Hello, I am starting a network of sites which will have offices located over various parts of the world. One of our sites will be offering webhosting. I have a few questions that I am sure you WHT members could help me answer.


Best Server
What is the best type of server. I know that Cobalt's give you quite a bit for your money. Are they stable enough to run a 1-275 virtual acounts on? Does anybody have any experience with Dell or IBM servers? Does anybody have a links to servers that are pumped up like 4x80gig hd's etc (besides the Cobalt XTR).

Colocation
To start out we are going to colocate our servers. Supposing that we are just starting out would a 10mpbs line be enough? We could always just easily upgrade to a 20mbps line. I like the prices of wholesalecolo.com, but they mainly use cognet. Does anybody have links to sites that provide reliable colocation but don't only use cognet?

Datacenter
We are currently creating plans to either buy/lease a datacenter once we have enough clients and use enough bandwidth. Therefore we can offer dedicated servers and colocation. When would you suggest that we move to our datacenter? When we use 30mbps, 40mbps, 100mbps, 1000mbps, etc of bandwidth?

We basicly have enough money to fund all of these (including 24/7 techs and security guards), but we wan't to see what servers to get and when to move to a datacenter.

Thank you for any answers!

I have used Dell servers before and I must say I loved them. I had it for close to 2 years and never had one problem. uptime was great! I would highly recommend dell!

What is the best type of server. I know that Cobalt's give you quite a bit for your money. Are they stable enough to run a 1-275 virtual acounts on? Does anybody have any experience with Dell or IBM servers? Does anybody have a links to servers that are pumped up like 4x80gig hd's etc (besides the Cobalt XTR). Check out the new Cobalt 550, you can get a 1GHz model with 512MB of RAM and dual 40GB drives for around $1600-1700. A little more expensive than a comparable white box, but they can't be beat for ease of use when trying to establish a hosting operation.

Supposing that we are just starting out would a 10mpbs line be enough? Absolutely. Since you're going to colo, just get a provider with enough b/w to serve your future needs, and ratchet it up as you go. In fact, just get a dedicated feed on 95% billing, and pay as you go. It makes no sense to pay up front for a 10 meg feed on day one. I suspect you won't be using 10 megs during year one, unless you've got a serious advertising budget and are looking for extremely high b/w users.

Good luck!

Brandon

We have hundreds of Dell servers and have never had any major problems except:

- A couple of hard drives fail (2 to be exact)
- 5th HD cage in a 2550 shorted out the whole disk subsystem on installation.
- A bad batch of NIC BIOS that had to be reflashed on 2 1550 systems.
- A failure on a HD backplane on a 2450.

That's it! They are rock solid and support has been top notch and available 24/7.

here is a co-location link for you,

http://www.glorb.com/products/prod08.htm

pretty much non-cogent hosting...

Cobalt servers don't provide much bang for the buck, unless you really like their control panel, which it seems many people do not.

For the price of most cobalt RAQ's you could get systems with 2-4x the horsepower with normal servers.

I doubt you'll be able to get even near 10mbps with a cobalt unless you're just hosting file downloads, and if you're looking to sell colo/dedicated servers, it's a lot easier to just partner with another company with an existing data center, etc. as it's no small amount of work to set something like this up (believe me, i know.).

Hope that helps :)

Thanks for the information everybody.

I think that I am going to start looking for partnerships or something of that sort. We are currently working on deals for the servers... so then we would just need to setup a deal or partner with a company that would like to join the network or help us offer colocation/dedicated servers!

porcupine, thanks again for the information. That is why I was uneasy about going with RaQ's. I know they are apealing because of their specs but I also know that sometimes they do weird things. And I have no clue how anybody can like their admin cp =/

Thanks again everybody!

I don't find their specs whatsoever appealing.

Personally i've never built into a 1u server case (it's too small for my preference), but you can put together nice dual cpu p3-1.3GHZ servers into 2u cases with 1-2gb of ram, scsi, the whole 9 yards for < $1000.

I know recently we built a nice amd mp 2x1800 server, 2x18gb 10k scsi, 2gb of ecc ddr memory, etc. for < $1400, coulda been put in a nice 2u case for $1500 or so :)

Thats 3.6GHZ of power (around 3.5x the power), and 4x the ram of the raq for the same price, just no flakey panel :).