Looking At RackSpace.. What Are Some Reputable Alternatives?
Mar 18, 2008
We were looking at a server on Rackspace for $300/month, but I wanted to see if there are any reputable companies which can provide a similar service for a bit less money.
Technically we could go with RackSpace, but there's got to be a service just like RackSpace but costing less? Our site only receives approximately 500-600 unique visitors per day, but once every two months or so we get a huge spike in traffic. Our current hosting provider has us on a VPS plan (we pay $80/mo) and today the server crashed because of a huge amount of traffic. We run an e-commerce site with many SQL queries involved, etc. I'm looking for a well established company.
This is NOT criticism against any of the hosts mentioned -- I'm simply trying to figure out why the offerings are so different at the same price-points.
I know to stay away from the "oversellers", but even looking at typical reputable web hosts, there seems to be a huge disparity in what is provided at similar costs. For example:
I believe these are all reputable companies. With that in mind, why do the hard/drive and bandwidths offered differ so greatly for approximately the same price ($25-$30/month)?
For example, Cartika only offers 25 GB bandwidth, while iMountain offers 500 GB at the exact same price point in a clustered environment. What am I missing here? What are the low-bandwidth companies offering different than the ones who give you more bandwidth (assuming these are all reputable companies)?
I'm a very small home-based start-up business that currently is having huge amounts of trouble with a webhost here in Vancouver. This webhost has been named recently on WHT as one to avoid. I never had a problem with them the whole 2 years that I only had a poster uploaded to this host. But as soon as I uploaded my first version of my site to this host, the problems came fast and furious. First it was not being able to log into the webmail to view any emails (which it should be known, I had only some test emails from my website forms). Then as of August 27, my site disappeared. I opened tickets. They closed them, saying problem solved. Problem was obviously not solved as I couldn't log onto Plesk, nor was my website visible to the world!
I didn't realize that website hosting was an unscrupulous business. Sigh. I've learned the hard way. I had paid a year in advance (in fact, think I was double billed to boot!). My .ca domain remains there currently as I search for a new webhost. I am loathe to mention the company although I'm sure a few can guess as I would like to recoup my domain as I have currently paid for advertising pointing to my website. All phone calls went unheeded (call centres in the US and elsewhere, even though these trained monkeys are told to say Vancouver).
Anyway, I have been lurking and reading and have been doing my due diligence; however, most reputable companies seem to be located back East. I have noted from all your posts that it would be better to have the data centre nearby.
I would like to support Canada; and in particular, Vancouver. Uptime and having a visible site is paramount to me...as is REAL technical support. I am not web-hosting savvy and I do not want to be taken advantage of again. I am interested in a shared web-hosting plan (I don't have any e-commerce or streaming video or any special needs...at the moment. My site isn't huge, but I can't check how much bandwidth or anything that I used because I can't log on...pretty minimal though).
I created my site from a Windows platform. Does this mean I need a Windows shared hosting plan?
Can anyone out there recommend a reputable HONEST Vancouver-based, Vancouver data centred webhost with very good technical support and excellent uptime?
One of my favorite web tools, dnsreport dot com, has gone pay only apparently
Is there any other service that is as close to advanced with the nice breakdown it does? Perhaps some tool I can install on one of my own servers?
I know the super skilled will says oh just run this, that and the other command line tool for the same info but I really liked the way they did it and how it explained the details.
I'm on a shared host right now and my server doesn't have the mod_auth_mysql installed. I was wondering if there were any additional alternatives for authenticating content using information from my CMS Users table? If I posted in the wrong forum, I apologize in advance as this topic could go either way, programming or server configuration. Thank you for your valued time.
Purchased a 3-month test period on a dedicated server a few days back but directadmin failed to boot from the outset, support wiped everything and reinstalled onto another partition which worked fine for about 12hrs.
Now I can't even FTP, tried rebooting from service centre etc. nada! probably hardware failure, Prices seemed too good to be true , glad I didn't move my entire site across [active forum with over 10,000 members] as the response time seems to be in days rather than hours.
