I've now been with Tailor Made Servers for two months (just paid my bill for my 3rd month) and my experience has simply been wonderful! Jose, from the beginning, has been helpful in all my requests and questions. Support requests are answered in a timely manner with useful responses.
I snatched up a decent performance server at a great price and so far, there have been no issues at all with the hardware and the network (Colo4Dallas) is phenomenal.
I'm keeping this short as there isn't a whole lot to say other than that my experience with TMS has been splendid up to now and based on the reviews I've read about them before signing up, I'm confident that it'll remain so. I'm definitely looking at picking up my next batch of servers with them as well.
It's a bit early for a meaninful review given I've only been with them just over a month so far, but I'll keep this updated at time goes by.
Network: 10/10 - Still early days obviously but so far zero downtime. All boxes are on a 100Mb port too which is a major plus, other providers tend to charge extra for that.
Support: ??/10 - I can't comment on their support as it's something I never used.
Ultimately though, given they are an unmanaged provider, support really should be limited to tracking down hardware issues etc.
Hardware: 10/10 - Spot on thus far, and very well priced too.
Sales: 10/10 - Ordered Saturday, box online Sunday (with an odd drive combo so some work must have gone into it too).
Other:-
Initially I was going to go with Softlayer, in fact I even filled in the order form a couple of times but got cold feet. Then browsing through WHT's offers section, I came across one of TMS's specials, quite frankly it was too hard to turn down. After a few searchs on WHT to confirm their reputation I ordered straight away. Don't be put off by the frankly awful looking website.
Once you are a customer, their client area has everything you need, including access to rDNS, you do not need to create a ticket & wait for a tech to do it, their system allows you do set it up.
and initially I never thought a 10Mbit port was a bottleneck for me, however I've since seen my peak bandwidth usage at 24Mbit. The free 100Mbit port is deffo a good thing.
I moved to them last week, because LT's price increase which I was not happy about. I contacted Jose and ordered a server.
Apart from the fact I got some free upgrades (CPU and HDD), the server was setup in about 1 hour! So far, their network is great and the signup process was really easy (no need to go through 2 pages of forms when signing up, unlike LT).
I also like the fact that we are provided a reboot port, and rDNS control (which LT didn't have).
I asked for custom partition aswell and the server was delivered the way I asked.
Overall, I love these guys and I think I'll be a long term customer with them.
I posted a review about Tailor Made Servers (TMS) back in December of 2008 however it was wiped out during the infamous "WHT Incident" but I see that it has returned, although in a very incomplete state. Here is a repost of the original review along with a few minor changes to celebrate our 2 year anniversary! (Changes made to original review will have a red font color.)
Technical Support [10/10]:
First things first, TMS are an un-managed provider so don't expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That's not to say TMS wouldn't help you, I'm sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an un-managed provider.
We have a total of 74 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Twelve of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.
When I say the tickets were answered, I don't mean a canned reply of "We're looking into it!" then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it's finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it's given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.
Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here - the technical support & response times are very reassuring and above average when compared to a lot of other un-managed providers.
Network & Uptime [10/10]:
TMS are located in the prestigious Colo4Dallas facility and using an impressive blend of InterNAP, Level3, Time Warner and XO Communications for bandwidth providers. There are also InterNAP FCP devices in use to attempt to provide the most efficient routing possible and also work around any problems thanks to its intelligent routing capabilities. This differs from BGP in the sense that BGP will always provide the shortest path possible - not necessarily the best path.
The latency and throughput are what you would expect from a reasonably multi-homed provider in Texas. Typical response times to my location in Ontario, Canada are about 60ms while response times to the United Kingdom are around 110ms. Average response times to other parts of the US are nothing short of impressive, 25ms to Chicago, 35ms to Los Angeles, 20ms to Atlanta and 50ms to Seattle.
There was a network blip on March 31, 2009 that caused some instability due to an apparent network upgrade that went wrong. These things do happen, however I feel that communication could have been a bit better in terms of notifying clients in advance. Outside of that one issue the last significant outage was in May of 2007 when a faulty router module had to be replaced and the downtime was a little under 1 hour. TMS clearly has a solid network and should satisfy everyone from web hosting providers looking for maximum uptime to die hard gamers looking for the lowest latency possible.
Hardware Quality & Deployment [10/10]:
All of the newer servers are Dell so you know you're getting quality hardware. The hard drives are a mix of new and old, but they all work perfectly fine with no S.M.A.R.T errors detected using multiple short & long tests. Some people would prefer to always have brand new hard drives, but that's not very economical for a lot of providers and I'm totally OK with that.
Servers are deployed extremely fast during business hours. In most cases if you order a server in the morning, it'll be setup later that afternoon. I've never had to wait more than 6 hours for a server, but I tend to order in the morning so I can't comment on how fast deployments are later in the day or on weekends.
