importantly this will allow to significantly reduce server infrastructure support costs.
What support options are available?
Our support department consists of a team of experienced technicians and smart customer care team. Each request is processed at the highest possible speed, and we are sure you will be satisfied with the result. Hostkey has many internal projects, and our customer care team is an essential part of it – for our guys, hardware, and servers are not just a job; it’s also their hobby and environment, so you can be sure that you’re in good hands.
We’re always here for you, any time of day and night. We have technicians and customer care staff on-site, available for you 24/7, and they have instant access to the hardware. Our around the clock specialists keep an eye at the server conditions at data centers and continuously monitor all the engineering systems.
If you have an issue with your service, you can create a ticket on our website and be sure that you will receive a reply from a real person within 20 minutes. If you have an urgent matter, you can send us a message via WhatsApp, Facebook, LiveСhat, or Telegram, and we will respond immediately. We care about our customers, so you can be sure to get honest answers and advice.
