Hi Everyone,

I've been monitoring the posts for about 2 weeks now and have found a lot of useful info regarding dedicated hosting. For that, thanks to all of you ;)

But, I have basically come to the conclusion that almost every company that offers servers for less than $150/mo have some amount of horror stories attached to them. With that in mind, I would like to expose my problem at hand and hope someone can put in their opinion to assist me.

I have been running a virtual hosting company for over 4 years now (actually started in Aug 1998). I currently own 4 dedicated servers with Dialtone Internet and pay approximately $350 per box. Now, I have nothing but kudos to say about Dialtone; their support is fast and efficient, their IBM servers have an obscene amount of expandability, and their network is awesome. I have not been down once all of 2002, and have only had 1 hard drive fry in 4 years.

However, I do have some issues that need to be addressed.

The first problem I have is ever since I installed Plesk (PSA) on my machines, I have not once needed to contact them for support. Since I really don't "need" their support for software management, I feel that I am overpaying for a service that is not being utilized. As a business owner, this is the equivalent of tossing money down the toilet every month and watching it spin into oblivion.

The second problem is the bandwidth limit they impose on our servers is less than acceptable. For the $350 per server, we only get 100 GB per month of bandwidth. As we are very close to popping over 100 GB on each server every month, we need to find an alternative solution as paying $2/GB over our limit is much too expensive.

So, here's my question du jour!

Where can I find a company that:

1. Provides un metered connection that won't amount to traffic overages OR if not unmetered, at least 300 GB/mo that is actually monitored properly.

2. Name brand IBM/Compaq/Dell/etc. servers that can be upgraded. I can't stand these junky white boxes that can't hold more than 512 MB RAM or crashes when someone sneezes.

3. Allows Plesk to be run with my own keys. I would need Red Hat 7.2 installed and the partitions set up properly for PSA to run.

4. Has at least 99% uptime AND more than 2 backbone connections to the net. I'm not signing up for a single line company that could break at any moment and then all my customers fly away because of the downtime.

5. Charges appromately the same or less than what I am paying for now.

I believe this is a very reasonable request, and I hope that by posting this delima someone can offer advice that will be beneficial for our company (and hopefully for others!).

Thanks :D

Eric Jensen
Web Pros, Inc. Support Team
http://www.webprosinc.net

Just some points I see:

The first problem I have is ever since I installed Plesk (PSA) on my machines, I have not once needed to contact them for support. Since I really don't "need" their support for software management, I feel that I am overpaying for a service that is not being utilized. As a business owner, this is the equivalent of tossing money down the toilet every month and watching it spin into oblivion.

If you are not a Linux guy and do not know how to fix things in command line, then consider the fees like health insurance. Sure you are paying for something not used, but imagine if you blow out your knee skiing or get in a car wreck. Same thing with the server, one of these days you will need advenaced support. It is only a matter of time.

The second problem is the bandwidth limit they impose on our servers is less than acceptable. For the $350 per server, we only get 100 GB per month of bandwidth. As we are very close to popping over 100 GB on each server every month, we need to find an alternative solution as paying $2/GB over our limit is much too expensive.

That is not bad at all for multihomed BW. Quality stuff.

Request 1,2,3 and 5 should be easy. #4 I would demand proof. So many companies out there run Cogent as primary and call a backup line redundancy. If cogent goes down, they will pull the connection and run it to the back up, which I guarantee will be oversubscribed. Watch out for this. People selling BW at large amounts for low rates can only be doing one of a few things, and most of them go along with what I described.


If I were you, I would maybe get one server. Find all your high use sites and dump them on that server. That way you keep the BW lower then 100 GBs on the other servers, but you get the great support.

Hi UmBillyCord,

Thanks much for your quick response, I appreciate your input!