The best deals for TMS are listed under the Dedicated Hosting Offers forum and not on their website, so be sure to check them out. Ordering a server from TMS is completely hassle free and straight forward. You pick the server configuration, pay via PayPal or Credit Card and wait for deployment. There's no faxing or scanning of documents and what not for verification of orders - but I'm sure JoseQ does his own fraud screening.
Overall [9/10]
I can't say enough good things about Tailor Made Servers! The staff is very knowledgeable and genuinely shows that they care, the response times are nothing short of incredible and I can honestly say I sleep better at night knowing our servers are in good hands if something goes wrong.
It truly is a great feeling not always having to worry about network problems, or how long it's going to take to get a manual reboot done, or replace failing hardware if need be. TMS are on top of their game, definitely one of the most underrated and under mentioned providers on WHT!
Why did I rate TMS 9 out of 10 after this glowing review? Well, there's always room for improvement and I don't think it's realistic to rate any provider a 10 out of 10. So what can be improved? When I first posted this review last year, I mentioned that KVM access would be nice and I believe they have since been added - perhaps JoseQ can clarify on that. You know, I honestly can't think of anything major I would like to see improved at this point.
That's pretty much it; if you're looking for an unrivaled dedicated server provider definitely take a look at Tailor Made Servers! Their best deals are always under the Dedicated Hosting Offers forum so be sure to check that out or send TMS - JoseQ a message to see what they can do for you. You have my word, you will not be disappointed and the only regret you'll ever have with TMS is not signing up earlier.
Tailor Made Servers - TMS - 1 Year and 8 Month Review - Highly Recommended!
Here's my long overdue review for Tailor Made Servers [url] and I'd like to urge everyone looking for a high quality unmanaged provider to take a few minutes to read this. I'm terrible at writing long posts, so I apologize if this review is a bit all over the place - it's just so hard to contain my excitement!
Technical Support [10/10]: First things first, TMS are an unmanaged provider so don't expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That's not to say TMS wouldn't help you, I'm sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an unmanaged provider.
We have a total of 57 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Ten of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.
When I say the tickets were answered, I don't mean a canned reply of "We're looking into it!" then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it's finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it's given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.
Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here - the technical support
I have a problem with some mp4 videos and the downloads made from cellphones.
I have a plain LAMP server (centos 5, apache 2, php 5), the customers download the videos from a web, mobile section, and play on their cellphones.
The strange thing is that when they opened the video to play it on the cellphone, the video shows itself as a binary, although the extension remains mp4.
Tried moving the same video to another server, and it was played ok without any changes.. so, tested another server and after making this changes, it was able to reproduce the mp4 format:
I changed the Default mime.types from text/plain to application/octet-stream
TypesConfig / etc / mime.types
# DefaultType is the default MIME type the server will use for a document
# If it can not otherwise determine one, such as from filename extensions.
# If your server contains mostly text or HTML documents, "text / plain" isnte
# A good value. If most of your content is binary, such as applications
# Or images, you may want to use "application / octet-stream" instead to
# Keep browsers from trying to display binary files as though they are
# Text.
#
DefaultType application / octet-stream
When the videos out in binary, with a lot of strange characters, leaving just this: application / octet-stream
I see in /etc/mime.types and there is support for many formats, including. Mp4
However, on the original first server even if I change the above code, I can not reproduce mp4.
On any laptop or pc from the three servers I can reproduce the videos, the problem it’s just on one server playing from cellphones.
Recently, we had trouble with Horde, which I Re-installed. However, since then any change that is made to a domain in plesk (changing mailbox settings, domain settings, hosting settings) All website show the default plesk page and I will have to re-run the reconfigure-all command in SSH to bring them all back up. Sometimes even that won't work and I will have to re-run the bootstrap repair command. We were actually on Plesk 11 when this started happening, so we upgraded to Plesk 12, but unfortunately this did not fix the issue.
We have around 500 customer websites on this server, so obviously the changes are made often and the sites going down on every change isn't great at all.
I have a long list of these errors in my error Plesk error log:
2014/09/25 17:31:53 [error] 818#0: *1566 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown" while reading response header from upstream, client: *.*.*.*, server: , request: "$
But I can't seem to find out if this is the cause, or how to fix this error correctly on a Plesk install.
I always thought that 10 mbit unmetered was just a prank or not really dedicated to the server. But damn the server i got from www.kevworks.net totally screamed when doing some real bw tests.
Might try more tests to see if server performs and can provide the bw juice for me.
These are the stats from mrtg i got going :
Max Average Current In 9853.9 kb/s (98.5%) 311.2 kb/s (3.1%) 4805.5 kb/s (48.1%) Out 9553.6 kb/s (95.5%) 849.0 kb/s (8.5%) 9553.6 kb/s (95.5%)
Well cannot really post link to the mrtg as wht mods will go "aah bunny no url posting to ur site " crazy !!
