Hosting of 100 small static sites plus 10 sites with little MySQL databases on FULLY MANAGED linux with good control panel. Total disk usage = 4 GB, Total mail accounts = 2000, Total transfer = 50 GB/mo. Total uptime = 99.99%

Which hosting solution would Experts recommend, Reseller/VDS/Dedicated?

What configuration?

Whats your budget, you could get a fully managed virtual server that could handle that a lot cheaper than a fully managed server.

Seems like a reseller account would do the trick. VDS has a few inherent problems in my opinion (I'll explain why). Dedicated is too expensive for the resources you would be using.
VDS does have a few advantages over shared hosting, but it also has a few disadvantages.

Advantages to VDS:
1) One customer can't crash another customer's services (Apache, OS, etc).
2) One customer can't consume all of YOUR resources because each customer is guaranteed resources.

Disadvantages to VDS:
1) If you are the customer who needs a lot of resources, even for a split second, they won't be available to you in a VDS environment. In a good shared enviornement, your site will get the bandwidth it needs, the CPU power it needs, etc when it needs it and if it is available (not being used by others). If this causes a problem for your host, it is their responsiblity to upgrade the bandwidth or upgrade you to a new package. In a VDS environment, your puny amount of CPU power and RAM may not be enough and your site will crash. The other customers on the server will be fine, but you won't.

2) Cost. The host can't split up the server like they can with shared hosting. Even the customers who have no idea they don't need a VDS still get their "guaranteed" resources. This increases the price a lot and frankly, there isn't much reason for this. The power devoted to the guy running a 1 page personal site will not be available for you when you need it for your site.

3) Some think the extra reliability is great. Fact is, any hardware problem or glitch in the VDS software will still cause the whole thing to crash. Any decent shared host will stop a customer who is abusing resources and in that case, reliability is no worse.

4) It is just like having a dedicated server, costs almost as much, but is much less powerful. A "fully managed" dedicated server, just like a "fully managed" VDS, is still harder on the admin than a "fully managed" reseller account. This depends a lot on the level of management. Any shared hosting account is automatically managed. The more management you need for a dedicated server or VDS, the higher the price.

I dont know what virtual servers you have used but you are wrong. I use virtuozzo, each virtual server can burst upto the full speed of the server. So you are wrong about that.

You can get fully managed virtual servers for only $5/more than some of the popular reseller providers, and you dont need to know anything about administrating a server to use one.

There are also more benefits to having your own virtual server. With a reseller what happens if another one of your hosts customers lets a spammer on the server. Yeah, the whole server gets black listed and your mail will be affected. As mail is sent from your own ip if you have a virtual server you wouldnt be affected if that happened.

You can also do things like set up your own resellers, and install any software you like. Can you do that with a reseller account? Nope.

That's a pretty big account for reselling. I think a VDS is a good choice for that environment.

John, until you've really done your research, please don't spead FUD about VDS hosting. Memory is about the only thing that isn't burstable in a VDS. Based on whtaddict03's requirements, VDS is a very nice fit.

What SplashHost.com and John said, makes me feel that I am between a rock and a hard place. I am sure they were both right from their perspective but I am more confused now :(
Budget = $125-$200
Concern = Uptime

Which of these Reseller/VDS/Dedicated has the highest potential for uptime within the above budget?

Im not sure if you would be able to get a fully managed server for that price. You can definately get a fully managed vps for that price, if not less.

whtaddict03,

Your budget is not out of line for a dedicated server, but I'm not sure how managed you will get. Two providers you might check out in this regard:

www.nocster.com
www.servermatrix.com

I've used both and found www.servermatrix.com to be the most responsive.

For a VDS you may run into some problems, but it really depends on your needs as to whether or not you are affected. If utilizing a Virtuozzo powered VDS with CPanel then you may run into problems with disk quotas. This is fairly easy to get around and requires periodic updates performed by the provider, but make sure you ask your potential provider if they know how to get around it before giving them your money. If disk quotas are not an issue for you then you have no worries.

Plesk in Virtuozzo (2.5+) works without trouble, disk quotas work perfectly.

DirectAdmin also works very well with Virtuozzo.

There are other VDS implementations using various technologies as well. It seems you hear less about Ensim these days, but there are providers out there. Also User Mode Linux is mentioned quite a bit. This is what http://www.linode.com uses (with a beautifull members facility), and it works well but I don't think you can burst CPU usage.

Of course, do some research. You can get what you want for a bit less than your budget currently allows or you can go with the dedicated server and have plenty of room to grow.

yeah, post#3 is totally off about VPS/VDS. and even memory is burstable, though not all available, but there's a guaranteed minimum and possible maximum limits when setting up a VDS.

125$ would get you a full virtual P4-like server with 512Megs of ram, so you'd easily have some room to grow.

