Hardware ram vs hdd

I'm still chicken after lurking here for years to get on this stack. It's time to move forward.

2020 is the year of cost reduction for me as my site is earning less than it ever did post may 5 algo change.

So, my current machine is 7 years old so it's time to change anyway. i currently have a dual hexacore E5-2620 running 8gb ram. honestly, it's more than enough performance for the site but it actually costs me about double what i'm pricing out below. loads are low, but my performance figures are not where i would like them to be.

Leaving cpanel behind will be hard for me, but i can't justify the $30/m cost anymore. And, i'm tired of apache being slow and need to improve my content paint scores in lighthouse.
with cpanel, its about 200/m.

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So, i'm on strict budget of around $100/m out the door for my new provisioning. That means, no cpanel for starters, and maybe even skimping on some other areas if I can to reduce costs even more. But, not at the sacrifice of peformance. I need to rank well again to get traffic back! This is kinda the last ride... if this doesn't work, my 20 year old forum is going to go on a shared host and timeout all the time just because i'm too vain to turn it off.

Pricing a few severs at leaseweb (where i've been for a long time before as servint), i can get a Xeon E3-1270v6 with either a
1tb sata drive with 32gb ram
or
2x 240gb ssd with 16 gb ram

for about the same price and come in under budget. 64 gb ram is out of budget.

I don't need the space - i've offloaded most data to s3 so that's not a factor. (20gb is more than enough)

does the ssd advantage go away when everything is cached in memory? innodb? redis?

what about raid options? raid 10 with 4 disks is just 7 bucks more. I can't imagine it being faster, but i'm obsolete in my understanding of modern technology. (backups aren't a concern, they are on s3 too). i figure if i lose a drive, i'm probably down anyway so i'm not considering uptime in this at all. just speed.

I've looked into other providers as well like ovh and such and i can't get a better price without adding some things i don't want, or sacrificing for a non server chip set. but, i am open to options.



More questions -
what are you all using for email? dns?

I am not on cloudflare. I invested in aws cloudfront instead a while back when i was considering putting everything on ec2 instances but that plan didn't work out. It's actually more costly.

Thanks, looking forward to making the jump this summer.

 

good to know that the 1270 is older too.

how about the
Xeon® E-2136

ovh has a promo now for that one

 

Sorry to report i've chickened out again

I ended up getting cpanel on a vps at vultr with their high frequency vps. https://www.vultr.com/products/high-frequency-compute/

I figured after setting up email and a few other $5/m items i would need (Even though there are free options) i figured i'd be about the same $ wise a month.
The account transfer and setup from cpanel to cpanel is hard to beat and i'm comfortable with it. I think that's the biggest thing.

i went from 12 cores and 8gb ram to 2 cores and 4gb ram and my site is WAY faster, especially in first byte time.

So, until i grow more hair to try it, i'll still be a big supporter of the stack and want to play more with it to comfort myself as i do want off apache. soon!