For reliable managed hosting, with some research, I can find...
Liquid Web
Rackspace
It seems like Liquid Web is definitely the bang for the bucks.. but it also makes me think if it's too good to be true. I feel Rackspace is more "professional" and they're more "high-end". But I definitely love the pricing from LiquidWeb. for the same price, I can get a quad core + 4GB from LiquidWeb, and maybe an AMD dual-core + 1GB from Rackspace..
My question is : Do LiquidWeb and Rackspace offer the same kind of "managed services"? Rackspace told me that they would give me an account manager which makes me feel more personalized. but I also had a live chat with LiquidWeb and the sales kept marketing the "Heroic support"
I'm looking for a managed server (mid range specs) and approximately 20TB monthly bandwidth.
I'm looking for reasonably priced hosts, that have a reputation "very similiar" to Rackspace.com. I don't want to quite pay what Rackspace's pricing looks like. So, I'm looking for something slightly cheaper than Rackspcae, but that have a VERY good record for promptness in addressing issues and with proven uptime records.
So far I am considering Verio & The Planet. My knowledge of hosts beyond that is very limited. Please point me in the right direction as to where I can find hosts with SOLID records like Rackspace.com, but are slightly less expensive.
I have a client that I would call my 'primary' client, and as such he gets some leeway with me. Sunday he called and wants some new business venture of theirs to have a preliminary site up by Thursday so they can sell the idea to their initial prospects.
All fine & dandy. Now the present issue is that this morning he decided that it's time to get a new/different webhost for this venture. A bit of background...
Now this client has close to a dozen websites spread out over various hosting facilities that he's randomly found over the years. Ie, he's the sort that will pick the first or 2nd google result and call to give credit card details and let whoever is doing his IT at the time sort it out from there. So at this point he's got close to a dozen different sites (mostly focused around 4-5 business that revolve around their 'core' business) spread out all over, and it's a pain to administrate when issues arise.
Needless to say the randomness with which he does his IT decisions (he doesn't understand that web hosting isn't the same as buying off the shelf software for MS os's) is part of the reason for the randomess of the results he's gotten. I've slowly taken over more & more of the out-of-office IT related activities for their companies as a result, and have at least kept things stable the last year or so.
So for this new venture they're doing, I also want to get hosting I can eventually move all of his sites to (over the next couple of months). I think what I want for him is something equivalent to a reseller account somewhere that offers good support and acceptable uptime, because none of his sites generate incredible traffic counts or bandwidth counts, but it sure would be nice to have them consolidated into a single location that I can administrate them from. Most of the smaller sites can be moved as easily as ftp'ing things into place, doing a bit of quick database work and then moving dns, but one or two sites have enough traffic and custom rolled php so that will take a bit longer.
So the difficulty comes because I need to find something by this evening, get it up & running with a domain currently registered (dns) at godaddy, and have it be something I can migrate the rest of his sites to over the next 2-3 months. I do *not* have an LLC for my personal business so I don't want to resell hosting to him (I'm assuming that the liability isn't worth it for my dba status) but I do want to find something we can have dozens (maybe 50 eventually?) of sites hosted under. Typically I see this advertised by hosting companies as reseller accounts.
And I'm relying on info gathered here to supplant my decision making, as I did my last round of looking into hosts several months back and garnered a short list that I can't post here because of my new account status. So I'll just name them:
wiredtree
rackspace slicehost joyent
(these next 3 I have reseller hosting specifics from) mosso a2hosting mediatemple
bravenet dreamhost
More or less in the order that I perceived them to be at the time. Mosso is one of the ones that specifically lists reseller hosting, but I'm reading mixed things about them here and elsewhere on the net. Wiredtree looks interesting, but I'm not trying to move his sites to a single facility with independant plans per site,
Currently our site resides on a dedicated server that I manage. We are only using a fraction of the resources on the server and I have no interest in trying to sell accounts or resources, just too much headache. We made the move from HostGator to a dedicated server some time ago when it became apparent HostGator was overselling. Our server was seeing reboots way too often, ads and their company branded error pages (although I could have changed this part), and sluggish performance.
