Hello everybody,

we are tryting to start a small web hosting biz. Right now we are still building our first server (for sure, I will ask questions/opinions regarding this :) )

Still about a few days ago, I was thinking about colocating my server with WHHQ.NET, hwoever since I read a lot of bad things about this company, I am glad that I haven't signed up with them (although their prices are very good, especially for startup company since they charge the traffic usage per GB increment). Personally for me this is good since I have no clue how much traffic I will need, any idea? :confused:

Now, after reading many messages in this forum, I am right considering tera-byte.com and cheapservers.net. Both seems pretty good.

OK... which one is better? Anybody knows?
tera-byte.com :
- offer bandwith in 128kbps increment....
- their IPs are cheap (0.33 cents/IP/month)
- IP included? Name server?
- price for 128k: $81.25 (I am assuming they wont charge the $100 rack charge since my server is in rackmount casis).
- any maintenance fee? remote reboot capable?

cheapservers.net
-Bandwith is burstable (up to? substain bandwith?)
-The sales person said they don't use 95th percentile to determine the traffic usage (cheap! only $2/GB). But I thought using 95th percentile is better? No clue on this.
- IP prices are 'ridiculous', $2/IP/month.
- name servers (primary and secondary) are free.... (how about if my client want to have their own name servers?)
- prices for 2U server with 20 GB traffic/mo is $109.
- maintenance fee is $95/mo (no contract) or $65/mo (with min 2 hrs of contract/month).

Since I live in Connecticut, I won't care much about physical access to the facility.... BTW: any of these two companies being tier 1 data center? Also, if any of you know a good/reasonable price colocation facility near Connecticut, please let mw know....

Your reply will be most appreciated!

Chears,
:beer:

Welcome dektong! I'm originally from CT myself (10 minutes from Bradley Intl. Airport). Although I personally have a server with tera-byte, and I believe they are bigger, and have more users that might tout them, cheapservers seems like a fine place as well (Charles frequents this board). Hopefully you'll find a few users of each (though if both are good, I'm not sure that will help you :))

95% percentile method is definitely not better, you would find it hard to find a case study in regarding to web hosting where the 95% percentile method is beneficial.
Imagine a user uploads a mpeg movie to your site, say it's 100MB and it takes 10 minutes (presuming he's on a T1 or DSL, I wish for those speeds in the UK :) ), which calculates at 1.3kbps for the duration of 10 minutes (megabits are eight times smaller than megabytes). You will then be billed for 95% of 1.3mbps for the whole month which calculates to 3326.9GB per month, imagine the bill for that, whilst in "normal" bandwidth measuring it would flatten out to next to nothing presuming moderate use for rest of the month.

Obviously such speeds are hard to obtain, but the point is still clear, traffic varies (a lot) and unless your traffic is completely stable (such as a ping a minute and nothing else) then it will not work out better.

I can recommend Tera-Byte. I have had a server with them since Match and normally their support is very good and fast. I don't think you can have your own nameservers though - at least I was answered no to that question when I ordered my server.

I can recommend http://www.maxim.net if you are going to use a lot of bandtwidth. For a 200 $ setup fee you can manage your entire DNS records including your own nameservers.

Tox, RE: Maxim, do you have a server there? I was *just* talking to someone who wanted to move out of there who complained that their connection was slowwwwww at maxim.

Dektong, RE: WHHQ, surprisingly, someone said that although support wasn't really existant at WHHQ, they had no complaints and were colo'd with whatever the cheapest plan was ($20/mo-ish I think).

Not that it would be my first choice, I like tera-byte and they've over-impressed me many times. I keep mentioning them only because I really do find it rare when a host exceeds your expectations :) -and am just glad to be somewhere that doesn't have constant problems (past hosts).

Their connection was slow but that was months ago and it have actually never been faster than it is these days. I'm currently on a 3 m/bit connection and pulling around 30 GB daily. A friend of mine is using 50 GB a day and has no problems either.

And - well there was a hardware failure in the first week I had the server but they re-installed everything again and it wasn't that bad as I had told them to install Red Hat all though I wanted Free BSD so I could install that afterwards which was good.

I'm in pretty much the same situation as dektong, looking for a new dedicated server provider (I'm interested in a RaQ4 though; I currently use a RaQ3 and like it a lot). Right now my two "finalists" are datapipe.com and dialtoneinternet.com. I was also considering catalog.com, but their prices for RaQ4s are just a little high.

I still don't understand the 95% rule for bandwidth. On the Dialtone site it says: "We discard the top 5% (36 hours) of heaviest traffic and bill you at that level." What the heck does that mean? It just doesn't seem possible that I'd (for example) have a total of 10 gigs of traffic to/from my server for the month, but get billed $3000 for bandwidth because someone with a DSL connection uploaded a 100 megabyte file.

Anyway, datapipe.com gives ample bandwidth and 20 IPs to start off with, but charges $25 a month for extra blocks of 10 IPs! Dialtone offers unlimited IPs (wow!), but they've got that wacky 95% thing for bandwidth.

If you go to Duster's site http://techcellence.net and find the 95 percentile article (in the web hosting articles somewhere) you'll find a clear, layman-term explanation for it.

Well, another one you might want to check out is tera-byte.com Steve posted something about a special in the advertsing forum, but basically it just asked you to email him ( steve@tera-byte.com ), to get the skinny on it.

[i]

Anyway, datapipe.com gives ample bandwidth and 20 IPs to start off with, but charges $25 a month for extra blocks of 10 IPs! Dialtone offers unlimited IPs (wow!), but they've got that wacky 95% thing for bandwidth. [/B]

Well, my reply might not matter much for you since you want to go with Raq4 (hey, thedy do have a good price for the Raqs). But if you go dedicated server with ECUI.com, then you will get a full class C IP addresses--i.e. the whole 256 IPs--free, included in your monthly fees(at least that is what I was informed regarding their colocation). If you need more, then they will assign another Class C block of IPs for a one-time set up fee of around $200 (no monthly fees, but I need to verify this again). Also, their extra GB traffic is only $1/GB/mo (50 GB increment). You won't get charged if you go over you quota for a month, then you will need to upgrade it the next month. Hos much does datapipe.com charge you for traffic overusage? BTW, ECUI.com does not use 95th percentile also (traffic metered on your port).

This company specializes in Win NT/2000 (hence their dedicated server packages are cheap!). But they can also do linux/apache if you want. The customer/tech are really knowledgable.

just adding possibilities to your list.

cheers,
:beer: