Okay...our situation is this :

We've 50 websites for very different clients the last 3 years.
For each site a seperate space of shared hosting was being rent. On a "more quality" server that was.. and also for a high price.

It's like 300€ per year..

So we have like 50 of these accounts... thats 15000€ each year. Kinda stupid, isn't it?

So we figured, it's time to move to the dedicated area.

Then i dont really know what to choose. If we could go with shackrack.... we could be making alot of money.... like 14000 or something...

The only thing that i wonder then is.. how reliable is rackshack?
Each site can be down once in a while, but i hear stories of people's servers being down for weeks!

Another last thing, what's the ideal choice? a raq4 or a AMD, 1GZ, blabla + ensim

Is the company trustworthy enough? And is there (i know you can't expect much) but is there a BASIC support at which you can rely on?

Thanks for reading all this...

:)

*cries* :bawling:

15000 Euro per year for 50 sites? Customer of my dreams, where have you been all my life? ;)

There is nothing wrong with Rackshack. I'm with them myself. 2 Raq's, no problems.

But going from 15000 per year to 1200 per year is a big leap. I assume there is a very good reason why you paid so much for hosting during the last few years. As you said you paid for quality. Is Rackshack good? Yes. Can you get better quality if you spend a lot more money? Ofcourse.
If you spend EUR 5000 per year on hosting those sites, you'll still save EUR 10000.

Since money seems to be no object to you [insert little friendly sarcasm here] I'ld look around a bit more. Maybe a total solution would suit you? One where the host would also take care of monitoring your server, keeping it running, rebooting it when it goes down without you having to do anything? Those things cost money, but save you time and overall adds to the quality of your sites. Rackshack does ofcourse not do those things for the $ 99.- per month.

As to what server to get all depends on how large the sites are. A raq can easily handle 150 normal sites, but only has a 450 mhz processor which can be a problem if all of those 50 sites run a heavy PHP/MySql messageboard.

If you don't want to hassle with administering your own server, keeping the software updated and having to monitor it 24/7 to see if its still running I'ld go for the more expensive "all in" package.

Just my opinion though... :)

Sorry for going off topic but how did you do that € thing? I see it on my keyboard but I cant get it to show. Its on the %/5 key beside the five....

Thank you Pilgrim that was a very useful reply.

Yes that hosting is very expensive ATM... it's like for each account 1GB transfer, 12mb HDSPACE, and 5 emails. For 300€ a year (that's ALTGR-E venom)

Yes we're feeling ripped off...

But our sites were almost never down, so if we switch to another solution, it should remain the same quality for our customers.

that should be possible eh!

Just wondering...
Are you provided any special software worth it?
Or is your server located in Europe? Bandwidth is very expensive here!

Otherwise I would recommend a managed dedicated server.

Originally posted by Walter

Or is your server located in Europe? Bandwidth is very expensive here!


If you look hard enough you can find very competing prices. 300-400 euro for 1mbps for example, burstable up to 10mbps.
One problem europe has compared to the US is the IP policy. Ripe is very hard with IP's these days. Getting more then 8 or 16 ip's on one server is almost impossible.

Originally posted by Walter
Just wondering...
Are you provided any special software worth it?
Or is your server located in Europe? Bandwidth is very expensive here!

Otherwise I would recommend a managed dedicated server.

no not really, it is an NT server.. oh :)

but we're switching over to PHP, so that doesn't matter anymore.

How come bandwidth is so much more expensive here?

If you want to be absolutely certain of uptime and support, I'd suggest you go with Rackspace.com. Still seems cheaper than what you're paying now...

Yes, but unfortunatly, they seem to be out of RaQ4's right now :(

Originally posted by GeorgeC
If you want to be absolutely certain of uptime and support, I'd suggest you go with Rackspace.com. Still seems cheaper than what you're paying now...
I'm not even sure rackspace leases RaQs???