What I'm interested in is a hosting company that offers backup solutions and can make your backups available quickly in the event of a failure. Other companies I have dealt with offered this but their response time of 1-3 days is just unacceptable. I will also stay away from any overselling, built in ads of any kind, and companies without 24/7 phone support.
I would like to stay with cPanel so our user's email accounts will not be interrupted or changed when the site is transfered. Of course if there is a full import option to another control panel this isn't an issue.
So my question is this: Does this company/service exist, or are we stuck paying for a dedicated server that we don't need? I'm more than willing to pay, just looking to see if there is an option less expensive that my dedicated server.
I've had a similar conversation in the past wanted to get more specific.
It's really a personal question.
I want a dedicated server but don't want to pay the extra 70 a month for managed solution.
If i don't have much experience with a linux server and can't use windows server because i need Apache mod_rewrite am i safe just getting a dedicated host and not messing with anything but the cpanel?
Most apps i've hand coded so i don't forsee upgrades, assuming it comes with the standard setup.
Why would i need a hosting manager, I think i can learn things on my own right?
Anyone been in my shoes before and went dedicated non managed?
I currently have a shared hosting account with a provider. They have been less than stellar, so I'm looking into alternatives.
I'm am designing and hosting Joomla sites for customers. While I can certainly look into using another shared hosting provider, I certainly owe my customers the best most reliable hosting experience possible.
Would VPS fit the bill? At what point do I consider moving from a Shared hosting environment to Managed VPS?
I'm hosting x2 Joomla 1.5 sites using PHP v5 with the following extensions: Sobe2 OpenX Community Builder Fireboard Virtumart
The problem is that both sites have several sizable databases, each in excess of 100k records. After uploading the first 90k records to mySQL it became apparent that performance was going to be an issue. I'm therefore considering a dedicated server, tuned for returning fast DB results.
Firstly, would a dedicated server solve my performance issues?
Secondly, what are the critical components, spec wise, that would ensure superfast DB calls?
Like everyone, I'm looking for the best value, meaning solid support, uptime and a low monthly cost. I have been recommended the following hosting partners, but would like everyones input:
I tried searching around but maybe someone can steer me in the right direction.
I, as probably many other people, are in an interesting predicament.
I love my VPS right now...however obviously since I started with my VPS I'm about to out grow it, with the amount of power that I need.
What I'm looking for is a server which is completely managed, completely secured (some sort of active virus scanning), however I can get in there and have complete control like I would with my VPS, but obviously with more resources.
What I'm looking for is:
2-4GBs of ram Pentium D (minimum) up to a Xeon 3220 SINGLE processor 1000 - 2000TB / bandwidth 100mb/s uplink Windows 03 would be great, I'll settle for CentOS though
if there are any recommendations on managed database hosting services. This will be used for a fairly large project running on Mysql DB. Due to the size and complexity of the database a lot of resources are being used, so I prefer to find a company which specializes in dB hosting.
I am just considering to relocate one of my four sites from the current Ipowerweb shared hosting to a managed VPS one. I am fed up with their ftp upload speed problems and level of customer service and I want to upgrade to something sort of "semi dedicated".
Please consider that I am a beginner in VPS and i do not know anything about Linux other than it is an operating system. I have a few questions:
1) Managed or Unmanaged VPS
I guess as a beginner I would preferably have to opt for a managed VPS solution? Do you agree?
2) Easiest and most secure Linux Operating system to choose for VPS
I do not wanna end up having to fine tuning security issues or setting command line OS options (just want to reboot the server if needed and accomplish simple operations whithin the control panel). For example VPSlink at [url] shows me so many OS choices (centos, ubuntu, debian, fedora, opensuse etc. ) that make me confuse .
As a beginner which one is the easiest and most secure Linux Operating systems to choose?
