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  1. #1

    reseller or dedicated hosting? suggestions?

    I have been with my current host for many years with no major problems. My sites were not critical. However one of my businesses has really taken off and it is now critical that I have good speed, since I am constantly referring people from google ads I need NO DOWNTIME. I run about 15 sites but only 2 with significant traffic. They are all based on wordpress.

    Recently there have been several outages while I am working on the sites, so I have to believe there have been other outages while I am not around. My sites are approx 40k hits per month, 13k pages so pretty low volume.

    My two questions:
    Is it worth looking at cheap dedicated box, P4 1gb ram for approx $30/month. Or am I better served saying on a shared reseller account like I have now?

    Can I get real recommendations for reseller hosting? Everything on the web is so biased.

    Thanks in advance

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    California
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    I have been with my current host for many years with no major problems. My sites were not critical. However one of my businesses has really taken off and it is now critical that I have good speed, since I am constantly referring people from google ads I need NO DOWNTIME. I run about 15 sites but only 2 with significant traffic. They are all based on wordpress.

    Recently there have been several outages while I am working on the sites, so I have to believe there have been other outages while I am not around. My sites are approx 40k hits per month, 13k pages so pretty low volume.

    My two questions:
    Is it worth looking at cheap dedicated box, P4 1gb ram for approx $30/month. Or am I better served saying on a shared reseller account like I have now?

    Can I get real recommendations for reseller hosting? Everything on the web is so biased.

    Thanks in advance
    You could probably go with a good reseller host, unless you want to learn server management. The problem is that you will end up having to restore your sites occasionally as you learn, and that's not ideal if your goal really is uptime. And there are extra costs you don't think of, such as backups, server monitoring, cPanel licenses, etc. Those three can easily add $30 to $40 to the cost of your server.

    I was at Dathorn.com for 7 years, running sites just like yours, and they were absolutely fantastic in quick response to problems and stability. I would recommend them for experienced hosts only, but I think you qualify. I don't think I had a support ticket ever take longer than 15 minutes to resolve, and often I had an answer -- not an automated response -- in 6 minutes. They have plans from $13 a month.

    I am now at MDDHosting.com with a VPS; I had to move to get a VPS because Dathorn.com specializes only in reseller accounts, and two of my 22 sites were growing too busy for the platform (20,000 unique visitors per month). I can recommend MDD based on their service and support, and the people with semi-dedicated and reseller accounts seem very happy with the performance of their servers (their forums are open to the public, so you can check in there to see the comments).

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    1,785
    Why not a KnownHost VPS? If you want uptime, you won't get any better than that.
    Hosting is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    California
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    Forgot to mention; both Dathorn and my recommendation for MDDHosting are for their reseller accounts. I really don't think you need a VPS yet, unless you want to learn how to manage it.

  5. #5
    thank you for all the good replies. Not sure if I want to jump to vps yet and be responsible for the server.

    worries me that dathorn doesnt have a phone number. that is the way my current host is and although their support started good, it has slowly slid downhill and now most of the time it takes 24 hours to get an answer to a ticket. i am liking the idea of having a phone number to call if SHTF.

    MDDHosting looks interesting. Has speed been good with them? my two big things are speed and reliability. What else should I know about MDDHosting?

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2009
    Location
    New York
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    thank you for all the good replies. Not sure if I want to jump to vps yet and be responsible for the server.

    worries me that dathorn doesnt have a phone number. that is the way my current host is and although their support started good, it has slowly slid downhill and now most of the time it takes 24 hours to get an answer to a ticket. i am liking the idea of having a phone number to call if SHTF.

    MDDHosting looks interesting. Has speed been good with them? my two big things are speed and reliability. What else should I know about MDDHosting?
    Hi Tom,

    I would recommend you purchase either a quality shared/reseller provider or go with a Managed VPS if you want to be able to have scalability. A phone number is an awesome thing for companies to have, it definitely gives a buyer confidence.

    Do a search on MDD Hosting here, Mike and their team usually get great reviews.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    California
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    thank you for all the good replies. Not sure if I want to jump to vps yet and be responsible for the server.

    worries me that dathorn doesnt have a phone number. that is the way my current host is and although their support started good, it has slowly slid downhill and now most of the time it takes 24 hours to get an answer to a ticket. i am liking the idea of having a phone number to call if SHTF.

    MDDHosting looks interesting. Has speed been good with them? my two big things are speed and reliability. What else should I know about MDDHosting?
    To be honest, I was at Dathorn 7 years and never realized they didn't have a land line phone number. I never had cause during that entire time to ever escalate beyond a simple ticket. But I can see how that could be an important factor.

