Ok, for the past 2 years I've been busy with small scale internet jobs, like making websites for local small companies and managing some pretty succesfull sites . I'm currently in the stage where its better for me to get my own dedicated webserver. So far, I've only been working with local webhostingcompanies (area : Belgium/Holland) to fullfill all my needs. Why ? They speak my language and they were situated within a few hrs driving from me, wich gave me enough trust to host my sites with them. Paying methods for those webhosts are very simple and fast. The local market for webhosting is also not that big, you can easily oversee it after a while, so I know wich are the "good" companies and wich are the "bad" ones.

So I've never bothered to look further away to host my sites. But recently I came across some American webhost providers and I compared them with the local company where I'm planning to order a dedicated server. Let's see... Hardware quality ? looks the same. Prices ? almost the same, maybe slightly more expensive over here. Bandwith ? Woohaa... providers in the USA seems to be able to offer 10 to 20 times more data traffic per month then all the local companys here. For example www.Rackshack.net (seems to be a commonly known company ?) offers 400 gb per month whereas the best I've seen among the dutch companys is 50gb per month. I'm not sure how this comes, maybe the infrastructures in the USA are probably older and more advanced, and the webhostingcompanies can do everything on a bigger scale because of the bigger market there...

Now, I totally dont know the American market, but the promise of 400gb per month is tempting enough to try it. So these are the questions I still have...

- Rackshack : good company or not ? Should I get my dedicated server there ? Are their any similar wich are better ?

- Does anyone of you live outside USA (lets say in Europe like me) and have any experience with getting and using an American provider, and putting your sites there ? My sites are mostly in dutch, so the target audience is also 99% European... does that make any difference when it comes to loading speeds and other critical factors ?

- How does payment works for those companys ? I used to pay my local webhosts by posting the money on their bank accounts, wich was easy,secure and fast because they had their accounts in the same country as me, but I expect that with having an American webhost could bring different problems for paying.

- Any other tips are ofcourse welcome too :)


Btw, the thing i'm looking for is : dedicated linux server / 512mb Ram / +1000 GHz / at least 100gb per month data traffic / ability to manage more then 250 domain names / ...

do a search on rackshack you'll get a ton of reviews.

Rackshack : good company or not ? Should I get my dedicated server there ? Are their any similar wich are better ?Rackshack are generally a good company in my opinion, they have a solid network and a business model that looks to be working right for them. With Rackshack, your server could experience more downtime compared to other high-class providers such as Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/), or Dialtone (http://www.dialtone.com/). If you've got no experience in managing a dedicated server and you've decided to use Rackshack, you should also seek a Web Server Administrator to manage it for you. Rackshack don't provide much support in terms of software troubleshooting.

Does anyone of you live outside USA (lets say in Europe like me) and have any experience with getting and using an American provider, and putting your sites there ? My sites are mostly in dutch, so the target audience is also 99% European... does that make any difference when it comes to loading speeds and other critical factors ?I'm located in the UK and all our servers are located in America... so no, there's no problems with hosting your websites on a server that is not in the same country as you. Remember, the Internet is a worldwide network, where you'll get visitors from anywhere in the world. But in your case, your customers are mostly from your own country. Still, the speed of the server should not be a problem, it won't even be noticeable to the end-user.

How does payment works for those companys ? I used to pay my local webhosts by posting the money on their bank accounts, wich was easy,secure and fast because they had their accounts in the same country as me, but I expect that with having an American webhost could bring different problems for paying.All the dedicated server providers in America, including Rackshack, will accept major credit cards such as Visa or Mastercard. Some will also accept checks and PayPal payments.

Any other tips are ofcourse welcome too :)If you depend on your websites to be up and having downtime on your server is not a thing you want, I would suggest that you try one of the higher quality companies such as Dialtone. Sites that require a LOT of bandwidth is good for Rackshack, but my general experience with business websites hosted at Rackshack is that it's not always available... my main reason for staying with Rackspace Managed Hosting.


Btw, the thing i'm looking for is : dedicated linux server / 512mb Ram / +1000 GHz / at least 100gb per month data traffic / ability to manage more then 250 domain names / ... How do you know that you require 100GB of bandwidth? If you're hosting really small websites for clients, then you could even use less than 30GB of bandwidth per month. Decide if you really need the 400GB or the 100GB of transfer per month and then see which provider you can afford. You usually get what you pay for :).

Alan

Originally posted by ho247
How do you know that you require 100GB of bandwidth?

Thats a small calculation based on my future plans, and the fact that my previous webhost did put my sites offline because of crossing the data traffic limits :) (that wasnt dedicated server though, just a big webshell)

and hmm.. dialtone seems like more quality, but also a bit too expensive. I dont mind a bit of downtime if thats the only bad side. There's no info about their %uptime to be found on the rackshack site so I'm still looking around for some hard statistics about that (yes zerphyte, i'm checking all the reviews in here too :p ).

anyway, thank you for the info Alan :)

oh yeah, one thing I forgot to ask... raskshack doesnt work with contracts, is that a bad thing ? Is it a common practice for those kind of companies ? I understand it saves some time for both sides, but I assume it has a disadvantage too

Rackshack doesn't provide any uptime guarantee, but it really depends on how well you manage your server. Their network uptime is VERY good I would say during the 9 months that I've been with them. With some of the servers that I manage that are with Rackshack I've had above 99.9% uptime, which includes network and server.

It's now quite common for companies to work without contracts, but some smaller companies may be able to work on a contract if you wish.

Alan

My opinion is RS is great for high-bandwidth sites or personal sites or just as a play box... but I don't think anyone could recommend using them to host business sites?

As for not having a contract, again that's fine for most things, but that means you've got no formal agreement. I believe RS don't do backups either, so if your disc dies, be prepared to settle for a reinstall and making your own arragenements to get users' data back up and running.

Hi,

I live in the Netherlands too, and for me it has always been a clear fact that you pay too much money for a Dutch host. Even the cheapest one (with really low quality) are expensive. It just isn't worth it.
But now I found a good solution. Do a search for a NAC.net based webhost. I don't know if you know TrueServer.nl, but I tested several times and I got the same hops and even lower pings from a tracert and ping to nac.net than to TrueServer. And that while NAC.net is cheaper than TrueServer. They are very alike, only the location is different.
And you can't just take an US based host, there is indeed a difference in speed, most US host give about 30-40 hops from the Netherlands, and pings are mostly higher. And even for small sites you will notice this slowdown, because see can see the images loading slower. For text-only sites there is no difference, but who uses text-only :D
I am now going to host a http://www.freestylehosting.com, where I will have a shared (shared with the owner of FSH) server located at the NAC :D
I had an other account at Spenix (also NAC based) and the speed is truly remarkable, very very fast!

Good luck on your search!

Jacco

Greetings to .nl, here are some comments:

Rackshack = cheap and nearly no support. Do a search for them on this forum. If you want a host with good support and good network visit www.venturesonline.com - highly recommended. Speed should be no issue :)
Whoever you choose, do a bit of research, either here on the forum or in other communities. Don't go with the first cheap one.

Bandwidth? The market in the US is still one, two years ahead of Europe, pretty saturated, much pressure.

Payment? Credit card all the time.