3) Easiest VPS Control Panel
I am currently using Ipowerweb vDeck and aPlus control panels. What is the easiest VPS control panel to choose?
4) VPS Unlimited domains hosting
Does that mean that i can host unlimited domains or just park/redirect domains like in the shared hosting?
5) Preloaded PHP, MYSQL and other plugins/addons
Do they come included in the package like in shared hosting or do I have to install them myself?
6) VPS Dedicated IP and Search Engine Optinisation (SEO)
If I have one single VPS dedicated IP and many hosted websites do they share they same IP? How this affect the SEO effort if, for example, Google see all the websites sharing the same IP and linking each other? How would the announced Host Gator SEO Hosting [url]overcome this issue (no idea what multiple C classes are )?
7) VPS Hardware / resource selection
What minimum resources would you recommend for the following website profile?
Size: 45MB Type/Features: Static pages, no forum or dynamic database driven pages Daily Unique visitors: 4,000 Max bandwidth: 1,5 GB per month
8) Which cheap managed VPS to choose under 30$ a month?
Considering all the above, which cheap and managed VPS solution (possibly under 30$ a month) would you suggest to a beginner?
I noticed good reviews for KnownHost and they offer a basic semi-managed 20$ a month plan. Would a semi-managed plan good for a beginner like me? Any similar offers, with strong Customer support, you would suggest to look into?
Some of you may remember when I was asking for help on a good dedicated hosting company. I looked around for a month and finally found a great company to host my websites, WANSecurity. I received at least 10 dedicated server offers, but chose to go with WANSecurity because of the server and service they offered me. With so many options out there, I thought it would be helpful for me to share my experience with some of you. I have been on shared hosting for about 10 years and have never messed with dedicated servers. I had no idea there was so much work with dedicated servers until I got my hands on one. I was used to getting everything set up for me at Lunarpages. Although I love Lunarpages, their dedicated servers are nowhere near those offered by WANSecurity. Robert, the WANSecurity founder, has been particularly helpful. I received a recommendation from a WHT forum member telling me to get in direct contact with Robert for the "best managed hosting" offer out there, and guess what... I think I got it. Robert and WANSecurity moved all my files, installed Apache, Red 5, set up my mail servers, configured all of my large databases, and did so much more.
Although I am new to dedicated hosting, their managed plans are world class and their servers are very reliable. No issues in the last 6 weeks for me. If you are new to dedicated hosting and don't feel comfortable running everything on your own, trust these guys. They do a great job and they are flexible. Their managed hosting plans are new but they have been around for 11 years. They know their stuff and most of all, they care about you. That's the great thing when you are a big fish in a small pond. They truly care for you and therefore offer you the best service. If you are experienced with servers, they are still a great choice. They will give you a great deal on a server even if you don't need all the managed hosting services.
Check them out at: [url]
You can also get in touch with their founder if you are interested. PM me for his email. Feel free to ask me any questions. I'm open to give you my personal feedback.
About us first, we do cPanel shared hosting and also (however you want to put it) fully-managed proactively monitored dedicated hosting - due to this we need access to our equipment all the time so we host it locally.
Ed from RapidSwitch contacted us via live chat on our website at the start of September to introduce the company, he offered us a rack from £650/mo, mentioned we could take it upto 32A power (obviously not for that price!).
We're based in Maidenhead (in the town centre), 5 minutes walk from RapidSwitch and 5 minutes drive from BlueSquare, as we use power-hungry Dell PowerEdges and the DC is closer to us we thought we'd have a look.
We arranged a tour. On the tour we were told about their dual diverse dark fibre, diverse power, how their staff support cPanel, how the rack would be fully managed by them but we'd be able to pop in anytime to do work, how they'd let us move in our kit during the night, sounded great.
The following day the whole Poundhost vs RapidSwitch thing went down, soon after RapidSwitch themselves went down too, which was slightly worrying.