Any reliable alternatives offering similar packages for similar money?
I have been using hostingfest for a few months now, I had no issues and was very happy as they offered 1000mb space and 10GB b/w, also 3 sql 2005 dbs included and its space subject to the total space, so no restriction on db space.
Since yesterday it has started to bother me, the server is down! no reply from the support staff, which is unusual as they are very fast otherwise.
So i am thinking of a replacement now... cannot afford my site to be down for long
[url]
i have the basic fest plan, if someone can suggest me a good alternative??
Main requirement:
atleast 3 domains, 3 sql 2005 dbs (not lite) asp.net 2 framework and about 10GB bandwidth
I just found out that I cannot edit the text in the templates provided by RVSiteBuilder for my clients. Only clients can edit the text after they sign up with me. Which defeats the whole purpose for my needs. Are there any other programs similar to RVSiteBuilder where I can edit the text in the templates and not just pictures?
First: Of course Crissic had some advantages as well, they were always nice, they let you do a lot, have a nice client area and so on. In fact, Crissic would be very good, they just need to change their servers or server provider to more reliable things.
I need a reliable hosting that servers doesnt have problems all day. I need to resell stuff and I need online websites to do that, as well as I need online websites to gain money from affiliate networks. Crissic cannot fulfill this, in less than 2 weeks since I am customer there were a lot of downtimes ranging from minutes to hours, there were hardware failures including an 7 days old backup (at least with 15% redeem), somehow an domain couldnt connect at all (I guess some nameserver or DNS error?) and now after I was awake and checked my websites the server does not seem to handle sessions anymore and produces errors on a few of my websites. This hosting ruins all my business and I cannot keep them doing that!
I am searching for reliable alternatives now but with a cheap price and good specifications like Crissic had. Here is exactly what I need:
* Reliable Hosting, NO Downtimes every day. NO Downtimes every 2nd day as well. * Minimum Diskspace: 3 GB * Minimum Traffic: 30+ GB * UNLIMITED Add-On Domains. DNS entrys should be automatic and it MUST be free, had some hosters before that provided unlimited add-on domains but they charged 1$ for each add-on domain then. * Unlimited FTP-Accounts * 200+ subdomains * 200+ e-mail accounts * PHP4 / 5 + MySQL and GD Library * Cron-Jobs * ALL CPanel Functions like on Crissic (at least as much as possible, I need it) * Price Range between 5-10$, but there should be better hosting packages available for 10-20$ - WITH Upgrade possibility * No Contract, I do not want to get stuck for 24 month with an hoster * Good Support is required! * PayPal Payment possible * Audio/Video + Flash/Shockwave support and/or if I have additional requirements like for an video hosting script, the hoster should be able to install it and not charge more than 5$ for it * Money-back guarantee would be great since I do not want to be disappointed by hosters that promises everything but keep nothing * DAILY Backups
I send out almost 50 emails a day from a PHP program on my web site.
My web host wrote an email complaining to me.
Should I:
a) take their advice (and if so, do I need an SMTP server and how do I get one set up?)
b) change web hosts?
Here is the email from them:
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us.
Please note that the script is being abused via a web browser to send out mail. Please refrain to use the PHP mail() function as it is deprecated and vulnerable to abuse.
We could possibly suggest that you take a look at using SwiftMailer which is well documented and supported.
We have commented out all of the mail() function calls on your site.
I've read a lot about XS4ALL and other datacenters in .nl lately.
As much as I know by know XS4ALL have a superior network over there - dont they?
I did a lot of research to find some Resellers/Hosters who are able to offer dedicated servers at one of XS4ALL's datacenters - but without luck.... My inquiry about dedicated servers directly at XS4ALL is still pending tho....
Do you know of any Resellers/Hosters who can provide dedicated servers at XS4ALL DC's? Or can you think of any QUALITY alternatives?
