Co-Location With PoundHost In The BlueSquare Datacenter
Jun 8, 2007
I have never done co-location before and I am very interested in it. Although a fair amount of my questions could be asked to PoundHost I preferred to ask here as I can get opinions too and more elaborate information probably. So if anybody wants to reply with some help, please do!
I am currently looking at Quater Rack Space (10U) at the following URL [url]
The first issue is a switch. The site states "1 x 100Mbit CAT 5 Feed" - I assume I would need to install a switch to share this connection between my servers, what sort of switches am I looking at here - do you have recommendations?
Another issue is power. Is there any typical number of servers I could put online with 3A, as well as my switch? I've actually been looking at buying servers from the USA and having them shipped to me (at [url]). The systems I'm looking at are the Core2Duos (SATA Enterprise and SATA cost effective at the moment). What custom build places would you recommend in the UK? If I did want to increase my power allocation, can PoundHost do this for me?
I was also after some opinions of PoundHost as a company - anyone have experience with their colo? A question I should really ask directly to them, but maybe people already know here: Are they able to increase my IP Address allocation? Can they increase my bandwidth to say, 20Mbit as required?
Are there any other UK colo that can compete with these prices for rack space?
How would their connectivity be to the USA? With my current setup, most of my dedicated servers are in the USA. To people here in Europe connection is fine to the USA. I'm just wondering how this would work in return from the connectivity of BlueSquare.
I was wondering about remote reboots. If I wanted to be able to make my own hard remote reboots instantly, can the likes of APC remote reboot switches be installed into my 10U space? The main problem really is my understanding of power distribution in a data center and how power is fed to my space.
Again - I'm grateful for any replies, feedback or recommendations because I want to ensure I start with a good service and a good company.
Does anyone have experiences of what Poundhost are like to co-locate with?
Are they pretty friendly and fulfilling to your requests? Just wanting some general opinions of what they're like in the ways of co-location. I know their network is pretty solid but I've never co-located.
Wanting to offer some services within the UK but considering I live here myself I was thinking of co-locating rather than renting a server. Always wanted to but a lot easier to do so within the UK rather than the US!
This morning BlueSquare/Poundhost sent out an email to all their customers, announcing a special deal to all current customers, that sounds great right? Sure, except the CC'd instead of BCC'd all of their clients in on the email.
Since then everyone who's email address stards with anything up to the letter B - around 100-110 addresses - received an email containing the ****** image with the message
Followed by this from BlueSquare:
Quote:
Earlier today an email was sent out to all customers providing details on a dedicated server special offer. Unfortunately this email was sent out using the CC field and not the BCC field. This was not a breach of security, but a genuine mistake on the part of the sender who was not aware of what had happened until the email had been sent, and as such the sender has been suitably reprimanded.
We realise the seriousness of this error and have now taken automatic steps to ensure this cannot happen again by limiting the maximum recipients on our outgoing mail server to a small number, as well as updating and limiting staff on the use of the mail list system.
We are aware that some of our more unscrupulous competitors may have already obtained a copy of this email list and may contact you in due course. If you do receive an unsolicited email, to reduce further unwanted spam, please use the unsubscribe option which they are legally obliged to include.
We currently have two vps's one in chicago and one in dallas. We have our primary in chicago because we figured fewer hops=faster load times for website. is this really true?
right now we get pings around 35-60ms to chicago and 60-170ms to dallas. does this major difference really amount to anything?
as far as the page load time is concerned - to have a datacenter located as near as possible to your web site viewers.
For example, if my site is mainly concerned about European customers, will i have an extra page load time if my web hosting company's datacenter is located in the US? If yes, is it important enough to make me think of transferring my site to a European datacenter?
I used to have hosting with Tagadab, who use the clara.net network, which I used to get timeouts for about 10 minutes every 5-6 hours, so I moved to iFuse hosting (in BlueSquare house), where I get exactly the same issue. My ISP is NTL/Virgin Media.
Is London Hosting Centre in any way connected to BlueSquare 1, 2 or 3 in connection terms, for example with BlueSquare went down would London Hosting Centre still be up etc...
Just a question about hosting your site in the same country where your main targeted visitors is located. It is my belief that I should host my sites in the same country where I the targeted visitors are. Am I correct in saying this??