We moved in, or tried to First time we asked for DC access it took 1 ticket, a wait of 60+ mins, then an angry phone call from me to get it sorted out, it was sorted out for the following day -- okay, strange? We moved in the next day.
Some days later we decided to move some of our live kit at BlueSquare over to RS for the evening.
4pm - I open ticket saying I need access to rack some live servers as per our verbal agreement when I signed up, and I get a reply saying No, as they don't accept hardware or visitors outside the hours of 8am - 8pm Monday to Friday.
4:30pm - I phone Randeep (sales guy) and talk to him, he talks to a Manager, arranges an exception, says a note will be put in my account regarding tonight and the other server moves we had discussed before I signed the contract.
4:50pm - I follow up this ticket to make sure they're ready.
8pm - Again, I follow up this ticket to make sure they're ready.
8:45pm - I arrive at BSQ after having sent them one ticket.
9:05pm - I leave BSQ after going through security, meeting a BSQ tech, unracking a box from BSQ1 and BSQ3, signing documentation, etc.
9:15pm - I arrive at RapidSwitch, no one answers the buzzer, so I phone. A member of technical staff (seems friendly, etc) takes my hardware, I ask "Can you rack this immediately?", I am told "No we're really busy", I mention that I had arranged this earlier, he replies "Well I wish they had told us!!!", I am then told "Management always arrange maintenance tasks at the same time and never think of the fu****g monkeys (he said this!!) that actually have to do the work, there is no communication at all"... He then goes on to talk about only 2-3 people being on shift in the evenings, how they have too much work, etc. I ask "Can it be done in the next hour?". Am told "Uhhhhh I'll try but Ive got a mountain of jobs to do". Tech then walks off with the servers, forgetting to take the rails, network cables and power cables. I mention this to him, he says "Oh, I'm not used to this Managed Rack malarkey". He then says "I'll update your ticket to say we took delivery of your hardware".
9:28pm - I drive off.
9:34pm - I arrive at my office, no ticket update. I wait around a bit and reply to the ticket asking if it can please be done ASAP. No reply, I then phone and ask what the deal is, am told on the phone "ohh we'll do it in 10-15minutes, when (unaudible) comes back, but usually colo orders are racked within 48hrs, we're really busy!" (so basically am told that what I'm asking isn't acceptable and they're too busy to cope -- not what you want to hear from someone who's supposed to be managing your hardware)
9:50pm - I phone up and ask what the hold up is. Am told your staff are too busy still, am also told that servers are racked within 48hrs of delivery. (So, basically I'm pushing my luck).
10:27pm - I get a reply saying your staff will do it as soon as they've finished their current jobs.
10:40pm - By this time I am getting customers shouting at me as this is taking too long, too right! I sternly reply to the ticket asking again to please rack them, once again explaining my situation.
10:49pm - I get a reply saying the servers will be racked as your tech has finished his other jobs.
11:08pm - I get a reply saying the servers have been racked but not plugged in, asking how I want them cabled - fair question, if not a bit obvious.
11:20pm - Servers are pinging
11:25pm - I have reconfigured the servers to work on the new IP range, so my job is complete, I then emailed them back asking if they're cPanel trained - turns out they aren't, although some members of their team might know bits and pieces - not what I was told on the tour, not useful to me at all.
I had a think about it over the weekend -- I wondered, if we can now only access our equipment 8am-8pm Mon-Fri (30% of each week) and they won't even allow a Dell engineer in out of hours, plus their staff are too busy to handle our requests in a timely manner -- what do we do if something goes wrong?
Worst case scenario is if a server physically broke at 5pm on a Friday and we didn't have the necessary spare part. We have 4hr SLA with Dell so they'd arrive at RS at 9pm but not be allowed in until 8am on Monday.
I decided it would be unwise for us to use a data centre which only allows us access to the building for 30% of the week and we should have been told before we signed our contract that we'd only be allowed in during those times. Being told their staff were cPanel trained bugged me too, especially if what they're selling me is a 'Managed' rack.