As I'm handling worldwide customers a _good_ routing is a must have.
I know there are a lot of hosters outside - but I'm really looking for quality bandwith without any troubles (ecatel?)
I run a small streaming/cdn service and I'm looking at how best to utilize my bandwidth. Here's the scoop:
I have a 1/4 rack and 2 gbit drops from my provider. Currently I am running a single server connected to 1 gbit port - nothing fancy. Business is good so I am about to add another server. As this location is already the backup/failover for my primary colo (different location/provider), I am interested in playing with aggregation options.
I have used 802.3ad in the past, so that was my first choice. I asked my provider if they can trunk my ports on their switch - unfortunately they refused (they only allow it above a certain commit).
So...do I have any other options for aggregation? It's pure mb/sec throughput that I am looking for, rather than failover. I have the rackspace/power/etc to colo my own switch or router, I'm just curious if there is an effective alternative.
dedicated server for my PHP/MySQL browser game. I've been working with CentOS 5/cPanel on my current server and I have no reason to change as it works very nicely. However I can only push 1500tb traffic per month with my current server and ideally I want to be able to push up to 5000-6000tb. Does anyone know of any reliable hosts with good uptime that provide high bandwidth packages such as FDCservers 100mbit Unmetered servers. I recently requested a custom quote from FDC but they never got back to me, would you recommend them?
we're using IIS 5.0 which doesn't have any flexible support for rewriting URLs which include parameters (AFAIK, anyway). We're currently testing an ISAPI Rewrite Plugin, which emulates the syntax and behaviour of mod_rewrite, which is why I felt this forum category to be the most appropriate for this post.
Our URLs at the moment look like:-
[url]where 'hg' is an instance of a key. In this particular example, we wish to rewrite our URL to read [url]homegarden' where 'homegarden' is a value of that respective key.
Since the value 'homegarden' isn't present in our current URL, we need some way to associate this value with it's relevant key, by mapping one to another. The ideal solution in this case would be to use RewriteMap, however the ISAPI plugin doesn't support this directive.
One other solution, that I've seen here is to use the 'homegarden' value as the key instead. However, due to the lack of flexibility of our system, this isn't possible.
Another method of achieving this is to hard-code a RewriteRule for every instance of a key, but this solution has obvious performance drawbacks (we have around 400 categories)
So, at the moment I'm out of ideas, which is why I thought I'd try and rack your brains for suggestions. An ideal scenario would be to use something like RewriteCond (which is supported by the plugin) to attach a file which would contain the key/value map.
any alternatives to pjirc / jwirc / jpilot and mibbit tried all 4 seems jpilot is one of the best but the order page puts me off when its asking what bank my card with.
anyone know of any other webbased irc i missed off my list apart from those above and cgirc
I currently have hosting with Site5 (started back before all the overselling), and although my sites are very low in traffic and don't take up much space, I am running up against their 25,000 per site inode limit, due to my hosting a Gallery2 photo album on one of the sites (as I understand, the base install of Gallery2 uses 14,000 inodes alone. Due to how my album is integrated with the rest of the site, it would require hours and hours to switch to something besides Gallery2). All the sites together have used 17 GB of bandwidth so far this month, although much of that has been me uploading stuff to one of the sites to set it up.
Here are my sites:
- Site#1 is a family site, with family photos and a Wordpress blog. Very low traffic (a handful of visits a day), but lots of photos. Inodes not a problem for now (I'm at about 13,000), as unlike one of the other sites, I was able to switch to Zenphoto from Gallery2 pretty easily.
- Site#2 is the newest and fastest growing. It is a site for a small community of people who play a particular online computer game. It runs Drupal, and has about 60 members now, but 5-10 have been joining a day. Most online at one time has been 10. I get anywhere from 30-60 visits a day, but growing. The site uses about 150 MB of storage right now, and this will grow. No photo albums here.
