Pair is really well respected (from what I've heard), but their dedicated servers are a lot more expensive than many I've looked at. I've honestly wanted to use them because of their reputation, and my uptime being critical, but wanted to see if there are less expensive servers who are just as good...
I'm just about to buy my first commercial hosting package. I'm leaning towards 1 and 1 hosting, but I don't know whether to go for the US or UK version. The US version: costs $2.99 a month with 10GB storage and 300GB transfer
The UK version: costs £4.49 a month (about $8) with 1.5 GB storage and 20GB transfer
Are there many big / important advantages to going with a local host, and is it worth the extra cost?
it was about 2 yrs back when I subscribed to WHT and diligently went through the webHosting threads to decide on a suitable webHost. My search ended with PAIR. I chose PAIR basically bcuz I wanted peace of mind which I wasnt sure that other cheaper webhosts cud provide after reading lukewarm reviews(-ve and +ve) about them. The only downside to PAIR was it was costly and I did a lot of spelunking online(for a week atleast) but found almost zero -ve reviews about PAIR.
i am not here to praise PAIR cuz its a solid company anyway. The thing is I have a basic account with PAIR which doesnt have MySql/CGI....etc. I am planning to start a few blogs and install a CMS like Joomla. Obviously I will be needing databases and scripting. I can upgrade to an Advanced account with PAIR which has all the features I need. BUT that will cost me double the basic accnt.
So heres the dilemma-
Should I upgrade and stay with PAIR. OR Should I change to another cheaper Webhost
The deciding factor-
1) PEACE OF MIND- translates to A class service and support. 2) Somewhat ECONOMICAL
I was wondering whether Lunarpages will be a good idea.
forgot to add- my bandwidth(10GB +) and storage(1GB +) requirements aren't high.
On setting up a pair of CPanel DNS only servers, I decided to use 2 Virtual Servers from 2 seperate companies - one Xen and the other was Openvz. Reason behind it was in case something happens to the company or the virtualization technology implemented, I'm not screwed.
Guess what! Next day my Openvz node (I will not name the provider) went south and I'm on one leg right now. I'm kinda pleased with myself for having this laid out from the beginning and DNS is still working fine.
Now I'm thinking of having different OS - one linux and the other freebsd. Am I paranoid and over-the-top?
I started a website in HTML, then by different CMS (SPIP, Joomla), and now I use several PHP shopping carts scripts (Virtuemart, CS-Cart). Currently I have 10 sites.
I NEVER had a hacking attempt in 9 years. None security concerns. No downtime more than 20 minutes. Cumulated over the last 9 years, all downtime are less than 4 hours.
You can check by yourself any downtime of any Pair.com server, because Pair.com downtime archives are easy to check, on-line and updated in real time:
[url]
My only concern is spam. When one of my email address catch too much of spam, I just need to close and open up a new address to defeat it (sorry, it's the easy way to fight with spam, but I'm not enough smart to setup SpamAssassin).
The speed of my shopping carts is great (I'm on a shared server).
That's why I stay at Pair.com: (for me) There's nothing better!
The great team over at Pair has treated our website (www.Team-BHP.com) exceedingly well. In fact, I'd also posted a review of my experience way back in 2005 (Linky). I'm a pretty demanding customer, yet have no complaints with Pair through this long association. Says a lot, wot?
However, I see Team-BHP outgrowing Pair in the near future. Our traffic increases by atleast 25 - 30% each quarter, and we are currently hosting on the QS5 server level. The server does choke occasionally during peak hours, hence an upgrade is inevitable sooner rather than later. The next (and final) level of upgrade from Pair is the QS6.....which is pretty expensive @ $1,500 bucks a month! I've seen other hosts offering the same kind of juice for half the money, yet never moved away from Pair simply because of their solid service + uptime. However, now that we are growing (and are poised for a more fruitful future ), what are some viable options I can look at?
Our requirement is QUALITY : Outstanding levels of service, uptime, reliability & security are imperative.
1. Any other reputable hosts that you may recommend? Our requirement would be standard fare for a medium size website (dual xeon, 8gb ram, 3 or 4 15K SAS raid 10 hard disks, backup, 100Mbs public + 1000Mbs private port and about 3000 GB of bandwith a month)?
2. Is co-location a good idea, considering that our core team really isn't all that tech-friendly?
Ok just some quick background. I'm developing a website that will start out small, and possibly grow. I know everyone has that dream, and many fail, so I'd like to start out small but be able to expand with the SAME hosting company (I don't want to have to switch hosts if the site ends up having a lot of traffic).