So.. US Focus Site should be hosted in the US Canadian Focus Site should be hosted in Canada And UK Focus Site would be hosted in the UK??????
I have a VPS and when I signed up I was told by the provider that the server was based in a UK datacentre. However, I've just done a search on the IP address for my VPS and it comes up as 'The IP address is assigned to France'.
Does this mean the server's actually located in France?
from 2008-6-3 to 2008-6-9,bad speed. I am not sure it's PoundHost's Issues.but now normally.
another thing make me crazy.
maybe start from 2008-6-10, my server can't access . because IP conflict. then remove these IPs(92.48.119.2-5) from my server. and re-assigned me another IPs.
first 4 Ips, can't bind.
some hour later, re-assigned me another 3 IPs.
still can't use. because these IPs also assgined to another servers.
just again another 3IPs again(3rd.)
uk's IP so expensive need some servers shared a IP? or PoundHost?.
until now, still not resolved. a little problem take more than 12 hours.
this is my worst server rent experience.
SoftLayer never like this,DediwebHosting and qala never like this.
before order,I ask poundhost's sale, he said can provide 64 and 128 IPs, so,I create a order at 2008-10-11, 10-15 server ready, I ask them,but in this time, they said only provide 10 IPs,max 16IP. I used it for vpn applications,no have enough IPs,can't do it. so poundhost said can cancel the server. I never use this server,but poundhost still no refundment, I send mail to them,no any responses, ......
I was really bored with LINX problems at England and my current UK provider's (xx company) bad customer support, I started to look for another provider at EU. I know LINX is used nearly all England providers but the problem was only with 1 switch of them. Anyways..
While visiting wht pages unhappily with hope of finding a good provider and sending them mails which I've founded, days passed with no luck.. After a few days I've mailled poundhost ( www.poundhost.co.uk ) and they've returned me in 5 or 10 minutes not sure while I was hopping to see a reply tomorrow or next week which we saw at other providers
Matthew, answered my all questions carefully and gave me whatever I want. I didn't have too many servers but he replied me as I was planning to move 50-60 servers to them I was very happy that I couldn't stop asking whatever I wanted to know to him and got my replies again carefully and they were handled professionally.
Now he gave me some VERY special deal and I am using them at this time! Personally, working with nearly all UK and DE providers, I never saw faster reply time for mails and tickets sometimes you get reply before clicking another link If you really want to feel special, go with PoundHost!
Shortly; PoundHost? - Best EU provider that I saw in my 6 years IT life..
Im currently with poundhost i have some colo servers with them
they have gone down 3 times over the last week 2 DDOS attacks and 1 router/exchange issue
I called them up and they reckon they get 1 DDOS some weeks, and other weeks have none
However, when another server is getting a DDOS attack, i dont want my server to go down. I take it the network pipe is being flooded, and thats why websites stop responding.?
so i called rapid switch, they reckon if they get a DDOS attack, it just takes down the one server, and not everyones elses
They have been exceptional for me. Not a second of downtime that wasn't my fault so far.
They offer OS reinstalls instantly for 30 quid or free with a 12 hour wait. This comes into play about two paragraphs down.
I had it originally loaded with Windows, because I was planning on playing around with some ASP. They gave me the server with a default password of something that you all pretty much would guess on the first try and RDP open to the world: when I got it, it was already heavily infected. OS reload took less than half an hour. Played with it for half a month, ASP got boring. FreeBSD time. Speedtests easily went over 100mbps (looks like each host is a gigabit/dual gigabit), it wasn't an overloaded node; always fast.
They don't officially support FreeBSD - it's not listed anywhere, and they don't support it. However, since it's ESX, I decided to ask if they could do a custom ISO and chose the free next-business-day install. They did it in less than one hour, and helped me troubleshoot when it went down (typoed something, user error) (this is 100% unmanaged too).
So far, they've been great. Tons of bandwidth, you can actually use it, non overloaded nodes, disk i/o has NEVER been a problem.
Another thing is fast ticket replies. On average, I see tickets answered in less than one or two minutes. No canned responses, always helpful. Almost all of my tickets were at obscene times - probably 3-5am their time. Responses were prompt and clueful.
