Hello everyone,

Ok, so I'm thinking of moving to a new dedicated server company. I'm currently with Ventures Online (Data393) and have been with them for about 3 or 4 years now. I was LITERALLY one of thier first customers.

But my hosting business has shrunk a little over the years because I haven't been able to focus entirely too much on sales.

Anyways, so I'm currently paying:

$199 for
Xeon 2.4Ghz
HD1 80GB
HD2 40GB
512Meg Ram
300GB Bandwidth/m

Add on a $30 cpanel license and another $27.50 for 88 IPs.

Currently each customer has their own IP address. But I'm thinking I'm going to move them all (or most) to named-based hosting.

First off, should I do that? I mean 27 isn't THAT much but it all adds up.

Ok, so secondlly... VO/Data393 I would consider pretty darn reliable. I've been with them for so long, I'm trying to figure out the dedicated server market again.

I'm trying to understand self-managed (server beach), managed (server matrix), and fully managed (the planet). Does anyone have any ideas what VO/Data393 would catagorize themselves as?

I guess I'm trying to find a solution that is "back-peddling" to a cheaper service but not "downgrading" the service since I don't want to send an email to my customers saying, hey, we're downgrading! But I need to save some money.

I could save $1000/year if I could find something under $172/m.

The few ded places that struck a fancy so far are ServerMatrix, ServerBeach, The Planet, and Media Temple appliance server. But I haven't looked too hard yet. Contract with VO/Data393 ends in December.

Any suggestions, help, insight?!

Thanks so much everyone!



Added: Oh, also... is it easy to move my clients information and data over from the cpanel server at VO/Data393 to another cpanel server?

I would recommend looking at GNAX. They offer competitive pricing and good quality servers.

As for namebased it all depends on what your clients expect, what platform, who has SSL, etc... That comes down to a business decision because you know your clients, no one else does.

As for management, how much of the work do you do yourself? If there is a problem do you call VO/Data393 everytime or do you primarily handle it yourself? If you handle it yourself you might as well go with self-managed or semi-managed service.

I guess I pretty much handle stuff by myself. I don't really have too many problems. Cpanel handles pretty much everything. I've used VO/Data393 every now and then to install zend and some other server things, but cpanel can do that stuff now.

As far as namedbased goes, none of my clients use thier own ssl cert and I don't really think they need thier own ip. A couple use it when I tell them to for thier email server instead of thier domain name when something happens with thier domain.

Do you have a link for gnax? Thanks btw for the response ddihosting!

www.gnax.net has links to all resellers

www.tranxactglobal.com is them.

The IP would be the same for email. GNAX is .50 an IP with the first 8 free so you would probably want to cut that number down.

Contact chris@cyberwurx.com, I'm sure they could do something for you. BTW, I have yet to find any downtime for the past 9-11 months with them.

Well I'm adding Sago to the short list. Any experience with thier ded. servers?

Originally posted by IntraHost
Well I'm adding Sago to the short list. Any experience with thier ded. servers?

Yes.

Network is rock solid and improving. 99.999% uptime guranteed... Very good. High quality hardware (no problems here). Also, support was very fast when I needed it.

Server Matrix managed means they will automatically path the OS for you if it is Windows or Red Hat. The Planet is not fully managed. You get one hour of admin time per month and if you ask them to do something that takes 5 minutes, they charge the full hour, anything past that, they charge you $75 an hour...

Just wanted to update whomever is interested... but we decided to renegotiate with Data393 and are really happy about the decision.

Thanks everyone for your input!