I have been a reseller for a year now being very pleased with it but unhappy with my current provider. I am off looking for another provider or dedicated hosting service and having serious thoughts about getting a co-located service, but after reading about 30% of this board and surfing on all the sites related to most of the posts for about 5 hours I am still rather discouraged.

For instance:
I am thinking about coolresellers.com that uses Virtualis.com which I see in these message boards is a bad deal. While I love the pricing of coolresellers they seem to me to be way low use support pages off another service and it's a new company who's owners are another company from what I have gathered from searching The State of Florida's Online DBA and they are slow to respond to E-mail in my opinion.

Then I go looking on here and see 4webspace.com and tera-byte.com which seems to be a fairly good talked about provider but after reading a 6 page printed out Acceptable Use Policy for a dedicated server. Then finally you get to the bottom parts where they are not responsible for up to 24 hours of scheduled or unscheduled service interruption. Tera-byte says with redundant internet connections and back-up power you'll be up 24 hours/day, 365 days/year. In Penalties part a $500.00 fee payable by the Account holder and the user for abuse of the system with no clear definition of what abuse is. Then there is network performance in which I seem to gather what the server I lease/rent does affects everyone else leading me to believe this is actually a shared server. So can someone shed some light into what a dedicated server is and what I can expect?

So now I will surf more messages and go back to my surfing and try to find more answers and more questions.

BTW: notice the user name and take it easy please everyone starts somewhere.

P.S. If anyone knows of some good up to dated books I can spend some cash on to help learn this a little better please let me know.

With a dedicated server you have a machine all to yourself. But you still share network bandwidth with all the other servers on the network.

While 24 hours does seem to be excessive, It still translates out to a ok uptime, and from what Ive seen alone from a few things like some power failures etc, they have had very little downtime.

I don't have a server of my own, but my understanding of this terminology is as follows:

Co-location: Is where I _OWN_ the server and rent rack space at a data center, where my server will be located together with others (co-located).

Dedicated hosting: Is where I _RENT_ an entire server at a data center, which will be "dedicated" to my hosting needs (not shared).

So the only difference between "co-location" and "dedicated" is who owns the server, that's how I understand it.

Maybe Dedicated hosting (where you rent the server) implies that the NOC will ensure that the server is running and e.g. reset it in case of a crash, whereas with co-location you might be on your own even for such basic tasks... ?

I suppose additional services like daily backup or 24/7 watch are available for both co-location and dedicated.

I'm not sure if I got this right or no.

[Edited by astra4 on 01-03-2001 at 07:58 AM]

I figured it out later on the AUP just read into all the plans so it created some confusion.

Looking for some word of mouth on Co-located services though. You can E-mail me.

Newbie

I really like your sig by the way ;)

astra got it right, on a dedicated hosting the NOC (or NOC reseller) is indeed responsable for the hardware, most services are available to both dedicated or co-located, it's really a matter of persoanl choice, whant to just go out and buy the server and save a few bucks in the monmthly bill ? or just get the entire package from a NOC . :)

But Co-location has its draw backs. Since, you are responsible for the hardware, if there is any failure in it, you have to send the NOC the replacements for the damaged hardware. So saving the few bucks really aint saving anything.