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  1. #1

    Looking for stability - help?

    Hello all,

    I've had it. We have been leasing a server from Pegasus for a couple of years now, and while I've never been particularly happy with the amount of downtime NAC has had, the last few days have really taken the cake.

    I need to find another dedicated server somewhere. I need something inexpensive (under $130 per month, preferably in the $100 per month range). Now, before you say "you get what you pay for", bear with me. I don't need a hugely powerful server, and I don't need a tremendous amount of bandwidth with it.

    This server handles radius authentication for our dial-up users as well as dial-up user e-mail. Neither generates a huge amount of server load nor does it generate a huge amount of traffic. Pegasus doesn't provide us with reporting data, unfortunately, but I'd hazard a guess that we use well under 100 GB of bandwidth a month.

    I need a basic plain linux box - no control panel software required (and, in fact, we'd prefer not to have any). With maybe 100 GB of bandwidth. Something in the high MHz range (no reason we'd need a GHz computer) with maybe 512 MB of RAM and one 40 or 60 GB IDE hard drive would be more than sufficient.

    The most important thing is the network has absolutely got to be stable. This box is used for authentication of our dial-up users - meaning that when the server can't be reached, our dial-up users can't connect to the Internet. This is a Bad Thing (TM) and we've had something like 15 hours of downtime on our NAC server since Thursday - which is absolutely inexcusable.

    So - can anyone make any recommendations. I'm not looking for offers from the companies directly (thus the reason I did not post this in the requests forum), I am looking for user recommendations from end-user customers who can attest to the stability and quality of specific companies.

    Just for reference, we have a (web) server with WebReseller that we have been very very pleased with. Unfortunately all of their servers come installed with Ensim, and when we asked them if we could get one without Ensim they said no. Unfortunately we've found it impossible to get our necessary radius software to work properly given the constraints put on the server by Ensim. This is the reason we want a basic box with no control panel. This won't be used for web hosting at all, just radius and e-mail, so we don't need or want a control panel software.

    Recommendations will be very much appreciated.

    Thanks,

    Jason
    Jason Ellis
    All Star Internet Solutions
    Economy-priced nation-wide dial-up Internet access
    http://www.allstarisp.com/

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Nov 2001
    Posts
    5,383
    Rackspace?
    Clustered Hosting With Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
    http://www.solidinternet.com
    8 Years of hosting excellence!

  3. #3
    Just moved to DN and it hasnt been best of starts - before that I was with / still am with www.venturesonline.com have been with them for 2 years cant get better then there reliable network


  4. #4
    Originally posted by Myacen
    Rackspace?
    I've considered them, but there's a problem with that. We actually were renting a server from Rackspace for a while (stopped in November), and a couple of weeks ago I got this bill for $1300 from some government office in Texas claiming I owed them taxes for some equipment we had in Texas. Since the only equipment we've ever had in Texas was our (leased) Rackspace server, my assumption is that it was that.

    Now, my laywer assures me that I don't actually owe Texas a dime, but it's still going to cost me several hundred dollars to have him deal with it.

    So... I'd rather avoid any company in Texas if I can.

    But thanks for the recommendation!

    Jason
    Jason Ellis
    All Star Internet Solutions
    Economy-priced nation-wide dial-up Internet access
    http://www.allstarisp.com/

  5. #5

    Dial-up authentication

    No one will provide 100% uptime. For your use, I would certainly suggest some form of load balancing or mirroring to provide redundancy.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Feb 2001
    Posts
    1,227
    Try Theplanet.com.. 100% Uptime SLA.. 2hr replacement guarantee...

    contact eservers.biz for a quote.. i believe its like $199/mo for a Xeon server with 500gb transfer... I heard excellent things about this noc.. verio, uunet, and soon to come internap are the bandwidth providers..
    I have servers at: NetDepot/GNAX (A), SoftLayer (A), LiquidWeb (B+), DedicatedNow (B+), Nectartech (B) and more!

  7. #7

    Re: Dial-up authentication

    Originally posted by Incognito
    No one will provide 100% uptime. For your use, I would certainly suggest some form of load balancing or mirroring to provide redundancy.
    100% uptime isn't necessary, but a reasonable level (99.5+) is. And, frankly, the sheer amount of downtime in the last 4 days over at NAC is absolutely unacceptable.

