Networks Dedicated server advice...

I'm in the market for a dedicated server. Anyone got any tales about companies that I should consider and ones I should avoid?

I've got a budget of about £50/$100 per month. For this I'd expect something around the 2/2.4Ghz mark, about 80GB HDD, 512MB/1GB RAM and around the 1000GB bandwidth mark. Must be Linux with control panel such as Cpanel or Plesk.

It would be nice if it was managed to the extent that the company installed critical patches and major updates to core packages such as PHP and MySQL also.

It's going to be used to sell hosting to people I design sites for primarily, although I intend to take orders for straight hosting as well, and of course I'd put a free image uploader on it

Ta' people

 

are you sure you want a dedicated server?

if your only going to be hosting under 50 ish sites get a reseller account, that why you dont have to worry about hackers, updates and the like. These are well within your budget and will come with a control panel.

If you want alittle more power and want to run your own programs the next step up with be a VPS (virtual private server). This basically gives you your own server but the power of it is split between X number of users. These can come with a control panel. You dont have to worry about the kernel updates but PHP, MySQL etc you will normally have to do, but there are lots of tools out there that will do it for you. They cost more as you get more power.

Don't let me put you off a dedi if thats what you want, its just if you dont need it there no point in wasting your money.

I guess as you have put the price in $ you want a US server. $50 - $100 isn't alot for a dedi in the UK. Only place I know that does them so cheap is oneandone.co.uk they do one for £29 but you only get 10Gig data transfer a mouth and more transfer is soooo expensive (I think it was about £5 a gig when I last looked)

Hope you find one I know finding a host is one of the hardest things about running a web company.

 

I've had reseller accounts before, me and a few guys I know are clubbing together to go dedi, so the server will be used for much more than my side of things. I would be the guy that's doing most of the techy stuff though. To tell you the truth I also want one for the experience, it'll be nice learning how to manage a server properly instead of just hosting accounts, plus i can get exactly what I want on it (within reason). It'd be nice to know there is some basic support to install patches, etc too as I said though.

I've looked into 1&1, i was going to buy but i've heard really bad things from alot of people about them. Bad support, down time, cutting service for no reason, etc

Cheers! and thanks for the advice. It sure is proving to be difficult.

 

www.rackspace.co.uk, www.theplanet.com, www.ev1servers.net

 

good quick edit there RTT

 

To be honest with you bandwidth costs in the UK are going to make your 1000Gb of bandwidth requirement somewhat difficult to fulfill within your budjet.

You'd be best considering the US DC's although to be honest they are starting to struggle somewhat. I have 6 cabs of kit over with EV1 and untill the beginning of this year had 2 cabs with TP. I've had to migrate most of my TP equipment to the UK (cabs in Level(3)), the high bandwidth radio stations I moved to EV1.

Is that bandwidth requirement of 1000Gb of transfer per month realistic?

Also look at the long term cost effectiveness of running a "business based server" on the dedicated platform, as well as the flexibility you can get from your provider.

If you want some affordable colo space in a 99p per Gb of bandwdith used rack let me know, i've still got 9 or 10u free in one of my Level(3) cabs.

 

http://serverbeach.com

I have had really nice service from them.

 

I'm not sure whether you are either bragging or promoting your business...

 

Bragging / Trying to impart some knowledge (ie: is 1000Gb of data transfer realistic).

I dont particularly want more growth sales wise at present. The DR stuff I am doing for HSBC is draining my resources. Dont want to have to hire someone to work for me, as David says "Everyone else is incompetent".

If you really want UK based dedicateds and a decent level of service, i'd highly recommed www.dedipower.com

 

You won't get everything you want with a control panel, even from a ridiculously cheap soon-to-be-out-of-business provider, operating from their garden shed in the US for £50/month. Increase your budget to £70/month and it's doable in the UK, just about.

If you e-mail adam@ebws.co.uk (personal email), I can offer you some unbiased advice or possibly a sales pitch......

hk - EV1 don't 'do' cabs, all of their kit is on breadracks .

