Looking for Dedicated options

[Susan]

The time has come to begin looking at Dedicated servers. I'm by no means a sysadmin, but I'm willing to learn...or, if reasonable enough, pay for services...

So my question is this: Which dedicated option offers good support, everything we need to put the VB on it out of the box, sufficient equiptment to run a fairly moderate board (20k pageviews/500posts a day), and is reasonably priced. Is such a thing possible? Is it available for under $500 a month?

Your feedback would be appreciated.

Susan

[www.heisomni.org]

Dedicated hosting solutions.

Hi Susan, I came to your post in a quest towards increased knowledge of dedicated hosting, fortunatly I can answer your questions. I am in about the exact same position as you, looking to get a dedicated server for my own sites and some customer's websites. There are many different levels of dedicated hosting, you can get a beginners package which includes server lease, some tech help, some software installed, all the way to co-located servers which you supply and they supply the environment and connection. If you can get your own server then you would save lots of money. As far as bandwidth, the minimum packages I have seen would be ample for your demands, then they go all the way to unmetered t1 and beyond. A good company for beginners, although not real cheap, is http://www.webhosting.com . There are many many companies and they all have their pros and cons in pricing and service, just do a search for "dedicated servers" or "server colocation" <you supply the server> at http://www.yahoo.com and you will get tons of sites to look at. If you want to get your own server, well you can get that anywhere.. Perhaps you would be interested in going in halfers? or leasing some space on my first server? It would save us both some money. I have a guy who can setup apache server and administer all the virtual IP's etc...

Thanks.

[Shaman]

I do it for starting at $300 (Canadian, $200 U.S.D.) a month which includes the rack space for a rack-mounted computer, basic support, power for up to two peripherals/computers and a 100Mbps port.

Bandwidth is logged, of course.

It's pretty comparable to a lot of places stateside.

[Martin]

Susan,
Check out http://www.hostsearch.com

They have a very comprehensive search enging there that will let you plug in what you're looking for and read reviews by other customers (and former customers).

I know you have a site already, but some of the things you really need to be wary of is the "unlimited" bandwidth. If they are offering a really low price and saying that, chances are their idea of unlimited is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4Gb/month, which would suffice for now on a board your size, but not for long. They tend to make up the low cost by really sticking it to you in the excess bandwidth charges.

If you are truly a beginner and know little about telnet, etc, (I'll prolly get crap for this) you might want to consider going with an NT or Win2k server to start with. If you can get Apache as your webserver you should be able to run PHP as a module and get close to the same performance you would with *nix, plus you will have an easy GUI to admin your server with.
Overall, if you are familiar with telnet, I would recommend a *nix server, though.

[Susan]

Martin, we're pulling close to 15 gigs of bandwidth a month already! Over and over we've heard that a dedicated server is in our future. Virtual accounts just don't seem to be doing the job for us...(although we're fine on the virt account we have now...we want to expand...and don't have a lot of growing room left.)

I've heard so many nightmare stories about NT servers and such that I'd like to stay with what we have on our virt server (ie: apache/linux) I'm not that familiar with telnet, but as I mentioned, I'm willing to learn...and we have a few months time for me to play with telnet and learn how to do what I want to do. There are plenty of dedicated options out there that have web control panels...so I'm hoping that we can find one that will let me do everything I need to in a web based way.

Alabanza.com looks good as far as holding my hand with that kind of stuff, but I couldn't find a price list and that makes me cringe thinking that "if you have to ask, you can't afford to buy". Site5 is EXPENSIVE for start up...but I'm comfortable with Matt and he's said he's willing to help me learn what I need to know. CIhost is cheap, but I'm wondering if it's a case of "you get what you pay for". Verio, ditto. I'd like to get out of the VDI NOC if they don't clean up their act soon...but it's what I know. LOL

I'm off to look at hostsearch.com Anybody have any more suggestions?

Susan

[WebStyles]

Susan... You can get a Managed Server from most hosting companies, which means you aren't the sysadmin. You won't have root access, but you can call up the hosting company and yell if anything goes wrong with your box.

We're just getting on a dedicated (unmanaged) server at VServers (http://www.vservers.com), so I can't really give an in-depth review of them, but I've heard wonderful things. We had a very short experience with Digital Nation (http://www.dedicatedserver.com) which was very good, but VServers gave us a better deal, and we never actually got on the DN server.

The only advice I can give you without any hesitation is to avoid Interland (http://www.interland.net), they are the worst dedicated hosting company I have ever come into contact with... They are truly the worst! For example, we paid 6 months up front (since that's their "policy") for a 600 p3 HP server. They put us on a 400 Celeron for 5 months of our contract, we found out by accident when we were snooping through all the config files one day. This was after they blamed us for the performance problems and told us we needed more RAM (which we bought). I'm still flaming mad about that.

