Anyone has experience with them?

http://www.dedicated-servers.co.uk

There prices look good until you see that bandwidth costs £20+VAT per GB, and backup solutions start from £149+VAT per month. Most hosts nowadays backup their clients machines with only a nominal charge if any.

I would suggest a look at tera-byte for Raqs or Ultraspeed for normal dedicated servers.

Webfusion - has a very fast network but like all uk hosts they charge an arm and a leg.

I would recommend talking to kdawebservices via humanclick,icq or yahoo as he seems very professional and is a uk host with good prices.

I guess one good thing about dedicated-servers.co.uk is that they are using RaQ4. Tera-byte 4webspace uses RaQ3.

Btw, is RaQ4 and better than RaQ3?
Which one would you prefer?

Check http://www.cobalt.com for the spec. sheets. Yes, it is better. Faster processor, preinstalled SQL and pHp, etc... (overall similar machine).

From what I hear a lot of Raq4s now have AMD500 processors in them as Cobalt can't get 450s anymore.

Well, I've been using one of Webfusion's RaQ4s and I'm pretty happy.

How can anyone say that £99 a month with no setup is pricey for a RaQ4 with 128Mb of RAM? There is a minimum 12-month contract and 5Gb a month bandwidth is not as generous as some. But I do make use of the Chillisoft asp software (£800 otherwise) and the bundled Interbase software is a useful addition if you commit to that route - I'm still evaluating it at present.

I'm not ready for a full-blown Linux server just yet, and Webfsion support has been good so far, as has reliability. I have about 60 sites on the RaQ4, with two sites being very busy. It just hums along nicely and has been brilliantly reliable thus far. I am in the process of moving accounts from Fasthosts, so this is bliss by comparison...

As a step up from shared virtual server accounts it's ideal if you want more control over things.

Don't fiddle with the server too much though - and the more you read about Cobalt the more you'll be wise to think of the next move upwards - they are a great half-way house until you get more ambitious and then you'll be ripe for the hairy-chested world of real Linux machines!

David

I often think that a lot of us with windows machines dont realize what a 300mhz can do, we have long since forgotten about our 300mhz computers. I for one am only up to a 600mhz but.....

In any event, if you need the raq4i software, INTERBASE, CHILIASP. then you should find a raq4 since it's included, if you dont need to have chiliasp, and the interbase, then get a raq3, and install mysql, it takes all of 2 minutes to install mysql, then install php. PHP takes longer to upload to your server than it does to install.

All Raq's when given enough memory run nicely, and are great for newbies to linux administration. Some things to keep in mind.

We had a raq4i, with 128mb of ram and were using it for hosting, well, each site that you setup with asp has to open another asp server (or so Im told), what we found was that with just 25 domains on the server all with asp, we were running with like 8k free memory and more often running on swap space. So up that memory if your going to be running asp on a raq, you'll need it especially if your hosting sites on there.

The processor Im now thinking is not nearly as important as the memory, in the example of a 450 vrs 300 I dont think that the *average* joe will need more than that to run a site or a hosting service, because the majority of programas run on the server are your own, they are httpd mysql etc. etc. etc. Its not like your running dreamweaver or golive or internet explorer on the server, when you can get a 3i from 4webspace.com for only $99.99 a month, you can NOT justify spending so much more for a 4 machine unless of course you need to have chiliasp on your machine and dont want to spend the $695 for it, keeping in mind that it IS available for the raq3 for an additional price.

The nicest thing about the raq4 is the software especially if your hosting, as you can turn on and off php for each domain as well as chiliasp, whereas in the raq3, it's either on or not for everyone, unless you can tweak things somewhere to turn it off for certain virtual domains, I havnt looked that far into it.

Bbox

My main gripe about webfusion was the fact that they charge a fortune for backup systems, £149 + VAT per month is a lot of money.

Well quite honestly, for those on a raq server you can do your own backups and backup the entire server configs and all users email web space etc.

Now on a dialup connection this is almost impossible, I did one the other night and it was a 39mb backup file. Too long to do on a dialup, but for $69.00 I can get the new satellite dish that will download this type of backup in about 2 minutes.

For £149+vat Im not in the uk so I have no idea what that translates to in US monies, but I know it's a lot, dont know whether or not you folks have affordable sattelite or cable or dsl, but if you do it would be wiser to just go with one of those services and make your own backups twice weekly, I know for US customers with those connections it would be a lot cheaper. Just make sure to do the backups, and burn them onto two cd's just incase something goes wrong.

I do have a disclaimer on my hosting site that states that I dont do backups of users files, and that all users have the ability to backup their own sites using their control panels. I imagine this is perceived that I dont care about our users, when I really do, but unfortunately until the new satellite system comes out later this month I can't spend the hours and hours doing a backup twice weekly, when it would only take the users like 30 minutes to backup their sites locally. I also know that even when the host does do backups, they are not responsible for the users site info. We had a virtual account with a very good host, and they had a hacker, cracker whatever breakinto the server and destroy everything, their most recent backup was no good, they sent it to England to a specialist, who could only recover parts of the tape, for us it was a total wipeout, we had no recourse, we couldnt sue (nor would we have wanted to) our webhost. It was our own fault for not making backups on our own. So..... Get dsl, sattellite cable whatever is affordable, and just use the backup system on the raq's to backup all data and configurations, it is quick to do with highspeed connections, at least for US customers.

Hmmm, I just grabbed a total backup of my server and it was over 74 Mb. Even on DSL it took a bit.

Originally posted by Chicken
Hmmm, I just grabbed a total backup of my server and it was over 74 Mb. Even on DSL it took a bit.

Yeah, it will of course depend on how many sites are on your server and how much diskspace that they use too.

When we had a cable connection it would take us along the lines of 2 to 5 minutes to download a 25mb file so it will vary, but if you already have a high speed connection than using it for backups certainly wont hurt to do twice a week or even once a week.

Regards,
Bbox

What surprised me is that I *don't* have many sites on the server, and the ones that are on it are relatively small. It isn't one of those 30 Gb HDs either, so I can only imagine what a fully packed server would produce for a backup file.

I agree, on my raq4i I downloaded a 39mb backup file, that was with only one real site on it, that had about 3 mb of files, so the rest of it was purely the confiuration and server files.

Im at a wonder what happens when i try to restore this backup from a raq4i to a raq3i, Im thinking that it will throughly mess it up, or it might just overwrite all the important info with the info from the old server and basically install the raq4i software onto this raq3i machine.

I dont think I want to be the guinee pig in this experiment so I'll let someone else try first.