I'm thinking of moving a rather busy and important site (for me) to Rackshack. The only major hangup for me at this point is the quality of Rackshack's network. I'm currently on Verio, and I hate to suddenly see my traffic plummet after moving to Rackshack due to bottlenecks and slowdowns from various parts of the world in their network.

Based on experience, is Rackshack's network finally "world class" at this point?

For the amount your paying i don't think you should be expecting "world class" :rolleyes:

But overall, for the price they are a great option.. :cool:

So bottom line you're saying their network is not world class? Are you saying this from experience?

I understand the "price versus quality" argument is going to come up, so lets just get that out of the way :) My question isn't about price, it's about quality of their network. Obviously without their low price I wouldn't even about asking this question.

Their bandwidth is pretty fast, you should not get bottlenecks on that end. It's the hardware you really have to look out for - before you move any really important stuff, I suggest you do a lot of testing to be sure the hardware can handle it. Once you finally get a good server, though (which may take a few tries), you are fine.

Yes, I'm speaking from experience. ;)

There was one time they had an overloaded carrier. I helped them track it down, and they credited me one month for my troubles.

Other than that, it's a rare day we have trouble with our servers there. And for the price you are paying, buy another server on another network as a hot backup. Then your home free!

yeah
make sure you get a working server
they carry a lot of bad hardware it seems

other than that their bw is good

Hi,

I own 50 dedicated servers at RS. The support is really cool, very quick, the reboot time is 5-10 minutes before we request in the control member panel so it is cool. Sometimes there are all the techs busy, but we just wait some secs and someone help us correctly.

If you have less than 1000 GB, it is the best option. (RS)

If you have more than 1000 GB, you had better to use
www.prioritycolocation.com because it offer extra GB at 0,75$.

I hope this will help u.

AFAIK, RackShack does not have a network uptime / performance SLA. If "busy" and "important" really mean "generating a lot of revenue" then I would seek out a data center / dedicated server provider who is willing / able to offer you serious SLAs for both network performance and actual service availablity (eg HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP)

You might also ask the data center provider if they have performance charts from someone like KeyNote Sysetms(www.keynote.com).

100% uptime here, using rackshack for several months. Their network has been flawless since day one, very responsive and fast. It was only slow a couple hours, due to certain circumstances pertaining to their network, DDOS attack one time etc. They have a variety of bandwidth providers, and just added another Gig-E. As well as plans for two additional Gig-E's scheduled sometime in late july. Their network just keeps getting better, and I like it :)

i have a bunch of servers with RS as well - overall support and speed has been fast.
And yes, you have to test your hardware before you go live (use SETI for a few days :))

One problem is that it really matters what subnets you end up at, there is big difference on the quality/uptime of the subnets. My compaqs on the 10mpbs capped lines have been down quite a few times the last weeks...however some of my other boxes have never had a problem...

If you need more info - feel free to icq 19678140 :)

Anders

well, a script that copies files around the filesystem and deletes files after, is also good for testing hdd(s)..

I agree with most people up there. But i think since you got worried in the begining means that the site's uptime is critical. In that case go for other servers at other company with less bandwidth to compensate for the increase in price. :)

Go with RS I have been with them over a year and besides one hardware issue and a screwdriver incident they have been great.. There support is sometimes lagging on the braincells but once you learn your way around you will be fine.. I mean I dont know of many DC's that have as much redundantcy(sp?) as them I think there up to 5 different ones now so I dont see that as really being an issue.. Anyway good luck and I suggest the Compaq boxes

So bottom line you're saying their network is not world class? Are you saying this from experience?

I understand the "price versus quality" argument is going to come up, so lets just get that out of the way My question isn't about price, it's about quality of their network. Obviously without their low price I wouldn't even about asking this question.

Please define what you mean by "world class".

I would say that with 6,000 servers they are certainly "world class" in terms of scale.

They have lots of bandwidth and it is fairly good quality. They have the capacity to be far more reliable than a single-pipe cogent-only outfit. On the other hand, things can still happen and on the rare occassion that something does happen it can take a few minutes for them to reroute things. But keep in mind as we saw with the DV2 outage a while back, even providers who say they are fully redundant are often not actually instantly redundant either - things come up - people have still had downtime there. Look at Burst even though they are using premium bandwith and much higher monthly costs. And also keep in mind that just because someone says they have a SLA does not mean that they will have better uptime than Rackshack. Since my server has been at RackShack I have not experienced any downtime on my network segment. I almost went with eservers.biz because I was initially impressed by their 100% SLA, but then I found on the forums that when they had an outage, they said that their SLA didn't cover downtime because it was planned maintenance (even though it wasn't planned for that time nor was it announced ahead of time) so essentially that SLA is worthless. Not that I have anything against esevers (except I would prefer if they would offer something and stand behind it rather than offer something too good that they can't stand behind.)

Anyway, if you are looking for a nice-spec server with lots of bandwidth and some redundancy and can only spend $100-$150/month RackShack is a good option for you.

Could you pay lots more to get better ping times? Probably. Some people say webreseller is a bit faster, but they dont' have as many different providers as RackShack.

Could you pay even more to be on a more automatically redundant network with people monitoring your server and the network 24/7 more carefully? Sure. But RackShack provides a great value for those without enormous budgets and is as good or better than any of the $100/month competition in terms of uptime as far as I can tell.

the simple answer is this.

no.

i had a cobalt raq with them, and a sun netra. although i didn't stick around for extended periods, i had bad network experiences in both cases (packet loss, blah blah blah). whether or not the network has improved since i was with them (january of this year), who knows. however, i do know webhostingtalk.com is hosted w/ them now, and i see issues w/ this site all the time. personally, i'd stay clear.

Doesn't rackshack use Verio as one of their providers? Verio itself as a provider is very reliable, right?

Yes

Verio is one of the most used onees :)

Originally posted by lotuslnd
the simple answer is this.

no.

i had a cobalt raq with them, and a sun netra. although i didn't stick around for extended periods, i had bad network experiences in both cases (packet loss, blah blah blah). whether or not the network has improved since i was with them (january of this year), who knows. however, i do know webhostingtalk.com is hosted w/ them now, and i see issues w/ this site all the time. personally, i'd stay clear.

WHT has been hosted with RS for a whopping week, it was having problems before because it exceeded the capacity of the hardware it was on. But thank you for your simple answer. :rolleyes:

Rackshack is more than OK, never had any major issues, although cpanel $ and better IP policy&pricing could make them even better :)

Go to eservers - they have SLA's and I have found they are better all round

Originally posted by Patrick-EV1


WHT has been hosted with RS for a whopping week, it was having problems before because it exceeded the capacity of the hardware it was on. But thank you for your simple answer. :rolleyes:

*laughs*

Go to eservers - they have SLA's and I have found they are better all round
:rolleyes: Ya but downtime isn't covered by eservers' SLA because any downtime scheduled or unscheduled they just call maintenance, even if it is unannounced and without any warning. So any downtime="planned" maintenance and their "100% SLA" = 100% worthless and misleading.

I have 4 servers at rackshack and am pretty satisfied. Already had to ask for a couple reboots within the past few weeks (all my faults as far as I can tell) and none took longer than 5 minutes.