I wrote a long ranty email to them to nullify the contract, Paul Tacey-Green phoned me, we had a chat, he said they'd change the access time rules (but he hasn't yet), he mentioned that 2/4 of their staff on that shift had taken the night off sick and offered me some time free to show their commitment, I wasn't interested, I got the contract nullified and arranged to get out of there.
I then called BlueSquare, they provisioned a new rack, got me a new IP range sorted and assured they'd help with whatever I needed.
Getting out of there was interesting, a week later I opened a ticket to go there 19:30 one night, they made an exception to allow myself and a member of my staff in at the same time (only one visitor on DC floor allowed usually as their racks aren't secure).
We got in there really quickly, the tech guy was nice. (But there seemed only to be 2 techs on site, Paul, on the phone told me there should be 4 during night shift) Anyway, we get to our rack and find the servers they'd racked the previous week weren't done properly, firstly they'd randomly been racked in the middle of the rack rather than on top of the existing ones (at the bottom of the rack), and then, quite scarily/hilariously, the bottom one they'd racked (in the middle of the rack), the rails weren't put in at the back, so it was defying gravity and mysteriously HANGING at about a 15 degree angle in the rack!
We packed up our stuff as fast as possible, got out of there. We got into BlueSquare 10mins later, by the time we reached the door there were already BlueSquare techs waiting for us! They immediately took all our equipment out the back of my car and put it next to the rack so we could get it all installed.
Anyway, I thought I'd just share my experience of RapidSwitch - Im sure they have lots of happy customers. I'm just happy we got out of there before we moved in too much kit. I couldn't handle the thought of giving them another chance, them failing and us being forced to move out some busy shared servers at 7:30pm one night! We'll be staying at BlueSquare from now on.
The Planet has expanded its focus to add a suite of managed services, which it calls "Planet Northstar" and has rebranded its dedicated server offerings as "Planet Alpha." It's also redesigned its site with a Web 2.0 look.
I'm finally ready to move from a shared environment to a dedicated server. I don't know anything about server set up and management. Therefore I'm looking for a managed solution.
Reading through this great forum I found out that I can either go with a fully managed solution by the hosting company or go with an self-managed host and hire a third party administrator.
This will be my first dedicated server project. I would like to keep monthly cost below $400. Not necessarily looking for the cheapest deal out there, but rather for good service and stable performance.
I have heard good things about the Planet and liquidweb here on this forum. If I can find a reliable 3rd party management company I might be able to look into softlayer and/limestone.
I'm trying to decide whether I should go with inhouse management or 3rd party management.
I work for a small web design firm with about 100 clients/domains and we are starting the search for a new hosting provider. We need a managed dedicated server with an offsite backup. We are also looking for a company that knows what they are talking about. If we have a Linux or server question they need to be able to give us a quick straight answer. Also, if they could help us transfer all our hosting accounts from our current server over to the new one that would be a BIG plus.
We have been thinking about Rackspace or 1and1.com but were wondering what the community thought. Any recommendations?
Im thinking about launching a dating/social networking website and i was told that i will need a managed dedicated server package and i just want to know if anyone can recommend a company that offers a high quality reliable service like this? Price is obviously important too.
I would also like to know if countries like India offer good reliable high quality managed dedicated server packages too? Or if its better to go with a company in the United Kingdom or the USA etc?
Perhaps there is someone on this forum who also runs a dating/social networking website and can recommend a good dedicated managed hosting package as well?
When a colo vendor can consider themselves as a managed colocation provider? What make them different than *normal* colo service?