Keep in mind this only costs ~$30/m USD - they have seriously dealt with a lot of my crap that they didn't have to, and I commend them for that. Support: 10/10 Network: 10/10 Hilarity: 10/10 (deploying unpatched 2003STD with internet-facing remote desktop and generic/not randomly generated admin password) Value: 100/10 (512MB + free Windows + free OS reloads + 2.5TB bw) Reported hosted IP to mods.
Is anybody able to get me in touch with Poundhost ? We can't seem to log on to the customer portal - and nobody are answering the phones there. Our server has been down for almost an hour now - I need somebody done immediately.
I'm currently a Poundhost customer and have been very happy with the service - my server has never been down yet and i've never had to contact them since setting the server up - it just works.
However, i've recently been offered a much better deal from Rapidswitch - a better server for quite a bit cheaper which as a personal customer with no budget makes a big difference.
I did think twice about moving from a provider I was happy with but have heard good things about Rapidswitch and their control panel is much better.
However, since placing my order it seems all they've had is network problems - they were completely down for hours last night, have had problems all day and are now down again. To boot, they said my server would be built in 24hrs and probably less but it's now nearly 30hrs and hasn't been built yet.
I'm really surprised and shocked that such a big provider with a good reputation has a single point of failure like this and doesn't have redundancy built in as well as hot swap spares and even spares from another provider.
It also seems their site and phone system are on the same backbone so that all went down too (and seems their monitoring is within their network so that doesn't register most of the outages).
Have I made a terrible mistake and this is the new Rapidswitch now it's been bought out or do you think it's just a bad week and they will get themselves sorted out and will return to 100% uptime?
Has anyone ever experienced first hand about CalPop Datacenter i hear they are good wanna see feedback from the WHT members i gotten a really good deal!
I started a poll the poll will be up for 24 hours!
I'm looking around for a nice, cheap colo place for a Dell PE 2650 I just purchased...
Requirements
* At least burstable to 10Mbit... dedi 10 is nice.. 100 is nicer..
* About 1000GB xfer should be good to start, I guess I can work with less
* Cheap IPs with no problems obtaining more
* Cheap remote hands since there's really not much in the RI/MA area. I will be going to school in upstate NY so I guess something around there would be cool too. I'm willing to ship anywhere though.
* Discounted/included DirectAdmin would be really nice...
* Not going to be selling IRCd stuff unless it's allowed and nice firewalls. I will probably only use it for a personal IRCd and irssi session.
Prospects
* Joe's Datacenter [url]
This company seems too good to be true... they offer great services for great prices and have many good features. I also spoke to an admin who said he will be able to include a DirectAdmin license for free. They include 5 IPs right off the bat. I got about a reply in an hour at like midnight from Joe (or just another Joe) himself.. and I'm not even a customer! They do free reboots. $50 to colo our 2U with 1500GB and 100Mbit. It's 25 extra for unmetered w/10Mbit but I'm sure the admin would be willing to just offer more b/w staying at 100Mbit instead of moving to a 10Mbit port.
* FDC Servers
Great reputation.. Pretty good prices for what I would imagine to be quality service. Not much more I can say about them.. Did not ask them about DirectAdmin.
Conclusion
I think I'm mainly just looking for any input on Joe's Datacenter because I really think I want to start my company there. If anyone has any better offers I'm open to anything.. but DirectAdmin would be really nice... just remember that.
I'm also looking for a solution to HyperVM... LxLabs (to-be LxCenter I guess?) is now releasing it for free.. I'm not sure if it's patched yet or not though. I think I might just start with HyperVM for now since noone is going to target us.. seriously.. we are two kids with like 2 clients right now. We can always migrate later if HyperVM never takes off again.
What if i got a really good connection to this house i have in Sweden and bought some servers there, is it a good idea and would it sell? How hard is it to get a good connection, the house is in a fairly populated area of Sweden and i have partners who could help run it and do support 24 hours.
But its just a thought and we would start small. What do you guys think?
I just got a phone call yesterday because my house I just moved into came with a small peice of land about 3 miles away * no clue why* And a company wanted to rent it out for colocation. Is this a scam or should I do it? They said it would only hold 60 servers. The building on the land they would be renting already has backup generators emergency lights etc just no internet leading to it.
My company is about to start a project and need about 100 servers within 3 months. I am looking for a list of afordable and reliable unamanaged server providers from Europe. Can you suggest some? Which datacenter should I contact for such a project?
