Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Managed Hosting and Services : Managed hosting in the UK

[armand]

I'm looking for the following sort of spec from a UK host:
Managed server
2x Xeon/DualCore (or AMD equivalent)
2 Gb RAM
Windows 2003 Server Standard edition
4x 160Gb RAID10
100 Mbps port
2000Gb bandwidth
50Gb offsite backup

It's pretty important I can grow the server when I need to, and we get good levels of co-operation from the host. Uptime and performance are critical. No budget at this point - I'd like to find out what I need to spend. Break it to me gently...

Thanks

[nitrohosting]

Armand,

What level of management do you require?

You may find some hosts can bundle things like security updates etc into their standard price however if you're going to want them to spend time configuring new sites, dns and all other little bits and pieces you should expect the monthly costs to increase appropriately.

Hosts can't provide quotes in this thread and so this example pricing shouldn't be taken as one from me however I'd estimate that for good quality hardware (i.e. a solid machine costing £1500-£2000) and reliable transit along with basic management you should budget around £300-£350 per month. Is this roughly what you were expecting?

I'm sure once you hunt around you'll get budget hosts offering pricing less than this and some hosts coming out substantially more expensive however it's probably a decent ball-park to work from.

If you have any questions feel free to shoot

Kind regards,
Kris

[reiteration]

I agree with Kris, if you require quality the price will reflect this although I'd say more around the £500 per month mark for full management.

If uptime is important look for things like branded server, dual-power and dual-switch connections to minimise any downtime. Again all this comes at a price.

Make sure you check out the kind of current customers they have, do they offer budget servers ? Do you want your server hosted with budget servers ?

You can tell alot about a host from their cheapest offering.

You'll get plenty of people offering to do it for far less - it just depends on how important this is to your business.

[Jamie Edwards]

www.rshosting.com (do a search here for reviews) offer to manage servers along side their own. The prices of management are very competitive, and support is available 24 hours a day - they offer full management of the server in technical aspects and general web hosting, e.g. "Enable shell for account X" or "Suspend...." and the support staff will do.

The service is not advertised on their web site directly - you will have to contact them

[armand]

We can certainly manage most things. The mangement will be for fixing things we can't as well as doing more routine management when people are on holiday etc.

I agree with looking for the budget offers - fairly clear from some hosts who purport to offer this kind of hosting that their attention is elsewhere - with the budget mass market or shared hosting.

Also, given that 40%+ of the traffic will be from outside of the UK, would a US host be equally as good? This isn't co-location, so no site visits needed.

[reiteration]

US will definatly get you a better deal although personally if 60% of traffic is from UK I'd say get a UK hosted server.

What you really need is semi-managed with the option for full mamagement when needed, say when people are on holiday.

I'm sure most host should be able to work something like this out for you probably on an hourly basis for things you can't fix and a fixed fee for a weeks management or similar.