Servers to rent: VPS and dedicated servers next to colocation

Research note, October 28, 2026, by Alexander Grabowski (B4L). Sources were retrieved on October 27 and 28, 2026. Figures are cited, and our own estimates are marked.

This note sets out the virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated servers that the investor could rent out from hall B of its first data center, alongside colocation and the agent servers of the hosting note. It gives packages and prices, derives the prices from cost and compares them with competitors. B4L prepared the note as consultant; the investor would build, own and operate the data center and sell these services. Money is in THB, with USD in parentheses at 33 THB per USD, the B4L planning rate, and EUR at 37.821 THB, the ECB rate of October 26, 2026.[494] Prices exclude VAT. The arithmetic and its output, all our estimates, are in model/server_packages.py and model/server_packages_results.md.

In short

• The investor could sell shared-vCPU VPS from 490 THB (USD 15) a month, dedicated-vCPU VPS from 1,650 THB (USD 50) and dedicated servers from 9,900 THB (USD 300), with IPv6-only VPS 50 THB cheaper (model/server_packages_results.md).
• Memory drives the cost. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98% in the first quarter of 2026, and TrendForce expects server DRAM to rise every quarter until the second half of 2027.[829][830] A 64 GB RDIMM costs USD 1,630 at the index and USD 2,245 at US retail, so memory is 49% to 58% of a shared-VPS host's capex.[831][832]
• Priced at 1.5 times the high-case cost at full use, the VPS lines break even at 40% to 43% of capacity sold with hardware at index prices and 66% to 68% at retail (est.).
• The dedicated-vCPU prices undercut NIPA and the Singapore clouds, and the shared prices roughly match them, but neither comes near Thai budget hosts: 8 dedicated vCPU with 32 GB cost 5,300 THB, against 6,599 THB at Hetzner Singapore and 8,240 THB at NIPA, while BearVPS sells 4 vCPU and 8 GB for 389 THB.[828][396][833]
• Dedicated servers priced at the regional market break even at 56% to 67% sold in the low case and 83% to 94% in the high case (est.). The Thai offers we found are old Xeons and desktop Ryzens.[834][835]
• APNIC gives at most 512 IPv4 addresses, and one host of small VPS needs 240, so the investor will buy addresses at about USD 24 to 25 or lease them at USD 0.30 to 0.59 a month, and should sell IPv6-only plans.[836][766][795]
• A host must keep traffic data for at least 90 days, prove every user's digital identity and remove unlawful content within 24 hours of a complaint.[837][838][839]

What the investor could sell

A VPS is a virtual machine on a shared host; a dedicated server is a whole machine for one customer. A shared vCPU is a hardware thread that several machines use in turn, and a dedicated vCPU is a whole thread kept for one customer, as DigitalOcean defines them.[840] Memory is never oversold: DigitalOcean keeps RAM dedicated on every plan, and Proxmox advises hosts to consider disabling KSM, the memory sharing behind overselling, because of side-channel attacks.[840][841]

Shared VPS run on a host we call S: one AMD EPYC 9555 with 64 cores and 128 threads, 1,152 GB of memory and six 7.68 TB NVMe drives as local mirrors. Dedicated-vCPU VPS run on host D, with the same processor, 512 GB and four NVMe drives that form a Ceph cluster across the hosts; host D is also the large dedicated server. GPU servers, such as a dedicated 8x RTX PRO 6000 node at 467,000 THB (USD 14,152) a month, are in the hosting note, and object storage is in the open stack note.

Shared-vCPU VPS

Dedicated-vCPU VPS

Dedicated 48 is half of a host D, so no customer fills a host; above that, the large dedicated server is the better offer.

Dedicated servers

The entry server uses AMD's EPYC 4005, whose predecessor AMD says it developed for a large European host; Hetzner, Ionos and OVHcloud use it. It takes at most 192 GB of ECC memory, and two modules per channel slow the memory to DDR5-3600, a trade the Entry 128 makes for capacity. Sixteen cores also fit Windows Server's standard license, AMD notes.[843] The storage server should be built to order only.

