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

 

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

 

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.

[Ryan]

It's not school related at all, nope. It's a golf-related startup and i've been doing some short-notice design work for them, and have been asked to do a few extra bits n bobs, like find a web server etc.

 

Coca-Cola won't be putting any money into it as such, nope. We're in with them to get the exposure and through-traffic. It might work, it might not

[localzuk]

I know of a colocation company that can offer:

 

Shared Colo:

5U of space with 2.5A of power colocation

10Mbps fixed unmetered connection (1:5 contention) Bandwidth

1 Power Sockets

1 KVM over IP ports

1 Network Ports

2 IP addresses (included)

 

Services:

NAS Space: Not Required

Firewall: Not Required

Service Level: 30 mins helping hands per month

 

 

Installation:

Servers sent by Courier

Service Charges are calculated as follows:

 

£214.00 per month; £45.00 setup charge

 

This monthly rental is made up of:

- £164.00 for colocation services;

- £50.00 for addon services;

 

And then the company would just have to provide the server (although 5U would probably be overkill there).

 

Or a dedicated server as below:

Hardware:

Dell Poweredge 2950 Server

Processor 1: Quad Core Xeon 1.86Ghz 2x4MB Cache E5320 (£199 per month)

Processor 2: Quad Core Xeon 1.86Ghz 2x4MB Cache E5320 (£54 per month)

4.0GB 667Mhz Fully Buffered DIMM Memory (£42 per month)

Hard Drive 1: 73GB SAS 3.5inch 15,000rpm Hard Drive (£28 per month)

Hard Drive 2: 73GB SAS 3.5inch 15,000rpm Hard Drive (£28 per month)

Hard Drive 3: 73GB SAS 3.5inch 15,000rpm Hard Drive (£28 per month)

Hard Drive 4: 73GB SAS 3.5inch 15,000rpm Hard Drive (£28 per month)

Hard Drive 5: Not included

Hard Drive 6: Not included

PERC 5/i RAID Controller Card (£40 per month)

 

Services:

KVM over IP enabled (£9 per month)

Shared Enterprise Class Firewall (Free)

NAS Space: No NAS Space

Service Level: Linux - Full OS Management (£55 per month)

Unmetered 10Mbps port

 

Software:

Linux - Centos 5.1 x64

SQL Server Not Required

 

Current setup lead time: 10 working days

Minimum Contract Length: 6 months

Service Charges are calculated as follows:

 

£511.00 per month; £456.00 setup charge

 

This monthly rental is made up of:

- £456.00 for hardware;

- £55.00 for services and extra bandwidth;

- £0.00 for software licenses.

 

Personally, I'd go with the Co-lo myself.

 

The company I'm looking at is http://www.melbourne.co.uk, based in Manchester

[Ryan]

Fookin' 'ell localz, appreciate the effort but some of those prices are nuts. The co-lo option is cheaper, ya, but we still need to ship them out a server I had a look through their site and priced up a package at £150 p/m though. They might still be an option.

 

I also looked and poundhosts and OVH. OVH may take this, i'll contact them in the morning for more details. I'll be seeking out testimonials before i throw money at anything though

[localzuk]

The problem I'd say that you will have is that bandwidth costs a fortune in the UK. Any UK company that claims to offer cheap prices for bandwidth is quite simply lying, and will cause problems for you when your usage goes up.

[contink]

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

 

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

 

Ok... one last and very telling point... If you're starting small and you expect it to go THAT big then keep in mind portability. Moving a site from one server to another when you have a few thousand people knocking on your door daily is no mean trick. I have nightmares every time I move any of my sites and they're tiddlers by comparison!

 

 

Re: colocation vs' maintained.

Bear in mind that when a piece of hardware goes tits up you'd better be ready to pay serious money to have it even touched. You'll want to check on the deal there.

 

Re: Cpanel, etc..

Good point re: cost in relation to the rest.. Wasn't thinking

 

Re: Costs

Remember that most services of the type you're looking for have to be ready to tear down your server and rebuild it in a matter of minutes to hours to get your site(s) back online. Sitting waiting for a site for half an hour is painful enough, waiting for a day is pure unmitigated hell (been there, done that!)

[dhicks]

If you're starting small and you expect it to go THAT big then keep in mind portability.

 

Defiantly check out the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, it is built for this exact situation - you pay for the processor power / disk space / bandwidth you need, and ramp it up when you want. You can even handle surges in demand pretty much hour by hour.

 

--

David Hicks

[DanW]

A Mate of mine has just started selling dedicated servers.

 

http://ezpzhosting.co.uk/dedicated/

 

if you do sign up make sure you say that i sent you

 

 

Dan

[Edu-IT]

A Mate of mine has just started selling dedicated servers.

 

http://ezpzhosting.co.uk/dedicated/

 

if you do sign up make sure you say that i sent you

 

 

Dan

Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't see any contact details on that website therefore they're not complying with the DSR. If that is the case then I wouldn't trust them.

[DanW]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't see any contact details on that website therefore they're not complying with the DSR. If that is the case then I wouldn't trust them.

 

They are on the privacy page

 

http://ezpzhosting.co.uk/legal/privacy.html

 

 

 

Dan

[localzuk]

They are on the privacy page

 

http://ezpzhosting.co.uk/legal/privacy.html

 

 

 

Dan

 

Is it an incorporated company? If not then the proprietor(s) have to have their name(s) on the site also.