    MDD's been good for me, very responsive to both my issues and a few of theirs during the time my server was being provisioned, and then also a couple of billing snafus (I changed from monthly to semi-annual payment with a deposit on account that was then applied, but it confused the billing system a bit ... it was quickly remedied, within about 15 minutes). I had them restore an account's database that was converted to Hebrew character encoding by my customer in the belief it would make it easier for him to produce posts in Hebrew. And they put up with several stupid questions I had about disk space on a VPS, etc.

    Speed seems good on their servers. I'm in California, and the servers are in Denver, so a close location helps. I liked the central location because my customers are spread out over the continental US.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Posts
    351
    I'd say a high quality reseller, it'd leave the management out so you could focus on your sites.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Location
    Minneapolis, Minnesota
    Posts
    32
    I have been using MDDhosting for my VPS for a few months and can tell you that their support is great. Most of my tickets have been responded to in minutes.

  10. #10
    Well it all depends on your experice in the area of server management if you ask me. Do you really think you can handle all the tasks of managing it?

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Aug 2002
    Location
    Charleston, SC
    Posts
    668
    Judging from your requirements, reseller hosting wouldn't be a smart choice, considering you'd require an isolated environment where you can get a guaranteed portion of server-resources (Memory/CPU) allocated to your account. Reseller hosting just does not offer that. A couple of companies to look at would be Eleven2 and HostDime.
    Amir Golestan
    Executive Director | Micfo
    datacenter facilities in 39 cities across the world | AS53889
    www.micfo.com/datacenter

  12. #12
    A reseller account should be fine for this.
    HostXNow - Shared Web Hosting | Semi Dedicated Hosting | Enterprise Reseller Hosting | VPS Hosting

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    United Kingdom
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    15
    I am using reseller hosting and very disappointed. Rightnow i would like to check out dedicated hosting.

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Jul 2005
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    Quote Originally Posted by Web3Hosting View Post
    I am using reseller hosting and very disappointed. Rightnow i would like to check out dedicated hosting.
    Why are you disappointed? Perhaps you found a bad reseller host?

  15. #15
    Thank you all, your insight and recommendations have been great.

    Two last questions for the experts as we make a final decision. As I said my largest site is about 40k page views per month so small. All together I only use about 6GB bandwidth per month. Is 768MB ram on a VPS sufficient?

    Just realizing that knownhost VPS is a managed VPS. So I have narrowed it to reseller account through MDDHosting or a managed VPS through knownhost.

    As we consider future growth, how large of a site would you need to have to move from reseller hosting to a VPS in terms of page views?

    knownhost VS2 $40/month w/ CPanel 768RAM

    MDDHosting Reseller $25

    The disk space and bandwidth on both are much higher than I currently need.

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    California
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    Two last questions for the experts as we make a final decision. As I said my largest site is about 40k page views per month so small. All together I only use about 6GB bandwidth per month. Is 768MB ram on a VPS sufficient?

    <snip>

    As we consider future growth, how large of a site would you need to have to move from reseller hosting to a VPS in terms of page views?
    With the right configuration, 768MB RAM will work (it probably will work with the default configuration they give you!) I've had disagreements with folks here in the past about this, but I usually recommend 1GB of RAM for hosting multiple sites using MySql (CMS, forums, etc.) The reason is that MySql can be tweaked to use more memory for cache that can improve performance.

    But, your sites will run fine on 768MB RAM. On my 1GB VPS, I'm using about 645MB of RAM, but I have tweaked MySql to use more RAM for cache. I think you could have some refined MySql settings and still have plenty of free memory.

    The final consideration is the processor specs and disk I/O. I don't know KnownHost's set up, so if some of their customers chime in, that would help. MySql will swap out to disk when it runs out of cache, and that swapping is affected by processor speed and I/O performance. Check with them to see if you can "upgrade in place" to more memory, and more processor. Usually you can with a VPS.

    If this were a business decision, I would say you're killing money by going with a VPS when you don't "need" it. But if there are other considerations, such as learning to manage a server, or simply a "quality quest", then its certainly a way to go.

  17. #17
    Yipes, been trying since about 9am to call or get in touch with MDDHosting through livechat for some sales questions. Get voicemail on the sales and support lines, no return call from voicemail.

    Not a good sign.

  18. #18
    Join Date
    Jul 2005
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    Yipes, been trying since about 9am to call or get in touch with MDDHosting through livechat for some sales questions. Get voicemail on the sales and support lines, no return call from voicemail.

    Not a good sign.
    MDD gets back on voicemails, I'd suggest leaving a voicemail.

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Location
    North Carolina
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    4,988
    Quote Originally Posted by tomwitt View Post
    Yipes, been trying since about 9am to call or get in touch with MDDHosting through livechat for some sales questions. Get voicemail on the sales and support lines, no return call from voicemail.

    Not a good sign.
    Feel free to initiate a chat through the Web site. I'll be available for the next few hours.

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