Add-ons

How the prices were set

The hardware

Each build is priced from parts at October 2026 prices. The EPYC 9555 costs USD 6,026 from a broker (low case) or USD 9,826 at launch list (high), DDR5 follows the MemoryMarket index (low) or US retail (high), and NVMe costs USD 505.70 per TB.[857][858][859] Chassis prices come from a search result only, not verified, plus 30% in the high case for a Thai distributor and 8% for freight and integration (est.). Thailand belongs to the WTO's Information Technology Agreement, which removes duty on computers, but a tariff aggregator gives 4.1% on average for HS 8471, so duty is 0% (low) or 4.1% (high).[860][861] Import VAT of 7% on the CIF price plus duty is reclaimable input tax (our reading) and stays out of capex.[862] A Thai reseller's 1U server with two EPYC 9355 and 1.5 TB at 2,805,300 THB fits these figures.[863]

The watts build on SPECpower results, such as 249 W at half load and 381 W at full load for a one-socket 96-core EPYC, plus component budgets (est.).[864][865]

Power, space and transit

Power is a server's average draw times hall B's PUE of 1.322 (from model/first_dc_results.md) times the study's 3.81 THB/kWh, or 3,677 THB a month per kW of average load.[25] Space is a charge per kW of peak draw that recovers the first data center, without land, solar and battery, over 20 years at the study's 8% cost of capital, with its maintenance, insurance, certification, facility staff and fixed connectivity. With all 2 MW in use it comes to 4,662 to 8,392 THB per kW a month, and in phase 1 with 1 MW in use to 6,481 to 12,333 THB. Together with power that is 8,339 to 12,069 THB per kW, below the 12,933 THB per kW of True IDC's 3 kW rack at 38,800 THB.[390] Transit costs 6,000 to 15,000 THB per Gbps a month, the band of the connectivity note, which leans on CMU's NT contract at 1,596,457.54 THB a year; servers send 0.05 to 0.4 Gbps each at the 95th percentile (est.).[758]

Unit costs and overhead

Capital is charged over 5 years at 8%, with 3% to 5% of capex a year for spares and repair; Azure's researchers put maintenance at about 5%.[866] Fully sold, a shared vCPU then costs 30.48 to 53.43 THB a month, a dedicated vCPU 113.16 to 195.37 THB, a GB of memory 23.59 to 43.46 THB, a GB of local NVMe 0.96 to 1.07 THB and a GB of Ceph RBD with three copies 1.95 to 2.42 THB. The shared line sells four vCPU per thread, OpenStack's default since 2023; VMware calls one per core the safe start.[867][868] Watching CPU steal time matters more than the ratio (our judgment).

Overhead (staff, the portal build, identity proofing, legal review, traffic logs and DDoS detection) comes to 194,658 to 346,961 THB a month for two racks and 411,003 to 711,946 THB for ten (est.). That is 166 to 297 THB per small VPS at two racks and 70 to 122 THB at ten, the figure the packages carry. Payment fees and fraud take 2.5% of revenue (est.).

The pricing rule and the market

Each VPS price is 1.5 times its high-case cost at full use, rounded up, the rule of the agent-server packages. Since 1.5 times the cost is close to the cost at 70% sold, the high case nearly breaks even there. For dedicated servers the rule gave 12,300 THB (entry) and 39,500 THB (mid), at or above the top of the regional market, so we set those prices against the market. Service levels follow the market: Hetzner Cloud promises 99.9%, NIPA 99.5% per instance with credits of 10% or 30%, and DigitalOcean 99.99% per Droplet.[869][481][870]

Margin is what is left of the price after every cost, capital included. The main comparators, in THB a month (full list in the model results):

