I am wanting to get a dedicated server, and start a hosting company. I have been looking at BurstNet, and they seem pretty good, but they have had some downtimes in the past month or so. I was looking through the forums and found RackShack. They have great prices, and it seems to good to be true. I would like to know is it? I have read that they have a slow ping. So...Would I be best off not using them? How is there downtime?
How is there support?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

well rackshack use to be a really good company. but they just moved to a big new NOC and are having some "issues". While I'm keeping an eye on them myself right now I'd be a bit worried. perhaps in a month or two they'll get their network all finished and running smooth they'll be worth checking out...

Rackshack are 100% excellent.

I have two servers with them. One Plesk, One Ensim.

The Plesk is for personal R&D work.

The amount of bandwidth and the spec of the machine supplied far exceeds what you'd normally get for 99usd per month.

Although the setup fee can put some people off, http://99servers.com can provide Rackshack servers w/o the setup cost, but for about half-again monthly.

The only one thing I would like to see from Rackshack is some real indepth anti-spam resources and config info for Qmail, as both Plesk and Ensim run on Qmail and it's a nightmare.

I am not a reseller for 99servers.com, so I don't gain anything by mentioning them here.

Kind regards

DT
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The products themselves seem decent except the way they are setup can be a little questionable. Downtime isn't much of a problem (only an electric problem recently kept the servers down for a couple of minutes but it happend like 3x in an hour) but according to some people the network wasn't down till another 20 days earlier.

Support I believe is the only problem in this case. They cannot provide adequate support in this case and it's hard to afford very good support when your only getting $100 bucks a month from clients. I think that if you have a very good amount of linux experience or are resourceful you will be okay. You can get support from this forum but it may or may not be enough.

BTW, it could take up to 5 days to get things like new ips. I got my server from them 3 days ago and ordered additional ips (4 total) and haven't received them yet.

*The five days is based on an account from a friend who has a Cobalt Raq server with them. I'm not sure if it takes longer but people have received them in less then 24hrs as well in the past.

I would choose Bust.NET over Rackshack, the server spec may not be as good as RS, but the monthly fee can be slightly more, but they're support should be better. I say *should* be because I've never been a Bust.NET customer, but I may be in the future.

You could probably get the setup fee knocked off, if you ask them nicely.

Alan

Thanks

Happy RS customer here.

Network issues with new NOC not really serious, like moving into a new home and finding all the light switches :eek:

Good pricing, good thruput.

Shortness

Since you are a customer, in your opinion are there servers slow?

Rackshack is good about 95% of the time, everything works ok nothing exceptional. But the other 5% is downtime, sometimes due to a server crash you cant really avoid, network issues, dropping screw drivers in the UPS :rolleyes:

Rackshack IMHO isnt stable enough to provide the 99% uptime most people expect, it could well be in a few months though. I have some people I host that have been though alot, suprised they actually still host with me. I dont run a real webhosting company, but I provide hosting to some people I no.

good prices, too good to be true.. I bought it last week, and the server was fast for about one day.. now it is really slow and the server crashes alot.

Thanks a lot for your advice/opinions!

I think that I will go with BurstNet for now, and I will check back in a few months and see whats going on with Rackshack then.

However if you still have comments, please post them and let me know.

Thanks,

Happy Rackshack customer here!

Signed on a few days ago, 75 clients now on the server, all are happy and love ensim!

Originally posted by Design123
Since you are a customer, in your opinion are there servers slow?

In a word, no, they are just as good as anyone, better than many.

The networking issues brought on by their move to new datacenter have caused a hickup or two but whoever below suggests that they have 95% uptime is quite wrong. It's way better than that.

I wont diss any other providers here but I'd strongly suggest doing a keyword search on any that you mention, I've heard a lot of desparately bad things about some of them.

Shortness

Good choice, Design123. In maybe about 6 months time, I might consider Rackshack too, when they have a chance to settle into their new data center and they've got their new employees hired.

Alan

I guess there are certain problems you just have to live with, anywhere you go.

I for myself am a happy RS customer and will definitely get more servers from them.


Cyborg