- Site#3 (running Joomla and Gallery2) is for my own gaming group of 8 people that play the above computer game together each week online. Low traffic, but this is the site with the inode problem, as I post screenshots in Gallery2 after each session. Around 25,000 inodes, and 6.5 GB of storage used on the server.
- Site#4 is my wedding site, running on Wordpress. It only gets a handful of visits each day, and will get almost none after the wedding in mid September. No photo album here.
- Site#5 is my fiance's site (running Joomla), which she has pretty much not touched in a year and I doubt anyone visits, but I'm too much of a coward to take down.
With that in mind, I'm wondering what my best solution would be: - Switch to a VPS, and if so, what kind and who? - Switch to a different shared host with a higher inode limit - Stay with Site5 and take the time to farm out the photo album somewhere off the site, or to another program like Zenphoto with a lower footprint.
I'm a tech-geek wannabe and willing to learn. I'm paying about $10 a month (I think) and could probably go as high as $30 or so.
Rackspace provides great uptime, however their ticket service is terrible. It takes them 3-4 hours to respond to normal tickets and 1-2 hours to respond to emergency tickets. If it's a real emergency they ask you to call them but when you call them the person never finishes what they are suppose to do. The person starts and then goes to dinner or their shift ends and nothing gets done.
Well I learned my lesson before and decided to call them instead of submitting a ticket. So I called them tonight at 6PM to tell them my website was hacked. The guy on the phone said it looked like it was a mysql injection. He said would remove some things and ask for a restore and I said okay fine and hung up. An hour passed and didn't receive an update via phone call or ticket. Where did this guy go? Well his shift probably ended. No sense in calling again since it won't leave a trail...
So I submit an emergency ticket on 2008-05-18 19:24:39 No response until 22:05:07 they apologized for the extreme delay and said restore was starting.
Here it is 23:03:25 and my website still isn't restored.
This has happened to me 3 times already and it takes rackspace around 5-6 hours to do a simple restore (I have the support tickets to prove it).
I would understand if it was a crappy hosting company..but I am paying close to $500 a month for a server and expect better service. Does this happen to anyone else or am I an exception to the rule. It's been 4 hr 22 min since I first submitted a ticket and around 5.5 hours since I first called them and my website still isn't restored properly...
I bought a server with RackSpace, for the network, support, quality, and other reasons.
Anyways I am starting up a new VPS division, and thought why settle for the rest when you can have the best. Because there is all of these "budget providers" out there that use cogent, and dual or quad core servers.
So I thought that if I bought the best server I could, with the option to keep upgrading (off peak hours of course). With premium bandwidth, and still be competitive why not?
The server that I bought through RackSpace is below.
Dell PowerEdge 2950 III Dual Processor, Quad Core Intel Xeon L5335 8 GB Memory (Fully Buffered) 4 x 146 GB (10k RPM) 2.5" SAS Drive(s), Raid 5 Unlimited Data Backup 100 Mbit Dedicated Port 80 IPs
Like I said I will upgrade that server when it gets time, because it could still use some tweaks. Also after this, me and RackSpace where talking about a cluster, but I don't know how that will work out, I think that it would be nice if it didn't pose any problems. And also load balancing.
But anyways I have not received the server as of yet, and I was wondering if anyone could give me your opinions. As this is my first time, and want to make sure that i am going about everything correctly.
I also have hired 3 admins, just for this venture, that have alot of knowledge with VPS nodes.
Also we where wanting to use virtuozzo , but they don't sell it. Would you recommend VMWare, or HyperVM?
I need to obtain a qutoa for a hosting from 3 hosting company (this is a project for a state goverment so you guys know the drill). I am contacting Rack space, who else on that level I should contact.
About a month ago I switched from Virtual Private Hosting on ************ to dedicated hosting on RackSpace. It was definitely an improvement, but I'm still dissatisfied.