    I don't mind if things go down - **** happens - but *when* things go down it shouldn't take 4 days of intermittent (anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours) outages and still no end in sight. That's bad network management.

    When I owned a hosting company (sold it about a year ago to start an ISP), we promised 99.5% uptime and we stayed above that, for four years we never dropped below it. The longest outage we had was something like 4 hours, and that was only because we were physically moving our servers from one datacenter to another (and we'd planned for it weeks ahead of time and notified all of our clients - we also did it at 2 in the morning).

    Now, I realize that was a slightly different thing - we owned our servers and had complete control over both the hardware and the software (whereas this situation where we're just leasing the server we have less control). But we still colo'd the servers and were dependant on someone else's network.

    I realize the **** happens, and networks go down, and that's fine. But what's been going on at NAC the last four days is well beyond the realm of acceptability. And if you think it's acceptable for a major datacenter to have this going on, then I'm sorry, I can't agree.

    Jason
    Jason Ellis
    All Star Internet Solutions
    Economy-priced nation-wide dial-up Internet access
    http://www.allstarisp.com/

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Mar 2001
    Posts
    1,446
    If you can stomach a Texas company, Rackshack would fit your bill - inexpensive, plain boxes with a pretty solid network.

    - John C.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Posts
    1,926
    www.atjeu.com

    Pay very little attention to the pricing on their site, just talk directly to them, they are always willing to be flexible. Just mention WHT, and I'm sure they'll cut you a better deal, especially since no control panel etc. are required.

    Though their SLA is only 99.5%, the only downtime I've had in the last month and a half (I've been with them for about 1.5 months) is 30 minutes while they dealt with the worm that was rampant over the internet. Bandwidth is multihomed over various tier1 providers.

    I don't know how much support you need, but they are semi-managed and are actually available 24/7, which made a nice change for me. Support is answered within minutes and will bend over backwards to keep you happy. I thought I had a virus on one of my servers 2 days ago, so I informed them. Did they panic and pull the plug? Nope, they just dived in and investigated. Luckily it was a false alarm, just the latest version of chkrootkit has a little hickup in the config file

    I'm sure there are plenty of other good choices out there. Hope you find one that meets your needs.

    EDIT: Can't stand my own rambling, sounds too much like a sales pitch
    Proud member of the RIAA closed quaters combat cell !!!
    You'd better drop that CD-R before I shoot you !!!

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
    Location
    Silver Spring, Maryland
    Posts
    256

    Re: Looking for stability - help?

    Originally posted by Jason Ellis
    Just for reference, we have a (web) server with WebReseller that we have been very very pleased with. Unfortunately all of their servers come installed with Ensim, and when we asked them if we could get one without Ensim they said no. Unfortunately we've found it impossible to get our necessary radius software to work properly given the constraints put on the server by Ensim.
    That's strange, I'm renting two servers from them without any control panels (and a third with Ensim). Their site also advertises plain RedHat and FreeBSD servers. Try asking them again, maybe there was some miscommunication.

  11. #11
    Try www.staminus.net I have a server there and I'm very happy.

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Jun 2001
    Location
    India
    Posts
    193
    You may want to have a look at venturesonline.com . I never had seen any network downtime with them since last 11 Months.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Jul 2001
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    167
    I have to recommend VO as well. We have servers in 4 different NOCs and VO is easily the best (DV2 the worst). Also we have a server at webreseller w/ cpanel

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Posts
    924
    Hello,

    I suggest looking at FluidHosting or ThePlanet.
    Unlimited Space & Bandwidth
    http://localhost/
    Providing hosting since 17/99/3003

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Location
    Darmstadt, Germany
    Posts
    1,096
    You definitely want to check out www.servint.com !
    Their network is awesome, their support superb and everything else is more than nice
    Do a search on the Forums and contact them .... i promise, you won't be disappointed ... (i've been a more than happy costumer since ~7months)
    In this period they had two outages, never lasting more than half an hour and these were only because of DDos attacks ...

    greets,
    In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

  16. #16
    Nobody is going to say "You get what you pay for" because NAC and pwebtech are both good. NAC has just ran into some problems, thats all. Happens to the best.

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