to colocate a 1U in the DC metro area for $100/month for a small non-profit I work with. The service necessary is pretty basic -- 1Mbps or so would do (preferably unmetered so we're not on the hook for overage charges), 1 or 2 IPs would be fine, and the only real service necessary (besides steady power and connectivity, of course) would be the occasional remote reboot and 24/7 facility access.
I've come close to settling on Crosslink Internet (web site at www dot crosslink net, silly system won't let me post the URL directly because I'm new), because they're the only place I've found that can meet that price point. Before I commit, though, I wanted to hear from you guys:
* Are they a reliable ISP? They sound sort of low-budget over the phone, and while that's not necessarily a valid indicator of reliability, it makes me nervous.
* Are there any other decent ISPs in the Northern VA vicinity that could meet this price point that you guys would suggest over Crosslink?
Also could you point me in the direction of some reliable German Rack Hosting Companies (Franfurk). As we are a GSP (Gameserver Provider) the network needs to be strong and reliable.
Do any of you know the best way to build a high reliability e-mail system?
I currently have Interworx as the default Control panel but are happy to change to Cpanel or otherwise. The iworx HA is not that good as if the cluster manager fails you loose everything.
I guess my only option is to do what most companies do and hope for the best - but have a good disaster recovery plan.
is it really worth the money nowadays to put in SCSI or SAS instead of SATAII (single disk, non-raid here), IF reliability is the only concern (i.e. NOT i/o performance) during the usual 3 year life time of a server?
Actually, I was pretty amazed by the sata reliability, in the past 3 years the only hdd failure was two sata on a mismatched mobo, which didn't support SATAII (a lot of read/write error, eventually died). Although we have 0% scsi and sas failure.
I currently have a Signature VPS with Servint and although I have found their customer service good and am getting concerned about my VPS's reliability. This is the only VPS I have experience with.
At the beginning of the year I was experiencing downtime at least once every couple of weeks and for at least 20 mins each time. Sometimes my VPS was down for over an hour. Most of the time the explanantion I received was a "Kernal Panic". Then for the last month and a half things have been good with no downtime, until today when my VPS went down again for about 50 mins.
So here I am asking what is normal downtime?
Is the downtime I am experiencing the norm and would I get the same reliability from any provider?
Would a dedicated server tend to be more reliable than a VPS?
I am considering moving to a dedicated server at LiquidWeb, not because I need the resources but I am wondering if reliability would improve. I am willing to pay for reliability! Any advice as to whether this would be a good move?
I would really like to know which hard drive brand you have had the best success with in regards to server hard drive reliability. Is it Seagate or Western Digital? Or is it one of the other brands? Please vote. This poll is specifically regarding SATA2 hard drive experiences in servers. Please do not factor in SCSI hard drives.
In order to increase the reliability of a audio streaming service I am thinking to take the action I describe below.
1. Buy two Windows VPSs with WMS installed.
2. Register a domain name (i.e audiostream.com) with 4 nameservers: ns1.ip1_vps1, ns2.ip2_vps1, ns3.ip1_vps2, ns4.ip2_vps2.
3. Create all publishing points (streams) on both servers.
Normaly VPS1 should serve all clients. In case VPS1 goes down, VPS2 should jump in and serve all clients-connections. As soon as VPS1 becomes available (ns1 & ns2 start responding again), VPS1 starts serving all new connections.
Load balancing or any other kind of advanced load, traffic, etc management is not important.
Then we have the following cases: 1. VPS1 is down , which means that VPS2 should take charge.
2. VPS1 is up (ns, http, ftp services), but WMS1 is down (crashed). Means that the playlist (asx) file should be built so that it also includes the IP, port & publishing points of VPS2. This should be done because ns1 & ns2 will answer without any problem, but WMS1 will be crashed and won't serve any media connections, thus ASX will look for the next available stream in the playlist.
Do you think that the above is possible. Is this gonna work?
Is there any conventional wisdom on WHT about which shared hosting providers have highly reliable email service?
The provider I have now has very good web hosting service but their email services tend to bitbucket far too much mail for comfort. Reliable delivery and reception for the half a dozen emails I might send/receive a day (it's a personal use site) is I hope not too much to ask without needing to pay and arm and a leg for the privilege.
1) Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2,2 GHz; 2) RAM: 2024 MB DDRAM; 3) Hard Drive: 2x 250 GB SATA (can be smaller); 4) Traffic: At least 1000 GB or unrestricted; 5) Port: 100 Mbit / sec. (ideally 1000 Mbit / sec.); 6) IP-Addresses: 2.
Mandatory conditions: 1) A great date-center; 2) Operational and anglophone support; 3) Ability to establish a panel, for example: ISPmanager.
Recommended requirements: 1) Protection against DDoS-attacks; 2) The ability to administer the server, a company that provides services to lease (regular updates, round-the-clock monitoring, etc.).
The server is designed for the site, which will:
1) Forum; 2) Video and audio materials (up to 20 spots, for up to 10 minutes each), which can be viewed directly on the site using flash-player or download. Clips will not be frequently changed or supplemented; 3) Downloading developed software, up to 0.5 Mb; 4) Download documentation formats: DOC and PDF, up to 2 Mb; All audio, video and documentation for its own production.
Additional information:
The number of visitors, initially to 10000 per month (probably much less or slightly more, not yet known) The audience will be visitors from the following countries: Ukraine, Russia, Poland, UK, Germany, France, USA and Canada.
Budget: up to $ 200 a month. But if such amount is not sufficient for the entry requirements, are ready to revise the budget.
Need a really high-quality channel of communication and operational support, etc. Perhaps for these tasks, you recommend other requirements to a server and placing the territory? Check your real council.
Also look in the direction of affordable rental server and utilization of services: Akamai Technologies. If someone has experience working with Akamai, I ask, share their views. Should I use it for such a project?
A lot of information has been revised to servers in Germany, UK and USA. But the single answer, yet to be found.
I received a complaint from some of my clients, stating that they can't connect to their site because "it is not online"
Now, the site works perfectly from my PC (both on IE and firefox), I've checked its availability on host-tracker.com, and it's being spidered by google, which clearly means it is online
However, those clients' ISPs won't let them access the site for some unknown reason...I believe it's some DNS issue (probably they refuse to cache IPs from the country the sites are hosted on, which is Holland for the record)
Is there anything I can do, DNS wise, to solve the issue? It's getting frustrating because they think I'm not doing my work and I can't just tell them "your ISP sucks"..
I'm completely torn on going the absolute budget route vs spending more for something that'll allow easy upgradeability in the future. I basically need lots of space but file sending-- media like mp3s, video, etc.
it'll be raid 5 and I'll need at least 2-3TB initially but the ability to expand would be nice.
option 1: nice chassis with plenty of hotswap bays with sas expanders expensive sas raid card
option 2: cheap chassis to serve "immediate" needs and go with more later. not sure what I'd use as a card? maybe even onboard?
regarding reliability: I once saw a database of failure rates of different models. raptor was the most reliable of the "desktop" drives. anyone have the link? I'm wondering of the seagate ES drives are worth the extra money vs the non-ES drives. they're supposedely more reliable and the "server versions" of sata drives.
