My site is steadily growing -- now at 350k pviews/daily, ~35 gb/month -- and am considering going dedicated. I run a pretty large gallery w/ video downloads, and constantly have to shut off my files to avoid extra bandwidth charges (which doesn't help my site growth). I'm looking at RAQs right now b/c they're affordable, but does anyone know if they can handle this site? Especially in the long term.. I don't know much about the RAQ's performance, and I wonder if my site will outgrow it quickly. here are the past three months stats...

bandwidth pviews
30,369,974,048 368,163
34,635,910,451 331,475
26,313,074,700 217,014
33,563,620,131 161,452

bandwidth isn't consistent b/c I was shutting off files. I also plan to start 2 or 3 smaller sites on the same server, so I'm sure that factors in somewhere.

Basically, I have about $125 a month to play with. Anything that is != RAQ seems to be too pricey.

Thanks for any suggestions!
Mike

There are some pretty good deals with RaQs and high transfer amounts. One of the better uses for them would probably be for one (or a few) busy sites. Relatively easy to maintain, (sort of if you read the Cobalt forums), and the only thing I'd watch is running really resource intensive scripts. Overall, it is probably ideal for you, based on what you described.

http://www.rackshack.net provide a hefty amount of bandwidth.

http://www.cobaltracks.com do a similar deal with no setup.

Make sure you do a search on the forum on both of these companies before deciding.

Also serverhost.com are soon to launch a 700mhz machine with 100GB Bandwidth for $129 per month soon, might be worth checking out.

The only downside with rackshack is they charge per month for upgrades, so if you need more memory or whatever you may go over your budget.

I am with 4webspace.com and I get 100GB per month on a RaQ3 for $99.

The RAM on startup is low though, at 32MB, but at least if you upgrade it, it's only a one off charge.

$0 set up fee, and excellent tech support. Not noticed even one second in downtime in 3 months or so.

A good RaQ 4 with about 256 megs of ram should be enough for you. We have a couple of servers like that with about 220 sites on one and 160 on the other. Off course, those sites only average about half a gig of bandwidth a month each, but some of them use perl/php scripts and the servers handle that without problems.

You can certainly use a RaQ for your site and maybe put a few more as well without problems.

I would recommend rackshack. Their prices are really good and they give you plenty of bandwidth.