I have limited server administration experience, so want a clustered or shared hosting environment. I want a reputable company that I can grow into if necessary, and my budget is around $20 to $30 per month. Here are the ones I'm considering:
- iMountain : They offer a clustered environment and 500 GB transfer for just $30. Unfortunately, I think they are in California - is location a problem (as I am in Ohio).
- Cartika : They offer a clustered environment and allegedly have unparalleled support. But they are pretty expensive -- 25 GB transfer for $25, and based in Canada.
- Pair : They have a 200 GB transfer plan for just $30. They are also very close (Pennsylvania) to where I am. However, I believe you are on a non-clustered shared server, and they charge a $35 setup fee.
- FusedNetwork : They offer 100 GB transfer for just $20 and use cPanel (which I'm familiar with). However I've read a lot of controversy on here about FusedNetwork & Hostjury -- I don't want to sign up with a company if allegations of shady business practices are actually true.
Which one do you think I should go with? Does the location of the servers matter at all? Is being on a "cluster" instead of just plain "shared" that big of a deal? Am I overlooking anything else?
I'm leaning toward "Pair" right now, unless clustering turns out to be important.
I’ve found pair Networks via this forum and have been its customer for more than 2 years now, which gave me quite a good insight in this company. So here some thoughts about pair Networks.
Some background
Pair operates its own Data Center with over 1.500 servers, hosting more than 190.000 sites. If you are concerned about the server saturation, these numbers are speaking for themselves pretty much. Among the customers are such high-profile sites as Barack Obama, The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code), Tom's Hardware etc. Quite impressive and it actually says a lot about the host’s structural reliability.
Stability
It’s a truly business class host with an amazing stability. The server load is always nice below 1. During more than 2 years the site I’m hosting there was down for two times: once due to the massive ddos, and the second time due to the planned server maintenance.
Technical support
I’ve got phone and e-mail support on my plan (webmaster). The standard support response time is reasonably soon. The so called ‘urgent’ support reacts literally immediately. The nice thing with Pair is that you actually don’t need any support, because all services are up and running at all time.
Control Panel
Pair is using a custom CP. It’s transparent and as useful as a CP could be. I can’t remember a situation when I was missing some feature in this panel.
Price
Pair is not cheap, but it’s not overpriced either. From my point of view, they were able to find a really well balanced price for the level of services they’re offering. If you’re a hobbyist using your site for fun (and therefore the stability and uptime is not really an issue), you can find tons of cheaper hosts. If you’re hosting any critical site, where the stability, speed and uptime do matter, you’d better pay a few bucks more: servers are not oversaturated and overloaded, no kids experimenting with 'custom' scripts, best hardware, best manpower etc. I’d like not to be involved in over- and underselling discussion, Pair has earned its stripes based on this business model.
Speed
Download speed (from Belgium) is as good as it gets from any US-based industrial-grade site through our broadband line: approximately 400 KB/s. Downloads from Apple, Adobe etc. sites have exactly the same speed.
These all were PRO’S, where are the CON’S?
In more than 2 years I haven’t noticed any serious, structural shortcoming. And I don’t like to make it up just for the sake of false objectivity. Pair Networks is by far the best host I’ve ever had.
Server is running fine on 2GB memory on Xeon 3060 running on Apache 1.3, php 4.4.6 and mysql 4.1.21
It's only used to host a forum with about 80 members online and a multimedia download section.
Would it be a big difference if I upgrade to 3GB? Like will it support more downloads at once without boggind down the server? Which stuff should I tweak in apache and mysql config to make use of extra gig of ram?
I'm looking for a VPS running Windows Server (preferably 2008, but 2003 is also OK) with 4GB of RAM. Disk space, provided it's at least 50GB, and bandwidth, provided it's at least 100GB/month, aren't really that important.
I've been scouring WHT and Google for something that will meet my needs but have not yet been successful. Does anyone know where I can find such a VPS? Or is there nothing out there and should I concentrate on fully dedicated products?
Although I have switch to using VPS for some time, I still have a question in mind.
Most registrars need 2 ns which 2 IPs are sufficent. Why some hostings are giving 4 IPs?
I ever sign up with one hosting which give 1 IP. If a minimum of 2 IPs is needed, what else can I do other than pay money for an extra IP? Feel cheated.
I have this G4 Apple Xserve that's just sitting collecting dust. What can it be used for? I guess I could install a powerpc flavor of linux. But what can I run on OSX? Game server of some sort?
