A friend is looking to move his Mail and Web server to Tera to save on using a few T1's. I suggested Tera-Byte, and am wanting to hear about people's Co-Location experiences. Where he lives has bad bandwidth to Vancouver BC so max connection is 20KB/sec. I have seen with my own eyes that the Connection is fast when I downloaded a PHP upgrade via SSH to his server got over 200KB/sec.

We will be using G4's, and looks like will have to cram them into 4U cases.

Looking at the pricing structure, bandwidth scales very nicely between plans. if your using 15GB-40GB use the $30 plan if 50GB-95GB the $95 plan and so on.

I heard your allowed to use a switch to connect your servers. This would be useful to have a backup server to backup the main servers to nightly etc. With that, is their internal IP's or will the networking between servers be over the Internet? I don't want to use up bandwidth to backup between the servers 2 feet from each-other.

So basicly what have people's experiences been?I am with them for shared for one of my sites still, and my main Mac site is hosted with my friend. BTW How do you get Mac OS X to bind multiple IP's so some sites can have a dedicated IP? is it as simple as doing <VirtualHost IP adress>?

You also have to configure the ethernet interface to listen to all of those different IPs :-)

Originally posted by Mac Write
I have seen with my own eyes that the Connection is fast when I downloaded a PHP upgrade via SSH to his server got over 200KB/sec.

That's actually not very fast at all. I download the PHP upgrades from php.he.net and I push a full 100Mbit (over 10MB/sec.) Java downloads at 7.1MB/sec. 200KB/sec is right around 2Mbit... not that great. You could get pretty much the same performance off a T1 (a T1 will max at about 175K/sec.)

We will be using G4's, and looks like will have to cram them into 4U cases.

Why not pick up a couple XServes? They're 1U rackmountable, so they won't take up as much space.

Most people who use G4s put them on a shelf and put two of them side by side. This takes up about 8U. Not very cost-effective, IMHO. Sell the G4s and go for the XServes. :)

Originally posted by Simpli-Erica
That's actually not very fast at all. I download the PHP upgrades from php.he.net and I push a full 100Mbit (over 10MB/sec.) Java downloads at 7.1MB/sec. 200KB/sec is right around 2Mbit... not that great. You could get pretty much the same performance off a T1 (a T1 will max at about 175K/sec.)



Why not pick up a couple XServes? They're 1U rackmountable, so they won't take up as much space.

Most people who use G4s put them on a shelf and put two of them side by side. This takes up about 8U. Not very cost-effective, IMHO. Sell the G4s and go for the XServes. :)

Just a few quick corrections..

200 Kbyte/sec ~= 1.6 Mbits/sec
T1 = 1.54 Mbits/sec ~= 192kbytes/sec

he doesn't have the money for XServes. The G4's will be fine for a couple of years until he can afford XServes (on both of our wishlists) he is not rich you know. Just starting out with my site doing the most bandwidth :)

Originally posted by Mac Write
A friend is looking to move his Mail and Web server to Tera to save on using a few T1's. I suggested Tera-Byte, and am wanting to hear about people's Co-Location experiences. ...

I started with Tera-Byte with a RAQ3 a few years ago and I upgraded to a colo'd FreeBSD server about 2 years ago.

It has been a very positive experience having my server in their data center. The power stability has been excellent. My server has not seen a power problem in nearly a year, before that it was over a year. The network has good throughput for my needs. The techs have been very knowledgeable and capable with my support requests. One late Friday evening my server crashed and it was taking a loooooonnnngggg time for the fsck before the server could come up again. I emailed the support address and asked for a progress report. The tech replied minutes later giving me a status report and saying, "don't worry, I'll stay here until your server is back up." That gave me comfort, knowing my server was 2,000 miles away from me.

I'm on the lowest priced colo plan ($30 per month), and I still get very good service.

I highly recommend the Tera-Byte colo service.

Is it still a one-man company? I was considering using them a while ago (never did) but every time I called (on several occasions, different times, different dates) the same guy picked up. I'm not against one-man companies, I'm just curious.

Originally posted by mno
Is it still a one-man company? I was considering using them a while ago (never did) but every time I called (on several occasions, different times, different dates) the same guy picked up. I'm not against one-man companies, I'm just curious.

I called a year and a half ago when we were discussing going with them and different guys answered. Please note that they ALWAYS answered, no matter which time I called.
The only downside is that I had trouble trusting them wit hmy servers, I prefered going to the facility and watch them install it. So I opted for a location that I could do this (Peer1 - Montreal).

You should contact Peer1 Vancouver and ask them a list of their customers. Then contact these customers and ask them how much they would charge you to place your servers in their cage. Peer1 has a DC in British Columbia, with quite a few hosting companies that will be very happy to sell you space there.

Originally posted by mno
Is it still a one-man company? ...

No. It was not a one-man company during the time that I have used their services.

To be honest, I can't make that claim [one-man company] either. That was just how they seemed to me several years ago. Thanks for your responses.

I have been using Tera-Byte for over a year now and have nothing but good things to say about them.

In terms of Datacenter, they are staffed 24/7/365 - have a killer air conditioning system and always answer the phone / support emails within a few minutes.

I can also state as fact, that they are not a 1-Man operation and haven't been since I've been hosting there.

For network they have 4 Gigs of Multihomed Connectivity that I know of.

Ryan