Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Managed Hosting and Services : Unanticpated move to managed dedicated server

[ihsreal]

I'm new to the forum and have found myself looking into managed dedicated servers a little sooner than I anticipated. I just got an email from my hosting company - inmotionhosting - that reads as follows:

>>System administration has been tracking high resource usage on the machine housing your account... To be clear, your account will be deactivated on the shared systems by the close of business on Wednesday 2006-09-27 at 4PM EST. If you would like your site to be active past the stated date, you will need to get in touch with us about a move up to a dedicated platform as that is minimum plan that can sustain your site's resource usage. Dedicated servers are $289.95/mo.>>

The first notice just came on the 15th and since then I've been trying to get an answer as to which particular resources are being "overused" and what might be causing it. Apparently they couldn't give a definite answer so they are giving us the ultimatum of cutting us off (read: putting us out of business until we can get everything transferred to another hosting company) or "big boying" us into a dedicated hosting plan for 300% of what we're now paying. And, they don't seem to have managed dedicated hosting from what I can tell on their website.

So I'm hoping someone here can steer me in the right direction. We have no staff with familiarity with dedicated servers so I don't even know what questions to ask. We're currently familiar with using a CPANEL WHM and our website has always been on a Unix/Linux box. We need lots of disk space and mysql php myAdmin, etc. Price is an issue as we are basically a start-up.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[CD Burnt]

how many websites do you need to move? single sites, or reseller accounts?

budget?

[TR Seeks]

Get a dedicated server from somewhere like layerdtech (A cheap $80 ish one) and then get a managment company to get it for you.

Or go to a reseller like Server4Sale as they have managment plans. Then they will do everything for you. That is the only options I can think off.

You could also get a VPS plan which is a step up from a shared plan, just before you get to a dedicated server. Reason I say that is because of budgeting. I mean $290 is to expensive for an entry level server which is unmanaged

[ihsreal]

Thanks for the replies. To answer CD's question, we have 4 sites and a number of domains that are parked. We would like to keep it under $300 a month for now, but if that's going to cause a performance problem we would go higher.

[ImZan]

As it's been said already, $300 is probably on the higher end of the managed server for an entry level server - especially as you had been a shared server before this. A good starting server will run you 1/2 your budget and might be a good place to start. Perhaps something a little higher if you don't want to risk the performance of the system much.

[TR Seeks]

If you could tell us what sort of bandwidth you use and what sort of sites they are (heavy Mysql/PHP etc) we will be able to help on server spec.

[ihsreal]

The main site uses a lot of PHP and is farily database intensive. We currently run about 20 mySQL databases which primarily hold daily updated property listing data from Multiple Listing Services (real estate for sale data) for 8 metropolitan markets in the U.S. so they generally hold hundreds of thousands of records (we plan to continue to expand this as we add markets). There are also databases for an online forum, click tracking, site search engine, affiliate program and a few others. There are thousands of pages on the site as each property for sale has it's own dynamic display page. This is an online buiness with an e-commerce component for selling real estate services "a la carte". We're not a hosting reseller, but do host several other sites that have related business models.

[DATARTIM]

Based on what you say , i would have said around $150-$250 max. As for bandwidth , can't tell what you need but you should get about 1tb for that money. I would suggest looking around talking to the companies, make sure you get it managed.

[ihsreal]

A little more info (more always helps right?)

We currently have exceeded 1024MB Burstable Memory Quota
According to current CPANEL:
15GB Disk Usage
524MB SQL Disk Usage
21GB Bandwidth Usage

[ImZan]

From your requirements, I would suggest you get a system with atleast 1GB ram. VPS 1GB "burstable" ram is not the same thing as a real server with 1 GB of ram. You should be quite comfortable in a good machine under $200 fully managed with your requirements. At 250 - 300 - you'll be getting something that is capable of hosting a few VPSs like yours.

[ihsreal]

Thanks to all. Ended up going with LayeredTech and PlatinumServerManagment. So far both have been very responsive.