Just writing up a rewview of UnitedColo's (http://www.unitedcolo.com) service so far after about 2 weeks of service from them.
I bought their cheapest package, Intel Celery 1.7ghz, 512 ram, 80gig disk, 1TB month transfer.
My first impressions were skeptical, they had pretty good prices, and the machine is adequate enough for all my tasks.
But the 1TB a month was what threw me off, thats quite a lot of transfers for $99. I know its mostly a shared connection, all their customers go through the same pipe eventualy.

I have a couple speed tests here too.
First one if from ftp.isc.org, getting bind 9.2.1.
20:59:37 (1010.59 KB/s) - `bind-9.2.1.tar.gz' saved [5021044]
Almost a meg a second, during peak times (2pm pst)

21:03:27 (459.83 KB/s) - `Apachetoolbox-1.5.64.tar.gz' saved [69682506/69682506]
That one is from unc.dl.sourceforge.net

21:07:03 (438.35 KB/s) - `linux-2.4.18.tar.gz' saved [30108170/30108170]
ftom ftp.kernel.org

I should also say that there have been some periods of lag, and packetloss, however. But they seem to have been fixed, and lasted less then a few minutes.

I contacted support about the lag one time, and whoever was handling my ticket decided itd be a good trouble shooting idea to hard reset my box without notifying me. Granted, I lease the box from them, but it does have my data on it, and hard resets are known to cause problems sometime. Maybe it was a new guy on the job or whatever, but rebooting without customer permissions seems like a big no-no to me.

But all considerations taken, the price mainly, the service is pretty good.
If any of you want other speed tests or whatnot, let me know.
But so far I think I am getting what I pay for, not five 9's uptime, but generaly good service.

Originally posted by SkullOne
But so far I think I am getting what I pay for, not five 9's uptime, but generaly good service.

Give it a few more weeks. There's a good chance your opinion will change dramatically -- that is unless UnitedColo has managed to turn their service around in the past month.

-- Julian

Well, Ill certainly let the forum know if theyre still a bad company.

Originally posted by SkullOne
Well, Ill certainly let the forum know if theyre still a bad company.

We'll be watching! :)

Well for the price, $99, you cant really expect carrier level service or reliability.
I am satisfied with the service, it meets my simple needs (do about 25gigs a day)

Im sure if I was going to look for a real datacenter, Id probably choose one that had multiple carriers, and would probably cost an upwards of $3k a month.
But you -always- get what you pay for, and shouldnt expect anything more.

Originally posted by SkullOne
Well for the price, $99, you cant really expect carrier level service or reliability.
I am satisfied with the service, it meets my simple needs (do about 25gigs a day)

Im sure if I was going to look for a real datacenter, Id probably choose one that had multiple carriers, and would probably cost an upwards of $3k a month.
But you -always- get what you pay for, and shouldnt expect anything more.

You can't?
Its not hard to be a cheap hosting provider and have multiple carriers.
Sure, you have to have a clue but hey :)

I know of at least 2-3 near me (include myself) that do it, so it can't be that hard to do heh.

ServeForce, so basically you can recommend us about a service that's somehow better than UnitedColo in general. Could you tell me also please? And based on what ...

Because I am in the near future (about 1 - 2 month) will need some dedicated servers for my business (PhotoAlbum and e-Cards). And I do need good (cheap) price and huge bandwidth.

That's why I joined this forum, to get any information about it.

Try the outgoing bandwidth. Incoming bandwidth can be misleading at times given that it's almost always unused. (thus fast speeds during peak hours). If you can consistently push 10-20mbit/s for 24/7, then it's a different story.

Originally posted by kapot
ServeForce, so basically you can recommend us about a service that's somehow better than UnitedColo in general. Could you tell me also please? And based on what ...

Because I am in the near future (about 1 - 2 month) will need some dedicated servers for my business (PhotoAlbum and e-Cards). And I do need good (cheap) price and huge bandwidth.

That's why I joined this forum, to get any information about it.

Well, I think your post would've been better off in one of the advertising forums, but here goes.

nLayer.net offers great cheap service, they're also expanding massively so their BW will only get better. Also give Atrivo.com a shot, they're great guys. They both offer similar types of servers, and I believe similar BW plans. I also offer this kinda service but I can't advertise myself here :)

UnitedColo support has been pretty fast for me when I've needed it. Can't say the same for their accounting dept. atm though - been waiting for hours for a reply from them this evening.

My personal review of UnitedColo...

Me and friend of mine have split the cost of a server, to host a BattleField 1942 game server, due to the price/bandwidth ratio UC offers, it seemed like a decent choice. We also don't mind if the server is down, as nothing important is on the server, except a game, and despite some mixed reviews, we got their entree level package the Celeron 1.7 GHZ, 512MB ram.

Initially we had Linux running on the machine, and after two weeks, we asked UnitedColo if they could throw windows 2000 server on it. They replied very promptly, asking for the serial key, and told us they would have it completed within 24 hours. Only 8 hours later, they contact me and let me know the install is complete.

So far for the past month and a half, the connection has always been stable, and we push ALOT of bandwidth, during peak hours when the server is at full capacity (26 players), we are pushing roughly 900-1100 KBS steadily outgoing.

Recently, because of the intense load put on the server (nearly @ 100% CPU usage during peak hours). We are upgrading to the next box which is the P4 1GB Ram setup. And they have been willing to work with us.

So far, its been a good experience, support is fast and professional, speeds are good, and have yet to see any major down-time in the past month and a half. (Only outage was for 10 minutes).

HTH

I stand by my comment on support, but I now have to say their accounts department are far from acceptable.

They're definitely getting better, my biggest gripe is that 24/7 support isn't exactly 24/7... after hours, when there's no one in the cage, it's dependent on whether or not Jacques has his cellphone with him and/or whether he decides to answer it.

We had a colo server go down last Friday night, and it took four calls to United Colo, and finally a call to someone at Exchange (the facility in which United Colo's cage is located) before we got a call back... and then, we had to drive down to the data center and be escorted by the security guard into the cage to reboot our server.

Granted, Jacques has gone in before at 2AM and rebooted for us, but it really should be represented as what it is... one non-technical guy, with a couple of support techs that work for him... and not as a big company, which it's not at all.

Oh, and at the moment, United Colo is in the SPEWS database, so anyone with mail servers there will have a significant portion of their mail rejected. (We use a different data center for all of our customers mail transport.) The really annoying part is that, in spite of the apparent zero-tolerence spam policy, they haven't terminated the offender yet, even though I sent them detailed information and links to the SPEWS listing and newsgroup postings. Methinks that a big enough customer gets treated entirely differently than some of the horror stories others have posted.

About the SPEWS comment, luckily my UC box must be on a seperate IP block, SPEWS has no records on my IP.

And to the administrators who use SPEWS, or other RBL blackhole lists, there are better and more foolproof ways to block spam then just blocking subnets.
Try spamassassin, bogofilter, or any number of other spam filtering/flagging tools.
Nazi-like blocking of IP's is the least effective, IMHO.

Originally posted by ServeForce
I also offer this kinda service but I can't advertise myself here :)

You just did :rolleyes: