When searching for a host, how can one know if it's a sales crew with a web site and a reseller account or a real company, with great service and reliability, that actually owns and maintains its servers?

Sometimes I get the feeling that there is one data center and thousands of little fly-by-nights; layers upon layers, all reselling the same service to each other.

Hoping to make one last switch. Who are the big players in this biznus?

Thanks,

John.

you could start off by asking them point blank.

oftem though, sometimes people fear telling the truth for multiple reasons, so you could do a bit of investigating.

most places that own their own data center are rather proud of it and often flaunt pictures of this or that on their site, but do not take this as absolute truth because often people take pictures from the places they resell at .. hehe!

you can find their ip range and do a whois off arin if you wanted,
http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl
this along with a traceroute will give you some idea of where the DC is, where the connectivity comes from, and who pays the bills

if the sales guy seems shaddy when you ask these questions..
listen to your gut, and it'll be no prob.

Brian,

I did that the last time but the whole thing is designed to camaflage the fact that it's a few guys with a web site reselling someone elses service. They had pictures and everything. And what I've just figured out is that they stole all that from another hosting company. They anwer email quickly, but I'm having frequent outages and downtime.

Although I've been in business and had a site for years, I'm new in web design services. I have a few long standing clients that I need to host sites for. Not large bandwidth, but I really need reliability and service.

So I'm looking for a multi-domain or reseller account, although I won't try to disguise the situation, and want to be at the first level. Would sure like to get some recommendations for rock-solid unix hosts with own their data centers and don't oversell the servers.

John

wish i could recommend someone :\

best of luck however! :)

Originally posted by jtice
So I'm looking for a multi-domain or reseller account, although I won't try to disguise the situation, and want to be at the first level. Would sure like to get some recommendations for rock-solid unix hosts with own their data centers and don't oversell the servers.
So basically you're looking to host directly with AT&T or WorldCom then? Don't know about the not "overselling" though. Those chaps invented it. ;)

i think those that colocate their own equipment should be considered in the same group as those whom build out their own data centers.

IMO :)

Originally posted by brian-WHT
i think those that colocate their own equipment should be considered in the same group as those whom build out their own data centers.

IMO :)
Why? :)

What's wrong with the host that gets thier servers from Rackspace or Dialtone? I'd also be more worried with a smaller type host who has built their own datacenter. They're probably geared with a lot of debt and therefore could be a higher risk of going bust.

We sell reseller accounts to some hosts on this board, and i think you would find it very hard to find out they are reselling below us - because thats what a reseller account is designed to do... transparency is what a reseller expects :)

Matt, I am not sure if this is an appropriate question, but how do you guarantee the transparency to the reseller ?

We dont offer a 100% guarantee, but we can cover most aspects. Our resellers are kept on servers non-related to our own virtual hosting plans.

They are given there own IP addresses (nameservers) and even the main information on the box is setup under a domain name none related to to our company so should some global box information slip through the net it would resolve to a domain name not owned by anyone in particular :)

Originally posted by Aussie Bob

So basically you're looking to host directly with AT&T or WorldCom then? Don't know about the not "overselling" though. Those chaps invented it. ;)

Bob, no not really meaning that. I want a substantial situation where the people I'm dealing with control their situation, know what they're doing, are dedicated and have a track record of reliability. I don't think co-located servers would necessarily preclude that.

One easy way to check-up is to first of all do a trace to the box or find out the server name. If the server name is "server.domain.com" run a WHOIS on "domain.com" and see if that WHOIS matches the address of the hosting providers WHOIS.

Generally if they are resellers the information in the WHOIS for the server address will not be their postal address or it will just be nonsense like "Private".

Well personally i see no problem in resellers as long as they provide exactly what they advertise.

A company has got to start somewhere and it is not always possible for this to be owning a data center at first, som people work they way up slowly and some are fast and some just jump right in at the extreme.

Resellers and data center owners, faced with the option i wouldn't have a definte answer, as i said, all depends on if they deliver exactly what they say.

Greetings:

"What's wrong with the host that gets thier servers from Rackspace or Dialtone?"

As one of the companies that started out as a reseller to where we know co-locate our servers, I can only state the more you control and determine the infrastructure, the higher the quality of service you can provide.

Our parent company has been in the hosting business since November 1996 (in business since June 1995). They started as originally as a reseller purchasing account space (as opposed to renting a server); but they always had in-house support and system administrators.

They moved from reselling accounts to renting entire servers, and now co-locate.

Each step of the way allowed them to position themselves ahead of the needs of the customer (scaling was never a problem), to provide higher qos (the most recent move allowed them to offer 99.999% up time up from 99.9%), etc.

Bottom line: Rackspace.com, Dialtone Internet Services and similar companies are very good; and, have an established solid reputation. However, the closer you are to the food chain (so to speak), the better you can meet the customer's needs (presuming you know what you are doing <smile>).

Thank you.