Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Alternative to the Planet that is Reliable?

[uninet]

Hi everyone,
I've been with the Planet for four years and have been absolutely delighted with their service. Yet, I'm wondering if I should move elsewhere. Why? Mostly for one reason: four years later, my now aged Celeron 2.4 GHz system still has the same monthly cost as it did four years ago. I'm not looking for them to give me a better price on that system, but I'd like to upgrade to the "modern equivalent" of what that system was in 2004... looking at plans on their site, one might expect that for each price point the servers would have changed over the years, but my server is still the one that fills my price point. The Planet seems to have completely ignored having their low end line evolve as old technology fades away, new technology comes into play and things like hard disk prices have plummeted. For what I might have paid for a Celeron 2.4 GHz computer from Dell four years ago, I'd now end up with a Pentium or better (e.g. Dell's cheapest system comes with a 2.0 Ghz dual core Pentium and a hard disk 3x larger than my 80 GB one).

So, I'm looking for suggestions. Hosting is something I do on the side as a service to my web design clients. As such, I want something reliable (like the Planet has been) but I cannot at this point justify something where my end cost with server, cPanel, etc., costs much more than $110-$120.

Features I have and would like to keep:
1.) 24x7 tech support (obviously) backed by an high availability SLA
2.) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3.) cPanel/Fantastico
4.) Server monitoring/basic management (the Planet will reboot the server for me if one of its four or five vital services go down and they'll take care of kernel upgrades -- nothing else)


Thoughts?

Thanks,
Tim

[DATARTIM]

Well If your happy at the planet then I'd highly suggest trying to stay there if you can.

I'd suggest either giving them a call or email to see if they can help out a long time customer or trying to find a company that can leae you a server in the planet for a more reasonable price.

I understand why your thinking of leaving but its rare to find a provider your happy with and I'd hate to see you leave and then not be as happy with someone else as is likely.

[markfrompf]

Uninet, as far as price is concerned, I've had this one specific box over at The Planet for a few years now. It's a Pentium 4, RHEL, 2GB RAM, 80GB Drive, cPanel, 100mbps. When I first purchased it and tacked all of these upgrades on to it, the cost was about $200/mo. with EV1 Servers.

After the merge between EV1 and The Planet, I asked for a billing audit (through a ticket.) That box now costs me $139.99/mo.

Have you tried asking for an 'official' billing audit?


NOTE to Moderators: This is not a web hosting offer.

[WireNine]

SoftLayer, you can't go wrong

[andren]

You should expect tp pay $35/mo for basic management plus $10 for monitoring. Cpanel/fantastico is $30. Given that you have $45 left for the server if your price tag is $120.
Not too many people will give you a celeron and decent uptime and support for $45. So stay where you are.

[BudWay]

They have good network but that's really about it.
(that's all I can say in good about then)

I remeber once they gave me 1 hour on a sunday to respond to a "paypal" clone (Long url) that was due to a php exploit on a client site our the hole server was going to be offline (really they called but it was plain luck I was available asap on a SUNDAY).

They only care about the money, if they cause you caos for you, you can be sure they will not care our lose sleep over it.

If you cancel and want to get your refund don't wait for the last days to order (after transfering the data) because they will cancel your support panel login and not respond to e-mail refund request.

[djorgensen]

SoftLayer.com

[Laws]

Originally Posted by BudWay

They have good network but that's really about it.
(that's all I can say in good about then)

I remeber once they gave me 1 hour on a sunday to respond to a "paypal" clone (Long url) that was due to a php exploit on a client site our the hole server was going to be offline (really they called but it was plain luck I was available asap on a SUNDAY).

They only care about the money, if they cause you caos for you, you can be sure they will not care our lose sleep over it.

If you cancel and want to get your refund don't wait for the last days to order (after transfering the data) because they will cancel your support panel login and not respond to e-mail refund request.

Good. PayPal and any phishing scam sites should be pulled within the hour. Would you rather they let the scammers continue to sniff peioples information? This is not something you should be angry at ThePlanet for.

Also, why should you get a refund, all of their terms of service agreements state categorically no refunds. It is what you agreed to on joining their service.