1000GB of data transfer is as reasonable in the UK as it is in the US. With decent economies of scale and once you start bringing in private peerings, it's actually more feasible within London. It's the cost of floorspace in the major carrier-neutral London DCs that costs the money.

 

Funny that, seeing as I have cabs with them, that i've actually been to... Tell them you want to move your cabs from TP, they'll accomodate you.

Also even with economies of scale anything non cogent bandwidth in the UK is still considerably more expensive than in the US.

EDIT: Their dedicateds are breadrack, you can colo rackmount with them.

 

EV1 don't do colo at all. They never have and, so they say, they never will. Their entire business is based on standardisation, keeping admin costs down, "stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap".

I don't have any kit in TP. We're based in Redbus London II.

As for bandwidth, it's not about transit costs but about how much of your traffic goes via peering arrangements. Either way, as much as I had this word, offering 1000GB/month per server is "overselling". That's not necessarily a bad thing though, in this case.

 

Yeah true you wont get what you want for the budget your looking at. If you can go with a host that uses Cpanel then they can normally do you a internal copy (dont know the real word for it) which is ALOT cheaper.

on the topic of EV1 doing Colo.
They do do it they just dont call it Colocation.
Private Racks is what they like to call it.

really back on topic the question is are you going to be able to use 1000GB. If you can back it up sure but to me it sounds like your going abit over the top with what you require.

 

I've basically shopped around and looked at the kind of specs and bandwidth you get for about my budget, and that's where i've got the figure of 1TB transfer. I have no need for anything like that, at least for the moment .

One of the guys i'm clubbing together with will be running a fileserver site though, so I still need a reasonable amount.

 

That's not colo. You still have to use their kit.

Anyway, acrim, if you email adam@ebws.co.uk, catch me on msn messenger adam@23orchid.co.uk or call me on 0870 0115578 (Adam Smith) I'll come up with a (non-imaginary ) deal that will knock your socks off, figuratively speaking.

 

Sorry my bad I didn't really read it probally.

Adam I'm not sure if your allowed to do that, although I know your just trying to be nice.

 

*pulls hair out*..... ok fine, ev1 dont do colo, I imagined going over there, physically moving my rackmount servers from TP over to EV1.... I am imagining the large monthly fee I pay them..... its all in my head.... Anyway.

Adam: Redbus London II... you reffering to sov or the harbour exchange? As I have a 1/4 cab in sov that i'd be interested getting VLAN'ed over to you if you can provide me 1000Gb per month full routes transit for the same kind of money as in the US... actually might be worthwhile carrying this on over email admin(a-t)hamlesh.com (sorry for the slight hijack acrimonious).

acrimonious, if you are going to be running a high traffic file server, you are going to need a bit of transit You could always get (as Adam was touching upon with his comments on peering arrangements) partial bandwidth (so UK routes only) this would mean your file server would be UK only but heh, its a hell of a lot cheaper than full routes on quality bandwidth.

Personally I like to stick with quality providers, like Level(3), I guess for your uses transit from TSN would do the trick. I think they were offering 25mbit CDR (~7500Gb per month data transfer) at £5 per mbit or something silly like that last time I checked.

 

I think so. Imagining for a second that you aren't making it up (to what end, I'm not sure), why on *earth* would you do such a thing?

Redbus II is Meridian Gate (215, Marsh Wall) - surely someone in your position would know that? Although, in the last thread we 'clashed' in, you were referring to "Telehouse Harbour Exchange"...... Just give it up dude!

As I stated before, 1000GB/month is often given as standard with dedis because the majority of customers wouldn't even know what to do with that amount of bandwidth. Once of our clients is a small business who use their P4 dedicated server to upload a small backup, once a week, over their 56k modem. In total this month, they've transferred about 200MB of data. Of course, there are those which do use their full quota and over and above that amount but, overall, it works well. It has nothing whatsover to do with "US bandwidth is cheaper".

Transit prices are entirely dependent on the CDR you require. My e-mail address is in this thread if you're seriously interested but I won't hold my breath .

 

I've come a long way since then still learning and slowly getting there though. Right emailed.

 

Ok. To be fair, if you put as much effort into your hosting business as you did into your BS, you'd go a long way.

No sign of your email yet though.