If you need a managed colo, why not go with managed server? With managed server, your vendor will take care about the server health, including software and hardware too
(I am mentioning to fully managed server vendors like Rackspace, don't tell me cheap managed servers)
I wonder in Liquid Web's TOS is talks about not being able to distribute things that are not your copyright. I understand if this simply means "no piracy," but this wording could apply to video sharing sites where users post their own copyrighted work. Would we then not be able to host with Liquid Web because our users are posting their copyrighted works and we do not claim copyright on their works? The users agree by signing up and posting a video that they are allowing it to be distributed on the site, so this should be fine. I guess the lack of DMCA information or clarification on Liquid Web makes me wonder how they handle video sharing sites with legal copyrighted works being shared by the copyright holders (though they are not the direct Liquid Web user). I may be over thinking this, but I have had other hosts have issues (mainly because I believe it was shared accounts and they did not want their oversold servers to get that much traffic, so it may not be an issue with Liquid Web). Does anyone here have a video sharing site hosted with Liquid Web? If so, if you they ever received a copyright infringement complaint about a video on your site did they handle it professionally as the DMCA requires or hastily suspend your account?
I just wanted to give my thanks to the guys/gals at Liquid Web for they're help in getting my VPS setup and ready.
I've only been with them for 5 days, which I know isn't very long at all but for a complete newbie to the VPS scene (I like to try and run before I can walk), they're support has been second to none.
All tickets and request have been dealt with swiftly and professionally and I certainly couldn't ask for anymore from these guys.
I wasn't on planning on spending $50 a month for a VPS but I think I will carry on with these guys as they have proven they are more than worth it.
I asked liquid web to backup my complete vps account. They mentioned to me that I could not remotely backup my account. And then asked for them to send a backedup file. They said it was 4gig in size.
Background Well, my first venture into VPS did not go as smoothly as anticipated. I originally signed up for the VPS1024 at Wired Tree on special offer and although setup was fast and extremely smooth and ticket responses were extremely fast and helpful, they failed on one fundament - security.
A hacker managed to get into my WHM (on three occasions) and Grove Portal at Wired Tree (on numerous occasions) and deleted my site through WHM as well as messed up WHM settings. Although Wired Tree did their best and did help with my problems, security flaws (on my behalf perhaps), I felt it would be best to join another VPS provider.
Liquid Web So after browsing WHT and the VPS section for offers, I eventually decided to get an account at Liquid Web, what with their glowing reputation.
Sign-Up and Account Activation Signing up was painless and after receiving a telephone call from their sales team to confirm the order, I received my VPS account info on Monday morning gone via email.
Security The main concern was making sure I secured WHM as best I could from the start as I did not want my WHM hacked into again. It was suggested by myself that we protect WHM to only allow IPs I provided to access WHM. This was then set up within a few hours by their technician. Now the support ticket at the end was brilliant. These guys explain what they have done and how they have done it - I've never had this kind of response from a provider before. WHM was well and truly secure and was done in a prompt and highly effective manner.
Support Tickets You may have read my earlier post where I had to wait 42 minutes to receive a response to a support ticket. Well, prior to this, responses were extremely fast to numerous support tickets I did post and it was only this isolated time where they failed to mimic their 30-minute response SLA and so were forgiven as the work they carried out in securing the server, installing GD and Imagick and generally taking the time to make sure I was happy at all times whilst communicating with them over these tickets was way and beyond the call of duty for me.
What I will say though is that it would have been good to receive a response when I was asking for progress of a ticket. I had to post two times before I got an answer and it would have been good just to say "we are working on this for you" as a sign of courtesy and acknowledgement of my response to a ticket for an update.
Well, so far so good. Its only been 3 days with LW but I think I have found a great provider and no disrepect to Wired Tree but I think LW have an edge in terms of their technicians and the knowledge based on tickets I posted at both hosts for info. You just feel the LW techies are more knowledgeable in the way they go about working and responding to tickets.
I was at a crossroads on my server running php 4x and needed to be able to run 5 and allow the sites using 4 to still run it. I read about how to do it but would of totally screwed it up.
LW support came to the rescue, installed both the 4 and 5 and now I can select the php version to run from the accounts cpanel.
Took a while to work through it but it's up and running and I'm a happy camper.
That's why I've had my server with them going on 3 years now.
