Dedicated hosting

[Ryan]

Hosting's been discussed plenty here, but i'm looking for a dedicated web server for a company i'm involved with. They're trying to avoid paying more than £200 per month if at all possible.

Windows or linux, although linux is probably the best bet,
decent hardware with 2GB+ RAM,
Decent backups,
Oodles of bandwidth (expecting a lot of traffic)

Anyone had any dealings in finding similar? Or can recommend where to look? I did a bit of enquiring yesterday around a few companies, but we're looking at over £200 to 'well over' £300 per month, which is obviously an arseload of money for a startup.

Cheers folks.

[Jona]

I've used poundhost before http://www.poundhost.com/ and they did the job well for web traffic, however their bandwidth carriers wern't that great for gaming.

Probably the best place to ask this kind of question is over at webhostingtalk http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2

Cheers
Jona

[Edu-IT]

Does it need to be managed?

There was a post on here last week, which was deleted, from a company called OVH. Initially I thought they were just spamming but after doing some research it turns out that they weren't. They are a French company looking to expand to the UK market and the offer they posted turned out to be genuine. Might be worth looking at.

http://www.ovh.co.uk

If you want to go with a more established company then DediPower have always been recommended to me.

[Ryan]

Cheers lads, i'll check those out when i get a chance

[CSNM-Carl]

I guess our proposal was too expensive for you Ryan.

Bandwidth and power isn't cheap, if you want backups you will need a fully managed server.

I'd be very careful with any company offering fully managed server under < £300 a month.

[Ryan]

*gulp*

This aint gonna be cheap then Personally i wouldn't put my money into an unknown quantity (for anything really), and i realise they may have to pay for the requirements they have. Better break it gently

[DarkLight]

WHT (WebHostingTalk, as said by Jona) is the place to look for recommendations.

You can get servers managed, with that specification, for around your price tag. Depends on _where_ the server is though. You will likely get a better deal in the US, but the server will be further away and the carriers may not be too good (for example, Cogentco isn't brilliant). It also depends on the level of management you get, and what support contracts you have.

You might have to pay more for bandwidth (unmetered) or just a bit more for _lots_ of bandwidth. How much do you consider lots? The standard that comes with most servers now is about a TB, but can range from a couple of gigabytes to many many terabytes.

Best Regards,

[dhicks]

Might want to try Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud.

--
David Hicks

[Ryan]

How much do you consider lots?

We've been told to expect potentially 1.8million visitors in the first year, growing to a potential 5million by year 3. We have a deal with Coke, and they'll be pushing traffic through. Obviously these are at the upper limit, but we need to plan for this eventuality.

I'll check out WHT tonight at home. Has to be located in EU, preferably UK, as this is the bulk of the market.

thx

[contink]

WHT (WebHostingTalk, as said by Jona) is the place to look for recommendations.

Indeed but have a spare 3 to 4 days of time available to wade through the dross and confusing double speak.. Oh and be sure to check posters backgrounds (as well as offering companies) out before you jump.

You can get servers managed, with that specification, for around your price tag. Depends on _where_ the server is though. You will likely get a better deal in the US, but the server will be further away and the carriers may not be too good (for example, Cogentco isn't brilliant). It also depends on the level of management you get, and what support contracts you have.

Also remember that the exchange rates are all over the shop and even though the US$ is feeling it, we're feeling it more (UK£ to US$ has been dropping slowly but steadily since NorthernRock.)

You might have to pay more for bandwidth (unmetered) or just a bit more for _lots_ of bandwidth. How much do you consider lots? The standard that comes with most servers now is about a TB, but can range from a couple of gigabytes to many many terabytes.

Best Regards,

Don't forget too that things like control panels (Plesk, CPanel, etc..) are extra too and they can cost a fair bit...


I haven't looked in a while but as a rule you are looking at some serious cash. Might be worth seeing if something in the Virtual host arena suits..

[contink]

We've been told to expect potentially 1.8million visitors in the first year, growing to a potential 5million by year 3. We have a deal with Coke, and they'll be pushing traffic through. Obviously these are at the upper limit, but we need to plan for this eventuality.

I'll check out WHT tonight at home. Has to be located in EU, preferably UK, as this is the bulk of the market.

Whoa!... in that case, forget Virtual.. and start upping your budget... That's a lot of weight and the next question has to be what level of content, scripting, etc... are you likely to have on there? The more dynamic content the heavier the load and circumspectly the machine to handle it.

[CSNM-Carl]

We've been told to expect potentially 1.8million visitors in the first year, growing to a potential 5million by year 3. We have a deal with Coke, and they'll be pushing traffic through. Obviously these are at the upper limit, but we need to plan for this eventuality.

I'll check out WHT tonight at home. Has to be located in EU, preferably UK, as this is the bulk of the market.

thx

Surely having such a big client, they are willing to pay a premium for a server or even multiple servers for such a busy website?

[DarkLight]

Indeed but have a spare 3 to 4 days of time available to wade through the dross and confusing double speak.. Oh and be sure to check posters backgrounds (as well as offering companies) out before you jump.

Very good advice, usually the more reputable companies will have an older account, rather than a newer forum account; as well as more reviews on them. Don't just check WHT for reviews, search Google for other forums.

Don't forget too that things like control panels (Plesk, CPanel, etc..) are extra too and they can cost a fair bit...

With that amount of visitors a control panel will hardly cost anything (£15 probably if you go for a dedicated server that deals with bulk orders).

You might have to expand your budget dealing with that amount of visitors, though depends on the content and size of the content.

Best Regards,

[Ryan]

Don't get me wrong, if this takes off, the money will be spent on an all-singing all-dancing web platform, but they're still very much in the initial stages. It's a toss-up between how much to spend initially while still getting decent performance. I'll make this case to the bosses and see if i can give CS another shout :P

Edit: Yep, there's a lot of scripting and dynamic content involved. So yup, will place demands in the hardware and bandwidth. If it can't be done cheap, it can't be done cheap

[torledo]

Don't get me wrong, if this takes off, the money will be spent on an all-singing all-dancing web platform, but they're still very much in the initial stages. It's a toss-up between how much to spend initially while still getting decent performance. I'll make this case to the bosses and see if i can give CS another shout :P

Edit: Yep, there's a lot of scripting and dynamic content involved. So yup, will place demands in the hardware and bandwidth. If it can't be done cheap, it can't be done cheap

ryan

you'll have to post a link to the website once it's up and running....
to let us see what all the fuss is about.

Is this a school project run in conjunction with said commercial partner...in which case who's actually paying for the hosting ?

I'd imagine you're commercial partner/sponsor wouldn't bat an eye for 300 quid a month dedicated server.