Anyways, enough about me... Good luck in your search!

[Martin]

I have to agree with WebStyles about Interland. I've been there a coupla months and I have to say I'm not very pleased at all so far.

They have taken my server offline twice now for maintenance on the farm without any prior notification. The second time they told me it was because I was being moved in to the new data center. They lied. I'm still in the same, crappy old building.

I had a major database crash the other night. The reason for the crash, a power outage. They told me I would have UPS on my system. They lied. If it was there, it wasn't working.

[WebStyles]

Originally posted by Martin
They have taken my server offline twice now for maintenance on the farm without any prior notification. The second time they told me it was because I was being moved in to the new data center. They lied. I'm still in the same, crappy old building.

Yeah, our site was down for about 2 hours when they moved our box over to the new data center. We actually got in though, and after that the site never worked right again... They broke the ethernet card in the move. It took them two weeks to stick a new one in!

Whenever they asked which box we were on when we called tech support, we always told them it was the one with smoke coming out of it!

[werehere]

InterFlam is the worst in my mind.

They have us on a new server there and it has been fine oddly enough, but I am leaving very very soon to vservers like WebStyles said

We are hoping they are a quality hosting firm like I have been told they are.

[Michael]

I'm on a dedicated server now with the following config.

Dual 9 GB Hard Drives - One SCSI, One EIDE
Pentium Class 450 MHz
100 Base T Ethernet
96 MB RAM
20 IP addresses
120 GB per month bandwidth transfer.

Its $399 a month, but that gets me 24/7 tech support cause I'm not the worlds best sys admin, it'll do everything and anything you need done though.

[Kathy]

Originally posted by Michael
I'm on a dedicated server now with the following config.

Dual 9 GB Hard Drives - One SCSI, One EIDE
Pentium Class 450 MHz
100 Base T Ethernet
96 MB RAM
20 IP addresses
120 GB per month bandwidth transfer.

Its $399 a month, but that gets me 24/7 tech support cause I'm not the worlds best sys admin, it'll do everything and anything you need done though.

I have the website along with Susan in our quest for a ded server...my question, Michael, is:
Is 96 Ram enough for 20 IPs and all that bandwidth? I mean, if a person needs tons of bandwidth, shouldn't a server require more Ram than that? I'm learning the needs as we go...and I've been looking at 256 Ram.....and hopefully as much bandwidth as you've listed. So, is 96 enough?

[werehere]

I would not guess that 96MB is really enough for a dynamic site. Just my opinion

[Michael]

Actually 96MB of RAM is holding up extremly well, however I think there is a reason for that. On the server we are only using PHP and MySQL - not much Perl (or any actually that I can think off).

I think that they are both very effiecent and don't put too much strain on a server. I'd suggest starting at 96MB, and go up if your server isn't handling it. Upgrade the RAM though, upgrading the processor etc won't do too much.

[tabernack]

I have a dedicated server at Dialtoneinternet.com with the following specs:

Celeron 366
128 Megs Ram
6.4 GB Harddrive
RedHat6.1
Unlimited IP's
50 gb traffic included ($3/gb extra)

$177/month. Mind you that was a memorial day special. They have a July 4th special right now for $225/month :

http://www.dialtoneinternet.com/specials/specialoffers.htm

Their hardware upgrade options are very reasonable as well.

I have to admit that I think this company is definitely one of the best in the industry. You can check out posts on them and other hosts at http://www.scriptkeeper.com/cgi-bin/...=20&LastLogin=

Other good companies I have looked into are:

http://www.tera-byte.com

http://www.dn.com

http://www.rackspace.com

Hope this helps.

[George L]

well i have been looking for dedicated servers for nearly a year before i decided last month....

you're either an person with knowledge of admining a server or a person like me who doesn't know a thing about linux and admin and need a control panel to help you admin stuff...

admin knowledgeable i suggest looking at

http://maxim.net if you need alot of bandwidth 0.5 MB line (160GB+ /month) or more

http://digitalnation.com - spent about 6 months bouncing emails with their sales but decided to go with another place, rackspace.com

if you need a control panel like i do

i went with rackspace.com for

PIII 500
128MB
10 GB
8 IPS
50GB/month
fot US$405/month
US$250 setup

i have 7 sites on the server right now and plan another 16 - 18 sites on it which includes my vbulletin powered site at http://animeboards.net/forums/

there's also

http://i-interactive.net - expensive on setup fees, but reportedly uptime is the best and the ensim control is pretty good i hear...

http://netinfra.com