I just found RackShack's 1GHz Intel / 512 Ram / 300 GB Bandiwdth / 2 40 GB hard drive deal for $100/month and I am really excited. What are the drawbacks?

Questions:

1.) I take it RackShack can offer 300GB and an Intel 1GB cpu for $100/month on the premise that not everyone will use that much (the same philosophy that shared servers use to provide so much since if everyone used all that they couldn't afford to offer those prices.) Will they really allow you to use all 300GB though and then buy more at $1.50 a GB if I went over. This seems like an unbelievably good deal.

2.) I don't see mention of any uptime gaurantee - do you have a gaurantee on network uptime and/or server hardware failures. I'm just wondering what the turn around time might be if for example the motherboard or a hard drive crashed to replace it. And at these low prices, is the network likely to be down for a long time or a lot? Will these servers be able to achieve 99.5-99.8% uptime?

3.) Also I notice that in their TOS/AUP the fines could be huge if your server was hacked, for example $175/hour plus $250 for the first warning if someone hacked into your server and sent spam. Is this fairly typical? The hourly fee could really add up fast if there were ever a problem. Also I notice the statement that " If you dispute a charge to your credit card issuer that, in RackShack's sole discretion is a valid charge under the provisions of the TOS and /or AUP, you agree to pay RackShack an "Administrative Fee" of not less than $50 and not more than $150." I guess what I'm asking is how fair minded they are and if these statements are just to protect themselves, or if anyone has had a bad experience with them.

Actualy I have heard of people using 500GB+ BW a month without being over charged. But yes they proably do over sell.
They have a lot of "pipes" to route out data, including a Conget gig-e conection as well as some OC-3 and DS-3 lines. Right now it seems like they are only running at 25%-30% capacity, also I have heard they are getting a couple more gig-e conections from different companies, so that will bring the total bandwidth up even more.

I visited RackShack yesturday, and I was stunned when looking at their deals. :cool:

Unbelievable. :cool:

My personal opinion is that if you have a small budget , host with a small/medium sized, company you have heard of before . Somehow when problems arise, you'll probably have a better chance of getting good customer service, since they have less problems to deal with. Unless of course you have loads of cash and can go with a very reputable large host that will treat you like a king. Of course, thats just my opinion :rolleyes:

Small budget or just starting out = RackShack
Want to do high performance hosting = anyone good

I'm really excited about this price so I appologize for all the questions, but a few more:

4. I would be interested if anyone has monitored their site's uptime on a rackshack server over say a month or more what the uptime numbers looked like.

5. What is the maximum speed you can download at - I remember on ***** the maximum for one file was 20 Kbps because of some cap so downloading larger PDF's and tif image files on a slow line could be slow. What is the maximum throughput on one of these rackshack intel servers?

6. What would be better about a much more expensive similarily speced server at dialtown or rackspace that might justify spending more?

You can read about rackshack at their own forums (has lots of praises and critiques)

forum.rackshack.net (http://forum.rackshack.net)

Small budget or just starting out = RackShack
Want to do high performance hosting = anyone good
netsolutions, I don't want to put you on the spot, but could you please go into a little more detail. It sounds like you have experience with Rackshack, so what specifically would be lacking?

From Rackspace.com
Same specs (as close as I could find, they didn't say processor type)
setup - $500
monthly - $1300 (I think, their system is slighly confusing)
where does most of the cost come from? The BandWidth, RackSpace's bandwidth was like $800 for 300gb a month.
Basicly what you get is:
true 24/7/365 people there (although rackshack is going to be adding 24/7/362 + people that will come to the NOC to fix stuff on the 3 days off at their new NOC)
Higher "quality" bandwidth (More providers, bigger companies, etc)
More options (at rackshack you can have any server as long as it is a 1ghz machine with 512megs of ram)
Backup options (Rackshack doesn't offer this, I am sure if they did they would please a lot of people)
More NOC's (Need servers in the UK, they have a NOC there)
More highend options (Such as clustring, dedicated DB server, more choices in OS's)

If you need some really secure hosting, I advise you to check out http://www.thebunker.net/ ;)

Originally posted by scott2
Also I notice the statement that " If you dispute a charge to your credit card issuer that, in RackShack's sole discretion is a valid charge under the provisions of the TOS and /or AUP, you agree to pay RackShack an "Administrative Fee" of not less than $50 and not more than $150

Can they do that? Do most credit card issuers allow it?

joe52 that was exactly my thought. I can see a clause which said "you agree that if you dispute a charge and we provide evidence showing that our charge is legitimate, you agree to pay an hourly fee for our time to handle this" (which shouldn't take that long since they should already have the evidence but in any case would be fair so long as they could account for the original TOS or AUP charge) but for the clause to say whether they are right or wrong, just for disputing you agree to pay more money seems suspect to me... I wonder what would happen if you kept disputing the dispute fee?

Originally posted by joe52


Can they do that? Do most credit card issuers allow it?

Depending on your contract, some can.

What it really comes down to is IF it was a chargeback that shouldn't have been. If you chargeback for valid reasons, and they charge you for the chargeback, they get in trouble. I think Weinbar has this with their CC processor too. But only on valid cause, when a chargeback shouldn't have been issued. You have to realize it costs most companies almost $30 when someone does this, not to mention time wasted fighting it, etc...

The fact that rackshack's policy does not differentiate between a valid and an invalid chargeback makes me skeptical. It just doesn't seem right that even if you proved yourself to be innocent you still have to pay their fee. I guess further I'm wondering about the fact that everything is "in RackShack's sole discretion" (whether you have violated the TOS or AUP and whether it is a valid charge) and to even debate this will cost you even more. I guess the easy thing to do would be to add $150-$500 to the cost of the year's hosting in case something happened "in RackShack's sole discretion" and if they charge this for whatever reason you already have it budgeted so you don't have to fight any bogus charges and if not you have some extra spending money :)

I guess that's a good question - if you have a dedicated server how much money do you have to have in the bank to cover the host's charges and your libility to the host (not to clients-just curious if you're using it only for your own sites) if the server should be exploited/cracked?

One major complaint I have about RackShack.net is their current slow turnaround time for reboots. For example, once my machine went down on the weekend and it took almost 24 hours for them to reboot it because no one was in the colocation facility where my machine was hosted. I complained about this on their forum and HeadSurfer (the CEO) said that this situation will improve once they're finished moving into the new facility.

Other than that, their network seems to be of high quality. If they can fix the support turnaround time, it would be great.

As for not having backups, I intend to just perform my own backups. I have two RackShack servers and I will set them up to back each other up (not trivial to do, but once it's done it's done).

Originally posted by scott2


4. I would be interested if anyone has monitored their site's uptime on a rackshack server over say a month or more what the uptime numbers looked like.


I have been monitoring my raqs for about 4 months now.
Their network was down once for all customers for a few hours. Thats all.

11.01.2001 01:05 No reply 1 hour, 12 mins
10.31.2001 23:51 No reply 55 mins