I'd say, go with either servint (though they are having uptime issues lately due to software problems on one of the host machines, but other than that it was a solid experience so far) or some other quality VDS hosts, for example one of the posters in this thread is transparently hinting that you check out his signature ;)

The only real drawback of VDS is that if VDS software is buggy, you can suffer 40-50 minute long reboots (host machines tend to have large disk arrays which are *very* slow to get up). If the possibility of having 40 minute downtime (if everything goes wrong) is unacceptable, probably your own dedicated is the only choice. Reseller acc has too much limitations and should be out of question for account with 100+ hosts, imo.

you can suffer 40-50 minute long reboots


That is one draw back, each virtual server needs to be started one a time once the main server is back up.

Hi :)

Just my little added extra here... :)

Whether or not you can get a fully managed dedicated for your budget depends on what exactly you require with 'fully managed'. The term varies quite a bit between providers, so if you do go in the dedicated direction, just remember to thoroughly check out what's included in the management package before you decide.

Getting a reseller or vds will probably be more resource efficient for you as you won't have bundles left over that your're not using.

Good Luck in your search!

Did check out the signatures. Also liked DizixCom views :)

I have already experienced those avoidable 40 min - 4 hour unacceptable downtimes :(

The only support I have ever needed is when something/service stops working. Fully managed to me means "They automatically take care of downtime when it occurs or at other times take care of issues fast when I report"

Reed says servint does not have a dedicated less than $239 with control panel, even if I need only 50 GB /mo.

Still have not found a solution. Need more research, luck and suggestions ?

40 mins yes, 4 hours no. Shouldnt take that long.

how you describe it, you are not looking for a managed server at all :) and 4hours... i doubt it. 40 minutes and not like it should happpen often. once per year if host software is not being buggy? :)

With UMl what it is possible to do is use a thing called Cow (Copy on Write). The main can be a standalone read only file and then everything on top of that is stored in the COW file. Also using things like journaling filesystem it is possible to recover quite quickly from a crash

All the main images are ideally held in buffer and jourinaling can bring a filesystem back quicker. So reboot time of < 10 minutes are possible if well tuned. If someone however is on non-journlaing, like ext2 then it might take a while for the server to come back

Rus

Just expanding on what JVDS said, with UML you don't have to wait that long to bring back up each VDS, especially if most are using the same master image. For example, if ten people have a VDS with a 10GB disk image and RedHat 9 installed, it won't take that much longer to boot up than just one person. It only has to access the startup files once instead of ten times (there's exceptions, such as if you upgraded your system, and some files don't match what you originally had). You're looking at minutes to bring everyone back up.

Plus, you'd assume your host would use only the highest quality parts for their VDS servers, since if one crashes everyone's affected. I personally don't skimp on anything, have RAID-1 setup (even on the swap partitions), good power supply, high-end motherboard, brand-name RAM, etc. A cheap dedicated server...you never know the quality of parts you're getting. May be good, may be whatever they had left over. Higher quality of parts, mean better reliability.

Few other points. UML can burst to the full cpu if needed. Now, there's no way to say these packages get 100MHz guaranteed, these get 500MHz, etc. There is a work-around though, just simply "nice" the UML processes to guarantee more CPU usage to the higher-end accounts, if you wish. Also while it can't technically burst to use all RAM, it is possible to end up using more RAM than you've allocated, if it's available. Basically you have to remember UML runs as a regular process on the host machine (as does every other VDS software I know of). If there's plenty of RAM available, the host server may put parts of the disk image in its RAM cache. It should only do this, if the other UML processes don't need RAM for themselves.

Originally posted by piramida
how you describe it, you are not looking for a managed server at all :) and 4hours... i doubt it. 40 minutes and not like it should happpen often. once per year if host software is not being buggy? :)


ENSIM Pro VPS appears to take 4-6 hours to be back up after running fsck on all the disks :( Depends on the amount of data on the disks, I guess. Couple of questions:

1. Do these actually exist? -> fully managed servers with only 50-100 GB/mo. Or does one have to always pay for 500-750 GB/mo, whatever the usage?

2. Is this semi-managed or fully managed->Application of patches, software upgrades, monitoring, re-booting, occasional advice, fixing service/something automatically or upon-request.

Originally posted by whtaddict03

1. Do these actually exist? -> fully managed servers with only 50-100 GB/mo. Or does one have to always pay for 500-750 GB/mo, whatever the usage?

2. Is this semi-managed or fully managed->Application of patches, software upgrades, monitoring, re-booting, occasional advice, fixing service/something automatically or upon-request.

1: Sure they do. Just place a request in the appropriate forum and you'll be flooded with offers

2: That would be managed in my books. But the question you should answer: is that enough managed for you or too much? :)