After investigating colocation (buying a box and hosting it somewhere) I have decided to go for dedicated hosting (renting a box somewhere) as it's a lot cheaper up-font, and monthly as well, go figure.

The current choices I can see are;



I'm struggling to find the perfect host, and input or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:43, Sat 26 June 2004.

Jase, as we discussed earlier,

Things to consider include:

OS: I have my doubts with redhat9, especially due to its loss of support by redhat. That said there are companies offering support for ~$5/month. Any Redhat system can be upgraded to fedora very easily as well which is an option. Fedora is based more on a debian-esk system of community development.

For us I think anything that is secure and supports the perl modules we use will be fine, which is pretty much any of the distros. I am leaning towards debian though but that is based on an irrational gut feeling.

HDD: I have expressed my concern of i/o on the IDE drives previously so if we have the option of using raid or something we should look at that.

Memory: 512 should be fine

CPU: Athlon!!!! <-- another irrational thing, or maybe not :-P

As we are talking now on msn, the serverpronto or managed.com option seems to be the best.

elSpike out.
This message was last edited by the GM at 07:29, Sat 26 June 2004.

Well, I'm not exactly what you'd call an expert on these things.

However, the serverpronto looks good to me too.

It is, of course the most expensive of them, but then I've found that the old saying "you get what you pay for" seems to be especially true for anything to do with computers.

As long as the bandwidth is enough, I suppose ServerPronto looks good, but I cannot claim to have much knowledge of these things.

That's my amateurish opinion, for what's it worth!

Looking more and more into it I think I (?we) am leaning toward managed.com, and jase is asking about their athlon products that are currently out of stock. We want an Athlon!

I have a 'little' <G> experience of US hosting. What I think needs to be given highest priority (next to price of course) is the bandwidth prioritisation, scale and connectivity. A lot of the budget outfits have *$#&$( connectivity and that's why they're so cheap. It can be a pain in the ass when you find pages take AGES to move. That is, it isn't so much a matter of how much data you get, but rather how quickly that data moves which relates to:

1) How the NOC is set for connectivity (including peering)
2) How many clients share a pipe of size X.

The next most important bit is the support options - a ticketing system alone does NOT do the job here. The NOCs I tend to gravitate to are those with 24/7 direct access. Not to the helper-monkey but to the techs in the NOC itself. By phone if possible. It can be rather irritating to submit a ticket and then have to wait around while you wonder:

a) Has someone looked at the ticket?
b) What are they doing?
c) Why is it taking so long?
and so on :)

Much easier to phone ... "Hi .. can you reboot server X now please" - "Sure, I'm walking down to the rack now. Do you have any other queries? ..."

I agree on the AMD side AND debian (If you can - Redhat is OK as long as the NOC 'supports' it properly via proper licenses etc).

With Athlons et al, the other concern is to ensure the NOC is a good facility, with REALLY good air-conditioning (per rack ventilation/conditioning if possible) as the AMD's rackmounts tend to overheat a little more, especially when mounted in rack clusters.

I have options for cheap and quality servers. I'll dig em out and post when I find. Though even the 'cheap' option isn't quite as low as those shown above - but having worked with these guys I know the quality et al. They also offer lease-to-own. For an additional $25/month you OWN the server after one year and the monthly costs plummet!! :)

Anyways - my 2c for now - will post more soon ...