Yes, I am a Linux guy and install, manage and run all of our servers by myself. I don't consider myself a guru by any means, but I understand how to monitor and fix a machine. For example, sometimes stunnel fails and I have to kill Plesk, find the zombie process, kill it and restart Plesk (the most common problem with PSA). Monitoring where formmails are being exploited for spam purposes is another one of my daily grinds. So yes, I guess I know the basics of what's going on :D

I also have a good friend that I can call for assistance and/or pay him for things that I do not know how to do (ie partition a server properly). So the support issue to me is a big waste of my money, because I don't forsee the need of ever using it with my existing knowledge. Actually, I know more about Plesk than some of the folks at the ISP do since they have only been running it for a few months (not tooting my horn, just stating facts).

Regarding #4, I also agree it's very quality stuff. I guess I am just trying to find a way to reduce our expenses when it comes to bandwidth overages since so many of these other dedicated companies offer 300-600 GB/mo. I understand Cogent is not a good company to go through, and perhaps it's best for me to stick with where I'm at.

What are your views on colocation? I'm aware I can host little 1U servers and get an unmetered connection. But, I'm also weary of sending my servers to another company that I can't physically "see".

Thanks for your help :cool:

Eric

I understand Cogent is not a good company to go through, and perhaps it's best for me to stick with where I'm at.

I wouldn't say that. The a perfect for what you pay for. As long as youunderstand that, they are great.



Like I ssaid, I would maybe test the waters with one server, then move the high BW sites to that server. If everything is running great and you are happy with the provider, move all of them.


Here is one more thing. Worse case plan that Cogent for example goes under. Look at what your DC charges for multihomed BW. Everyone gets Cogent BW for basically the same price. But multihomed involves negociating and volume. If one DC has multihomed at $150/meg and another at $300/meg, then if everything else is balanced, the $150/meg place is where you want to be. Lets say you go with a Cogent provider and they go under, do you really want to move servers? Many places know this and offer cheap BW to hook you with the possibility of hitting you later with expensive multihomed.

Greetings:

"5. Charges appromately the same or less than what I am paying for now. "

So, you want them to provide MORE -- (brand name vs. white box, unmetered vs. metered, etc.) while you pay the same or less?

Confused...

Right, but I do not need the "managed" tag to it. Anytime you add managed to a server, it seems to double the price.

I see Rackshack sells Compaq's with unmetered for $399/mo. This is almost perfect for what we want, outside of the fact they are sold out :rolleyes:

Still looking :stickout

Eric

Rackshack, unmetered,

those two words strike me as WAY less than perfect in the same sentence.

Didnt rackshack invent overselling or did they just refine it?
I dont know about using them for mission critical stuff... ive seen to many issues, but then again like someone pointed out to me they have sooooooo many customers, your bound to hear some bad comments.

BUT if your considering rackshack.............................................................................
stop considering them and go with fastservers.net.

Just my advice.

Yup, looked at fasterservers, fdc, serverbeach, and quite a few others and none of them offer name brand hardware. That is an absolute must in my book, I cannot stand frankenstien servers that are put together with 10 year old pieces of RAM and refurbished motherboards.

I guess I'll have to look at something like colocation and buying my own server so I know what I'm getting. It seems no one offers name brand servers outside of Dialtone and Rackshack. I'll open a new thread since this one seems to be off the topic of colo :look:

Thanks for everything!

Eric

Greetings:

"I see Rackshack sells Compaq's with unmetered for $399/mo. This is almost perfect for what we want, outside of the fact they are sold out."

Unless things have changed, Rackshack.net puts the unmetered servers on Cogent-ONLY connectivity.

So you are paying less than what you should, but getting less (imho).

Colo might cause alot of problems, ie when your hdd or anything die, you won't have hardware replacement as quick as what you get from dedicated hosters...

I'm sure you can find a good dedicated host by requesting it at web host request forum.

Originally posted by braysurdi
Yup, looked at fasterservers, fdc, serverbeach, and quite a few others and none of them offer name brand hardware. That is an absolute must in my book, I cannot stand frankenstien servers that are put together with 10 year old pieces of RAM and refurbished motherboards.