Shared 4 sits next to Vultr. The budget band lies below even our low-case cost of 805 THB, probably through old hardware and heavier overselling (our reading). Dedicated 8 is cheaper than every comparator we found, which in our judgment makes it the strongest line. It has room because Hetzner raised the Singapore CCX33 from EUR 96.99 to EUR 174.49 on June 15, 2026, citing "the massive increase in procurement costs."[828][880] Entry 64, with twice the cores of the 4345P, sits between OVH and DriteStudio; Equinix Metal closed on June 30, 2026.[881]

The platform

The platform can stay open. Incus project limits cap each customer's CPU, memory, disk and instances; Incus live-migrates running VMs and exposes everything through a REST API.[882][883][884] The hosts run NixOS, which the open stack note recommends for CPU and storage servers.

Storage differs by line. A Ceph consultant reported about 700 microseconds for a small write on tuned Ceph RBD with three copies, about 1,500 operations a second, against 7,000 to 10,000 on ZFS over local NVMe, and Proxmox found a 10 Gbit/s network easily overwhelmed by one fast drive.[885][886] Local NVMe therefore serves the shared line, and Ceph, on two 25G ports per host D, serves the dedicated line, whose customers pay for migration and restart on another host.

For billing, FOSSBilling (Apache-2.0) and Paymenter (MIT) are active, and closed tools are cheap (WHMCS from USD 39.99 a month, Virtualizor USD 9 per node), so the choice turns on control (our reading).[887][888][889][890] The investor would build the rest for 1 to 2 million THB once (est.):

1. a billing module for the Incus API;
2. a portal with console, rebuild, snapshots, reverse DNS and IPv6;
3. identity proofing at sign-up;
4. 90-day retention of traffic data and address assignments;
5. abuse-desk tools for the 24-hour clock;
6. PromptPay, transfer and card payment with Thai tax invoices, as Hostatom offers.[891]

The rescue system note puts the rescue and reinstall engine alone at 0.96 to 2.7 million THB of engineering (est.), so the budget above looks low once that engine is counted; the model has not yet been changed for it.

Supermicro's full Redfish functions need a paid license, and Hetzner gives three hours of KVM console free.[892][893] The rescue system note keeps every BMC on a closed network and shows the server's screen in the customer's browser through a proxy. FastNetMon Advanced detects floods for USD 115 a month at 10 Gbps, and larger floods go to upstream scrubbing (connectivity).[894]

IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4 runs out before power or space. APNIC gives a member at most a /23, or 512 addresses.[836] After 62 for infrastructure (est.), 450 remain, and one host S full of small VPS needs 240. Two racks at 70% sold need 755 addresses and ten racks 3,773, or 13 more blocks of 256. APNIC-region blocks traded at USD 23.95 per address in the third quarter of 2026, and leases cost USD 0.30 to 0.59 a month.[766][795] An address costs 7.9 THB a month inside the /23 and 9.9 to 19.5 THB leased.

AWS charges USD 0.005 an hour per address and Hetzner EUR 0.50 a month with IPv6 free, and Lightsail sells IPv6-only bundles USD 1.50 cheaper.[895][896][848] Hetzner unbundled IPv4 from dedicated servers because address prices kept rising.[897] Our IPv6-only discount of 50 THB exceeds an address's lease price, which is worth paying because each freed address carries another customer.

Thai rules, taxes and licenses

A host that rents out servers is a service provider under the Computer Crime Act. Section 26 requires it to keep traffic data for at least 90 days, or up to two years on an official order, and the data that identifies each user until at least 90 days after the service ends, with fines of up to 500,000 THB.[837] The MDES notification of August 13, 2021, names providers that rent out computer systems and cloud providers, requires digital identity proofing for every user, and keeps the provider responsible even when a third party stores the logs; officials can extend retention six months at a time.[838][898] Under a notification of October 26, 2022, unlawful content must come down within 24 hours of a public complaint to keep the safe harbor, and within 7 days, 24 hours or 3 days of an official order.[839] The 24/7 shift runs the abuse desk, so its cost sits in the facility charge.