Personally, here's what i would say to the original poster...


1. Is there a NEED for a more powerful server? is it stopping you achieve your business goals, is it failing often, is it overloaded, if no, why upgrade it?

2. Is the service you are getting from ThePlanet at a level you deem acceptable. Have they underperformed in any way that makes you want to move?

3. How has network performance been, how much downtime have you had over the past few years?

If the server is still supporting your IS needs, the service you are getting is at a level acceptable to you as is the network, then why change just to have the latest hardware? Is it really worth the effort and risk of moving to another provider which may not support your IS needs?

[BudWay]

Originally Posted by Laws

Good. PayPal and any phishing scam sites should be pulled within the hour. Would you rather they let the scammers continue to sniff peioples information? This is not something you should be angry at ThePlanet for.

Also, why should you get a refund, all of their terms of service agreements state categorically no refunds. It is what you agreed to on joining their service.

Personally, here's what i would say to the original poster...

I should have gotten a refund because:

THEY ACTIVATED a feature on my SERVER that had a EXPLOIT witch lead to daily downtimes
(Not to say the loss of many clients) and it was about 20 days till I Find what they activated because the TECH made notification of what he activated on my server neither did I request for that feature to be activated.

Also they closed the Orbit panel before the ending date and didn't respond to my refund e-mails request.

Later on a TP personal from the forum wanted to know what happend I gave all the info. and they said well it's too late for the refund now... you should have requested to us earlier (than I showed the e-mail proof than the refund was still refused)

How can you trusth our work with a company like that?

PS: Paypal clone site true a php hole can happen anytime I don't think 1 hour on a sunday is a acceptable time-frame to take a hole server down.

Maybe paypal should work more in educating there users because the url was major long like more than 35 characters long and it was on subdirs.

[uninet]

Originally Posted by Laws

1. Is there a NEED for a more powerful server? is it stopping you achieve your business goals, is it failing often, is it overloaded, if no, why upgrade it?

2. Is the service you are getting from ThePlanet at a level you deem acceptable. Have they underperformed in any way that makes you want to move?

3. How has network performance been, how much downtime have you had over the past few years?

1.) My server seems to be struggling a bit more under the weight of cPanel 11 -- it's loads have been inching up in recent months. I think exim is getting bogged down some what with spam these days too.

2.) No, they've been great.

3.) I've had I think maybe a half hour of down time (tops) due to their network since February 2004.

What I'd really like to do is colocate there instead (although I'm not sure they offer that any more). That way I could pay them for what they do very well (service) and not what they don't seem to worry about (hardware specs). The only issue there is I'd hate to have my server die and the only way to fix it be me flying down to Dallas.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Keep 'em coming.

[uninet]

Originally Posted by djorgensen

SoftLayer.com

I don't see anything in my price range there, other than data backup servers. Am I overlooking something?

Thanks!

[djorgensen]

The Softlayer express servers start at $139
Thats not far from his budget and the spec isnt bad either

[AvailNetworks]

stick with what you have. It works, migration costs and hassle will not even be worth a few bucks a month or the upgrade in hardware.

If you do not need a hardware upgrade due to load or space constraints. Don't bother.

also it is hard enough to find a provider to stick with and who treats you well. Consider yourself lucky and do not jump ship

[uninet]

Originally Posted by djorgensen

The Softlayer express servers start at $139
Thats not far from his budget and the spec isnt bad either

The big issue there is that is the base without cPanel, etc.

Thanks!

[uninet]

Originally Posted by AvailNetworks

stick with what you have. It works, migration costs and hassle will not even be worth a few bucks a month or the upgrade in hardware.

If you do not need a hardware upgrade due to load or space constraints. Don't bother.

also it is hard enough to find a provider to stick with and who treats you well. Consider yourself lucky and do not jump ship

Load is definitely the main concern, along with people requesting more and more space (after all, 80 GB was plenty for many sites in 2004, but these days people are doing podcasts, video postings, etc., that make 80 GB look rather small). My standard 300 MB account is looking small to folks these days.

I'll probably stay with the Planet, but I thought it was worth exploring the options.