Tarekcloud EPYC Purchase Experience: Super-Sized Specs, Super-Sized Headaches

How It Started#

On September 25, I bought a “super-sized” EPYC plan during Tarekcloud’s EPYC promotion. Judging from the specs and price, this machine was pretty much unbeatable at the same price point. But reality once again confirmed the old saying: when something is cheap, someone has to pay for it.

When the Problems Began#

From day one after activation, the problems started. The EPYC 7763 instance began experiencing random reboots, and then the reboot interval stabilized at once every 2–8 hours. After each reboot, it took 5–10 minutes for the machine to come back online.

For an entire week, the server was in a state of intermittent downtime, making it almost impossible to run any service reliably.

Ongoing Failures and Migration#

The issue persisted until October 3, when the provider decided to abandon that machine entirely and migrated the whole system and platform to another new machine, 7B13. So far, the fault has not reappeared.

Provider’s Response#

Tarekcloud’s explanation was:

The EPYC series belongs to a “resold on behalf of” lineup, different from their self-operated Gold series (which is self-purchased, self-tested, then listed). These resold machines are not fully tested before shipping and may have “mixed memory modules,” which can cause random reboots.

In other words, what they’re selling is someone else’s procured SR655, not hardware they purchased and tested themselves. But even so, their supposedly self-purchased-and-tested Gold series also suffered outages during this period.

Compensation Plan#

Tarekcloud’s compensation offer was:

• Extend EPYC plan usage by 10 days, or
• Upgrade monthly bandwidth by an extra 1T / 2T / 4T of traffic (choose one of the three).

On paper, it sounds reasonable. But considering I could barely use the machine normally from day one, this compensation is basically better than nothing, but not by much. It essentially just makes up for the ten lost days.

Harsh Takeaways#

• Quality control is lacking;
• Although the admin responds very quickly in the Telegram group, all operational notices are only posted there. There are zero email notifications — everything is done on a whim.
• They sent a Telegram notice at 10:46 saying they would shut down the machine for maintenance at 10:50.

Who can possibly react and migrate that fast?

About the CPUs#

Although the provider called it an upgrade, switching from 7763 to 7B13 is in fact a downgrade from the user’s perspective. The following data is from CPUBenchMark.

Right now, the 7763 goes for around 5,600 CNY, while the 7B13 sells for about 3,699 CNY (data from any random Taobao store).

In short: 7B13 is slightly weaker in real-world performance, a bit more power efficient, and cheaper. This so-called “upgrade” is really just a swap to a more obscure, cheaper CPU.

Conclusion#

This supposedly “super-sized” EPYC experience turned out to be a super-sized disaster.

When something is cheap, someone has to pay for it — and that applies to both users and providers.

Plan Details#

• Provider: Tarekcloud

• Type/Plan: HongKong EPYC Super-Sized

• Processor: AMD EPYC 7B13 64-Core Processor

• Num of Core: 8 Cores

• Memory: 48 GB

• Storage: 4****00 GB NVMe

• Bandwidth: 20000GB @ 3 Gbps IN | 3 Gbps OUT

• Location: HK

Benchmarks#

1
Basic System Information:
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Uptime     : 0 days, 0 hours, 9 minutes
4
Processor  : AMD EPYC 7B13 64-Core Processor
5
CPU cores  : 8 @ 2445.404 MHz
6
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
7
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
8
RAM        : 47.0 GiB
9
Swap       : 0.0 KiB
10
Disk       : 393.6 GiB
11
Distro     : Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
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Kernel     : 6.12.48+deb13-amd64
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VM Type    : KVM
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IPv4/IPv6  : ✔ Online / ✔ Online
15

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IPv6 Network Information:
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---------------------------------
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ISP        : Asia Pacific Network Information Center
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ASN        : Unknown
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Host       : Asia Pacific Network Information Center, Pty. Ltd
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Location   : South Brisbane, Queensland (QLD)
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Country    : Australia
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fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/vda1):
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---------------------------------
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Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
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  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
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Read       | 285.45 MB/s  (71.3k) | 1.09 GB/s    (17.1k)
29
Write      | 286.20 MB/s  (71.5k) | 1.10 GB/s    (17.2k)
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Total      | 571.66 MB/s (142.9k) | 2.20 GB/s    (34.4k)
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           |                      |
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Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
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  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
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Read       | 1.36 GB/s     (2.6k) | 1.51 GB/s     (1.4k)
35
Write      | 1.44 GB/s     (2.8k) | 1.61 GB/s     (1.5k)
36
Total      | 2.80 GB/s     (5.4k) | 3.13 GB/s     (3.0k)
37

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Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
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---------------------------------
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Test            | Value
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                |
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Single Core     | 1092
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Multi Core      | 7328
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Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/23828323
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