Here are painful parts of my experience with RackSpace:
1) RackSpace wanted me to sign paper contract (************ didn't require that). That paperwork took almost a day (several hours of my efforts + some wait time). Sales guy couldn't open several versions of "Microsoft Office Image Writer" that I emailed to him, so I had to resend the document in different format.
2) It is a little unpleasant to deal with RackSpace sales guys. They forget (or "forget") to answer some of my questions; use some slightly unpleasant pushy sales techniques. Is it typical for any sales reps, not only RackSpace's sales?
3) After the contract was signed, it took RackSpace almost 4 days to install the server. I signed the contract Wednesday July 3rd 2008 and was hoping that on Saturday-Sunday night I'll be able to move my web site (postjobfree.com) to RackSpace. But RackSpace set up my server only on Monday - not convenient time for me and my users to do the move.
4) RackSpace promised me that they would help with the migration. They gave some tips, but not all of them were good. For example, they suggested me to shut down my web site for few hours while I will copy my database. Not a good approach for 24/7 service. So, basically I was mostly left on my own with the migration.
Fortunately, I used advise of Omar Al Zabir about smooth web hosting migration: http ://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2006/08/27/110061.aspx
Ironically - it was Omar's recommendation to use RackSpace for web hosting that made me pick them.
5) Average response to my ticket requests is about few hours (2-3 may be?). Sometimes ticket response time is shorter; sometimes it's longer (up to a day or even more in some cases). It's an improvement in comparison with ************, but is that really the best in hosting industry?
6) Most of the time responses are good, ...............
I have dedicated server P4 3.2 Ghz with ThePlanet for 4 years now. Since I want to upgrade a server I started to think if it will be good idea to change to the Rackspace.
They offer AMD Opteron 246 for pretty much same price I am getting my P4 3.2 Ghz at ThePlanet. Is it faster processor? I do not need faster CPU, I want to upgrade Hard drive but if I am getting faster CPU it's good.
Several points here.
1. I can not complain about ThePlanet. Never had a problem. And whenever I had opened ticket they were answered in time I expected.
Good morning. I have been a customer of Rackspace for approximately 2 years. I love their level of service. However, I'm paying $475 for a dedicated server with the following specs:
Single AMB Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0Ghz, 1B RMD, 80GB HDD
Are there less expensive alternatives that provide similar level of support as Rackspace?
We are a web design firm and we provide hosting for our customers who design their websites with us, we do not promote ourselves as a web hosting company. We are in the market for years and the most thing that confuses us is the hosting problems. Server problems when occur take all of our human resources (we are a small company) and that affects our other (main) work which is web development.
We've tried a lot of reseller then VPS providers, each provider will experience some problems even after a long time of stability.
Sorry for the long introduction but it was necessary to let you know what exactly I want. I know Rackspace from a long time and I was happy when I found out that they are providing a new service (mosso.com) especially for web design firms, they provide 80 GB of disk space with their zero-downtime network and other cool features for $100 monthly which I think is very affordable compared with Rackspace's reputation even it's more than what I pay for my current provider but I'm really looking for stability that makes me concentrate on designing and programming. The problem is that they told me that their customers must have a U.S bank account which we don't have.
Can you suggest companies that provide same quality services with affordable prices (reseller or VPS)
I am looking for hostings companies that are comparible to Rackspace or are competitors to Rackspace. I have two of my clients on Rackspace and I love their level of service. Unfortunately, some of my smaller clients are balking at the $400+ monthly cost.
What I really am looking for is a dedicated host that offers a package with good managed support as well as handles technical questions/issues related to system administration such as MySQL troubleshooting, password protecion, or Apache configuration. I have heard that www.servint.net is very good, but their $200 and $300 monthly packages are sold out.
need a couple of exchange accounts 1&1 charges $6.99 per account and rackspace $14.99 per account also with rackspace you have to have atleast 5 accounts
i guess i need a 2nd opinion here which one would you go with and why
also how secure is rackspace's exchange against hackers
and if you have exchange only hosting what happens with the actual site?? like when someone types it in their browser