One of my hosting accounts has tons of extra space on it. Both bandwith and disk space. Enough to easily run one additional site. How can I use that extra space as hosting for another separate domain?
So its like using one hosting account for two different domains.
i was ddos'ed heavily two months ago and my host decided to invest in some ips hardware. even after installation, the targeted ip still had to be null-routed. because of the ddos, i was told the incoming bandwidth was going over my commit (500mbit?) and I had to increase my commit from 100 to 200mbit.
the attacks are over now, but i am stuck with paying for the commit. i am still under contract and i cannot exactly move 22U's of machines easily. i don't know how to proceed. I do not really want to sublease my cabinet out, but i also do not want to pay the extra costs for something that i am not using. I do not mind paying a one-time payment for the bandwidth cost during the attacks, but .. oh well.
has anyone ever subleased their cabinet? what kind of terms should i be offering and watching out for?
KVM/IP switches are a wonderfull thing, aren't they?
Lifesavers they can be..
Anyway, I'm looking for a module compareable to KVM/IP, but with the extra feature to remotely mount an image using an USB port of a server.
Basically so its possible to install a server remotely over IP, w/o having a physicall CD in the KVM/IP switch (or using hardware similar to IPMI's from HP/Dell/SM). Does such hardware excist?
I don't need multiple users to log in, or to control multiple server at the same time (login for each server would be handy though). Only 6~8 ports are required.
The only problem I could forsee with it is that my rack might get messy.. 8 servers, 8x2 powercable (A+B), plus 8x2 UTP, plus KVM, plus USB..
I tested eaccelerator with php 5.1.6 but I noticed just a very minor performance improvement. Eaccelerator is known for his incompatiblities, also php 5.1 is a big boy now and no longer need an accelerator.
i have a webserver (mailserver) already running example ABC.com now i want to buy extra server that will be used only to send newsletter to members of ABC.com. Is it possible to do it? Also i dont want to break the existing mailserver as it is used by staff so this new server has to operate independently but of course this has to appear and has to be legitimate.
One of my idea is to setup a subdomain for ABC.com lets say mail2.abc.com and point to a new server but again how it will appear if i send email from info@abc.com when its subdomain!
I was looking for a domain name and registered it with 1and1 last year, for UK 11 pounds approximately. I then found that they were also charging me approx 30 UK pounds every six months for web hosting space that I did not ask for as I have a great host elsewhere. I have gone to their site and tried to cancel the web hosting while retaining the domain name but it only allows me to cancel the domain name, which I don't want to do. I have tried contacting them multiple times over this additional charge and get stonewalled every time with a standard response that the money is due on my contract. In the circumstances I would like to transfer the domain name to another host as renewal is a couple of months away, but I'm scared that they'll find some way to stop me doing that? ....
I have a fairly busy server, and received a High Load warning from my firewall monitoring software. Showing a high 5 minute load average alert of 13.89.
I'm presuming extra memory and a more powerful CPU would be required to sort this out?
Time: Thu Jul 3 12:22:06 2008 1 Min Load Avg: 42.90 5 Min Load Avg: 13.89 15 Min Load Avg: 5.82 Running/Total Processes: 51/359
Output from ps: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND ...
So I run a small music forum site. We used to have the ability for our users to download music track sets. We had over 100 files that are generally around 80MB and the users could add more so our space requirements would increase over time.
We initially set this up with dreamhost.com (unlimited bandwidth/space) but they eventually asked us to stop using the space as a data repository and wanted to charge $1 per GB transferred (which at that time was about $100-120/month).
The Problem:
This is something our users want and would probably pay for. I'm sort of asking for advice on how to approach this problem. Need to figure out how we could set this up and what to charge the users for downloading the music files (price per file, monthly plans, etc). Considering we want to keep it cheap enough that users will pay and the hosting costs would probably rise with the demand and exposure of the program. What sort of hosts should I be looking for?
I'm currently designing a website for a friend of mine for her new photography business.
And she does not know anything about the web, basically I am setting her up with hosting, domain, everything.... I've done this for about 3 people so far.
My question is, Is it worth it for me to buy a small reseller hosting plan, and have her pay me about $5-7 /mo, and since I will be handling everything, I get the support from my host and have her basically pay for my reseller hosting which I may end up with more clients from more web design? or just stick with the traditional recommending her to a company... Is there such thing as me making a few bucks from giving someone else business?