jp_howard
10-20-2001, 12:01 AM
Thanks to all those people who offered advice on selecting a dedicated host. For those who missed the earlier threads, I've been running my IMAP-enabled webmail service, http://fastmail.fm, on a dedicated server at RackSpace (http://www.rackspace.com) and have been very happy with the reliability and service for the last 12 months (before that their network was very unstable). However I've been looking for someone with better pricing (both cheaper, and with a less overpriced upgrade path--Rackspace charges for every little thing by adding a hefty chunk to the monthly fee).
A large number of hosts were suggested, both by customers and vendors. The most surprising discovery was how hard it was to actually complete a purchase. Most vendors could provide a better price than was listed on their web pages--it's off-putting to find high prices listed; but if you email directly you do generally get a better quote. Many online ordering sites had faults that made orders fail. Many sales departments failed to get back to me. The most extreme example is Pegasus Web Technology (http://www.pwebtech.com/), who were univerally praised by their customers, yet all links on their site to pricing and ordering dedicated Linux servers were broken, and a request for a quote was never responded to after a week, despite a reminder! If I'd been their customer and had needed an additional server online fast, I would have been in real trouble...
I had similar mixed messages with BurstNet (http://www.burst.net) who failed to provide a quote when requested, but did so within an hour after I sent a reminder. They also closed my sales ticket before the quote was complete, meaning that I had to re-open a ticket to get them to take my money!
But on the up-side, when I actually got through their convoluted and less-than-robust ticketing system, they were great! I explained that I want minimal up-front cost, and they were flexible enough to bump up the monthly fee a bit and remove the up-front cost altogether, which is great for us because we'll probably be adding quite a few more servers as our customer-base expands. They also offered to provide more advanced configs like private switches and load-balancing for reasonable fees. I've been tracking their network reliability over the last week by pinging their server from Rackspace every 15 seconds. The results are pretty good: 98% of packets returned successfully
99.9% of packet pairs--at least one packet returned
One down-time of 2 minutes, one down-time of 75 secs
Of packets returned successfully, latency <100ms 99% of the time
Latency <300ms 99.7% of the time
Some of the dropped packets may be due to Rackspace rather than Burstnet, although in my experience that is very unlikely. The level of performance I observed is not quite best-practice, but it's good enough for me (if my customers can't handle waiting 2 minutes for their mail once a week, then I guess they'll have to go elsewhere!)
In the end I've decided to try BurstNet. They seem genuinely interested in doing a good job, and their pricing makes trying them out reasonably low risk (30 day money back guarantee). Very impressively, they upgrade all hardware to current specs for free every 6 months--an offer I haven't seen elsewhere. All the complaints I've seen seem to relate to their dreadful ticketing system, which clearly needs a overhaul and a much more disiplined process needs to be followed. Hopefully these problems will be worked out in the near future.
I sure hope that this works out. Shopping for providers has been a frustrating experience. I hope that some vendors out there are listening and consider learning from Rackspace, who I'd say are the leaders in purchasing systems by an order of magnitude. Please, provide your best price on your web page, and provide a form to fully customise orders including CPU, RAM, HDD, and bandwidth pre-purchase. Just let me give you my money with a minimum of fuss, which saves you time and saves me time! Provide ready-to-go preconfigured servers with a guaranteed 24 hours setup time, and 72 hours for customised servers.
A large number of hosts were suggested, both by customers and vendors. The most surprising discovery was how hard it was to actually complete a purchase. Most vendors could provide a better price than was listed on their web pages--it's off-putting to find high prices listed; but if you email directly you do generally get a better quote. Many online ordering sites had faults that made orders fail. Many sales departments failed to get back to me. The most extreme example is Pegasus Web Technology (http://www.pwebtech.com/), who were univerally praised by their customers, yet all links on their site to pricing and ordering dedicated Linux servers were broken, and a request for a quote was never responded to after a week, despite a reminder! If I'd been their customer and had needed an additional server online fast, I would have been in real trouble...
I had similar mixed messages with BurstNet (http://www.burst.net) who failed to provide a quote when requested, but did so within an hour after I sent a reminder. They also closed my sales ticket before the quote was complete, meaning that I had to re-open a ticket to get them to take my money!
But on the up-side, when I actually got through their convoluted and less-than-robust ticketing system, they were great! I explained that I want minimal up-front cost, and they were flexible enough to bump up the monthly fee a bit and remove the up-front cost altogether, which is great for us because we'll probably be adding quite a few more servers as our customer-base expands. They also offered to provide more advanced configs like private switches and load-balancing for reasonable fees. I've been tracking their network reliability over the last week by pinging their server from Rackspace every 15 seconds. The results are pretty good: 98% of packets returned successfully
99.9% of packet pairs--at least one packet returned
One down-time of 2 minutes, one down-time of 75 secs
Of packets returned successfully, latency <100ms 99% of the time
Latency <300ms 99.7% of the time
Some of the dropped packets may be due to Rackspace rather than Burstnet, although in my experience that is very unlikely. The level of performance I observed is not quite best-practice, but it's good enough for me (if my customers can't handle waiting 2 minutes for their mail once a week, then I guess they'll have to go elsewhere!)
In the end I've decided to try BurstNet. They seem genuinely interested in doing a good job, and their pricing makes trying them out reasonably low risk (30 day money back guarantee). Very impressively, they upgrade all hardware to current specs for free every 6 months--an offer I haven't seen elsewhere. All the complaints I've seen seem to relate to their dreadful ticketing system, which clearly needs a overhaul and a much more disiplined process needs to be followed. Hopefully these problems will be worked out in the near future.
I sure hope that this works out. Shopping for providers has been a frustrating experience. I hope that some vendors out there are listening and consider learning from Rackspace, who I'd say are the leaders in purchasing systems by an order of magnitude. Please, provide your best price on your web page, and provide a form to fully customise orders including CPU, RAM, HDD, and bandwidth pre-purchase. Just let me give you my money with a minimum of fuss, which saves you time and saves me time! Provide ready-to-go preconfigured servers with a guaranteed 24 hours setup time, and 72 hours for customised servers.