VAT stays at 7% until September 30, 2027, and foreign providers earning more than 1.8 million THB a year from unregistered Thai customers must charge it too.[899][900] Companies withhold 3% on services and 5% on rent; the Revenue Department treats rented movable property as rent, so a dedicated server could be read as 5%, though Thai hosts ask for 3%.[901][902][891] Law firms read the resale of connectivity to tenants as needing an NBTC Type 1 license (connectivity). We found no public SPLA price list for Windows.

Risks

Memory is the first risk. The index price of a 64 GB RDIMM rose from USD 1,350 in May 2026 to USD 1,630 in October, and TrendForce expects server DRAM to rise every quarter until the second half of 2027, with buyers without long-term agreements bearing most of it, which would include a new host (our reading).[831][830] Hardware for a 2028 opening will be bought at unknown prices:

A rise of 20% pushes the VPS high case above its price at 70% sold, so prices should be fixed when the hardware is bought.

Supply is the second risk. A March 2026 comparison puts Supermicro's lead time at 2 to 4 weeks, while a UK tracker reports 30 to 52 weeks to order acknowledgment in July 2026.[903][904] Throughwave, which calls itself Supermicro's official Thai distributor, is the first call.[905]

The third risk is the market. Hetzner targets Bangkok from Singapore, OVH includes unlimited traffic and a daily backup in VPS from USD 4.54, and Thai buyers find VPS at 290 THB from Hostatom.[849][873][408] The investor's case rests on Thai invoices, support, compliance and short paths inside Thailand. The IPv4 pool is the fourth risk.

Starting before the data center opens

The line need not wait for the second half of 2028. In a rented Bangkok rack at True IDC's 2025 offer of 38,800 THB for 3 kW with power included, Shared 2 costs 480 to 744 THB at 70% sold against 459 to 736 THB in hall B, and Dedicated 8 3,654 to 5,252 THB against 3,328 to 5,130 THB.[390] Capital is most of a server's cost, so the room matters little. The hosting note lists other colocation prices; CMU ITSC would first have to permit third-party customers (option A). A Bangkok rack from 2027 would test demand, the portal and identity proofing, with hardware bought at today's memory prices.

A ramp in hall B

Hall B has 60 racks of about 6.5 kW, 30 in phase 1. A rack holds 10 hosts S, 12 hosts D or 38 entry servers. Two racks (four hosts S, four hosts D and 22 dedicated servers) cost 24.7 to 32.8 million THB (USD 0.75 to 0.99 million); ten racks cost 123.6 to 164.0 million THB (USD 3.75 to 4.97 million).

Per kW of peak draw the line brings in 108,396 THB a month at 70% sold, about eight times colocation's 12,933 THB, but its margin depends on hardware prices. At ten racks and 70% sold, shared VPS earn 78,687 THB per kW in the low case and lose 509 THB in the high case; dedicated-vCPU VPS earn 37,530 and 1,796 THB; dedicated servers earn 6,226 and lose 14,122 THB. Colocation leaves 1,968 to 5,697 THB per kW after the facility charge and power (est.).

What this means for the investor

What follows is our judgment.

The dedicated-vCPU VPS is the line to build first. It undercuts every comparator in Thailand and Singapore, covers the worst hardware case at about two-thirds sold, and offers live migration.

The shared line belongs beside it at developer-cloud prices; the Thai budget band is out of reach with new hardware.

Dedicated servers should be built to order on 12-month terms, with a small stock of entry servers, because at regional prices they pay only when hardware is bought near index prices.

Memory decides the margin and IPv4 decides the scale. The investor should contract memory for the first fleet early, fix prices only after buying, join APNIC early, and make IPv6-only plans the default for new customers.

Overhead needs scale: two racks break even at 57% sold with hardware near index prices and 89% at retail, ten racks at 50% and 75%. A rented Bangkok rack in 2027 would build customers before hall B opens at almost the same cost per server.

Open questions