We are a medium sized online retailer currently using a dedicated unmanaged host (Skynet Web). Our part-time system administrator (and his UNIX buddies) from the get go reconfigured the entire server virtually from scratch, saying all kinds of negative things about how it was setup. Our system adminisrtator may be leaving and our business has grown to where we are now doing some serious business online. We can no longer afford to rely on a set of UNIX 'hobbyist' types that are not employees or contractors of the company managing our server for free. We need to move to a managed dedicated server.

Our E-commerce consultant has basic UNIX/Apache admin experience and can easily cover the basics. We want to move to a dedicated hosting service that is very competent with very secure configurations from the get go, will assist us with our unique needs when necessary, yet can provide a complete suite of secure (web based) administration tools so we can perform a lot of configuration and management ourselves. We are looking for a rock-solid company with excellent 24x7 support.

We run one main web site and about two dozen other doorway sites. We need to be able to setup, maintain, and configure these sites easily. We want dedicated IP addresses. Our current admins swear by FreeBSD as being more secure than Linux but that seems to really limit our choice. Other needs inlude:

mySQL with Web-based management
Perl and modPerl
PHP and modPHP
POP Server with web based admin
Sendmail
Secondary DNS Support for multiple domains preferably with web-based admin of all types of DNS records (we maintain our own primary DNS at out facility)
24x7 Tech Support
24x7 Server Monitoring
Multiple site hosting (up to 32 domains) on with separate CGI-BIN directories
Daily Backup (included or optional)
Firewall Security (included or optional)
99.9% uptime guarantee
Server Side Includes (SHTML)
Company must be experienced and FINANCIALLY SOLID

OLM's WSE Advanced Dedicated Hosting is looking like a very likely candidate at this point. Any comments on OLM's services or other recommended services that might suit our needs would be much appreciated. We are three million dollars worth of retail business through our website. We can't mess around with any half-ass solutions.

After reading some old threads, it seems Rackspace is really the favorite. I looked at the info on their website and it really appears Rackspace is more of a "raw" managed dedicated solution with simply the option to have PLESK on a Linux system whereas OLM seems to have more comprehensive web-based tools that are more suited to manging multiple websites.

We aren't going to resell but will be managing 30-40 of our own websites on our host along with e-mail, SSL certs, etc. I'm still leaning towards OLM unless there are some BIG reasons to use Rackspace instead.

Thanks in advance for your input.

We are three million dollars worth of retail business through our website. We can't mess around with any half-ass solutions.If that is the case, then I would certainly recommend Rackspace.com for the job, but in saying that I haven't used or dealt with OLM before. You simply tell Rackspace.com what you want and they'll set it up for you, usually within 24 hours. I've PM'ed you further info.

Alan