I guess I'll have to look at something like colocation and buying my own server so I know what I'm getting. It seems no one offers name brand servers outside of Dialtone and Rackshack. I'll open a new thread since this one seems to be off the topic of colo :look:

Thanks for everything!

Eric

I cannot stand frankenstien servers that are put together with 10 year old pieces of RAM and refurbished motherboardsYa I'm sure CompaQ would never think of using anything but the best hardware :rolleyes:

in fact, you should talk to dialtone and ask them to give more free bandwidth with your price.

just tell them that you are going to switch isp

this works find for me.

Originally posted by sonic
in fact, you should talk to dialtone and ask them to give more free bandwidth with your price.

just tell them that you are going to switch isp

this works find for me.

That seems to be about the best advice. If you have 4 servers then you are probably making money from them.

You seem to have relatively stress-free hosting at the moment, is it really worth risking the excellent service you are getting now for a few hundred $$ per month. You might be paying more than some people, but I would bet that you are also paying a lot less than others as well.

Not having to use their support isn't "the equivalent of tossing money down the toilet every month and watching it spin into oblivion." You aren't having to use it because everything works. I'd rather be in that situation than use the support (to get my "moneys worth") because things had gone belly-up .

Try to re-negotiate your pricing, but if the service is as good as you say then are you sure the money is worth saving? I'd think about it very, very carefully.

I have found that Dialtone won't get much lower than $2/GB for bandwidth, but they will drop the monthly rate on your box for you if you ask.

I think webreseller also offers IBM brand servers, I see they offer Supermicro as well

custom made servers are not bad if you really know what parts to use. I know a guy who simple refuse to use IBM servers at all due to problems he had experienced in past....

I am also getting a few IBM servers shortly... thought, I like 330 feature with the chain technology for consoles/keyboards :D

xSeries 342 are nice.... just one hot swap cooler used to vibrate (there are 3) in our server and makes a lot of noice - had to use a tape to fix it :) Not bad for a 6k server (with raid-5 configuration) :D

ps. we got brand new 4 xSeries 330 and one server didn't booted due to power switch failure... not a good experience comparing to compaq/hp servers we used to order before. Anyway, IBM fixed the server in two days and it was nice (there was a problem with power switch, that automatically switched power off)

Also...

You may be good at taking care of Linux.. But what if something happens, and you can't ssh to the box?

Rackshack has a no hands policy, they won't touch software issues, its a reformat and forget it thing...


So everytime something messes up that you can't fix remotely, they won't even just go in to do something simple, its a format suggested thing....

Managed is nice to have even if you don't use it, you know that they will go in when you can't, and fix the problem...

Thanks everyone, I'm very pleased with your responses!

We have decided to stay with Dialtone for now as I'm not overly impressed with what else is out there. The only real deals that I see are from Rackshack that provide name brand servers with more bandwidth.

I could care less about their no hands policy, in fact, that's probably what I would do anyways if something went bad (ie kernel hack, etc) to a server. I back up PSA daily, and reformatting the drive, installing the OS, reinstalling PSA and restoring the backups is the fastest and most effective way to fix major problems.

But, after reading posts about their downtime and the fact they sometimes cannot meter their bandwidth properly scares me. You are all right, I have it good now and why would I risk moving to save a few hundred bucks a month? I can just see testing them out for a couple of weeks with no problems and then moving all my clients over only to have downtime. Of course we all know downtime = lost business.

I'll see if I can negotiate a price on these servers, but to be honest, I think I've got it down as I can go. I have 3 IBM 331s for $350/mo which really isn't that bad considering I can upgrade the bajesus out of them (another processor, 3.5 GB ram, 3 more hard drives).

I'm still stuck with the bandwidth delima, but I guess if you don't have your own lines running to your office, you will always be paying for it. I think we'll see if we can get a fractional T1 put in our office and buy a Dell server and test it out for a while. At least having things in house you can always know what is going on and have no limit on your monthly traffic.

I'm sure not many people here have dedicated lines, but do any of you have experience with providers or which ones to use?

Eric