So look at the screenie itself
Amazing i was actually able to pull 10mbit/s out of the server. So good work to you Kevin (kev not sure what his name is or am too tired to remember ).
PS: will be doing more bw tests over the next weeks or over the entire month, i am trying to somehow use full 3.3 TB bw over the month. (doing mirrors for distros and other linux stuff can really push the limits at times) Wondering if anyone know of places to get some beta testers to test the server's bw limits (act as mirror for your game maps, linux distros, rpm packages and w/e comes free to download)
Hopefully server wont be shut down cause bunny used the full bw potential ( i have heard horror stories of providers capping servers further and stuff when customers starts pulling too much bw (maybe cause they put server on shared bw or something).
I have a remote XP PC: 172.16.1.5 OpenVPN connection with route added for 192.168.2.0/24 to go via the VPN
Now on the other end the network consists of:
I have a OpenVPN server inside the lan on 192.168.2.245 Its default gateway is 192.168.2.1
I have 3 Windows Servers, 192.168.2.246, 247 and 248. All gateways are set to 192.168.2.1.
I have a ethernet router on the network, 192.168.2.1, it has a route added for 192.168.0.0/16 to go via 192.168.2.245, and route added for 172.16.0.0/24 to go via 192.168.2.245 also). the 192.168.0.0/16 is incase any other LANs are connected at a later date, if computers saw any packets not on the the 192.168.2.x subnet they would be routed to the default gateway which would then pass them to the OpenVPN router.
The trouble is, i can remotely connect and ping to the OpenVPN router fine and also the ethernet router, however when i ping any of the Windows boxes it times out. But i can open up Remote Desktop and connect to the windows box without problem, infact if i am running 'ping 192.168.2.246 -t' it will suddenly come alive but only after the RDP connection is made.
Is this something funny with the routing? I want to keep the OpenVPN server internal to the network and i appreciate it is hitting the ethernet router then being passed to the OpenVPN but something is weird as it fires up RDP fine but not ping. No firewalls are enabled on any of the boxes. If i log into ssh on the OpenVPN router or ethernet router i can ping from that to the windows boxes fine.
Its as if a ICMP redirect is issued, and all is well after the 1st connection. Not too sure but could anyone be kind enough to enlighten me?
I have a lot of questions here so if you can't answer them all I understand. even pointing me somewhere where I could get the answers would be appreciated; hardware sites focusing on server hardware, forums focusing on such, etc.
we plan to have three different types of servers:
- db server (self explanatory. mysql. for forums, mysql driven sites.)
- file server (lots of files around ~2-10MB, consistant 70mbps right now, but we want more room for upgrades. needs a LOT of storage room.)
- web server (lots of php files, but also static things like plain html, images, etc. also includes all misc services for the setup-- dns, etc.)
could I be given a rundown for which hardware each of the three should have? I don't need specifics, even just knowing that more ram is important here while cpu doesn't matter as much, or that the fastest disks available are a must, etc would all be valuable info for me. despite that, I certainly wouldn't mind specific hypothetical hardware configs.
for the database server I'm assuming the more ram the better. not entirely sure about the cpu? also not positive on disks...
for the fileserver, how much ram would be practical or useful? disk io will be an issue I'm because plenty of people will be pulling files at once so the disk needs to read from multiple places. scsi (and even raptors) are not an option as we need 750GB+ of space on a reasonable budget. more ram will take some load of of the disks, but how much is neccessary / reasonable?
for the web server I'm assuming cpu first, then ram, but it'll likely need less ram than the db server?
I'm more lost on the disks than anything. scsi on the fileserver is not an option under any circumstances due to $/GB. for the db & web server I'm willing to pay for scsi if the performance increase really does warrant the extra money, but I'd like to be convinced before shelling it out. if you have benchmarks geared at server hardware when it comes to disks I'd really appreciate it.
also, what's the best way to network these together when colocated? each one with a dual gigabit ethernet port and then the communications go to and from the router?
I was wondering if it is possible to cluster 2 web servers and 2 mysql servers with only one server working as load balancer.
I am planning to use LVS (ldirectord and heartbeat).
Let's say I have 3 IPs allocated to the load balancing server.
111.222.111.222 (Main IP) 111.222.111.223 (Web Load Balancing IP) 111.222.111.224 (MySQL Load Balancing IP) If a connection is made to .223 it would pass the request to one of the web nodes. If a connection is made to .224 it would pass the request to one of the MySQL nodes.
Is it possible to do this?
If not, can I run, for example, nginx on 223 IP address to provide forward proxy? (Then it would not be able to HA but the main point is to load balance so)
Also, what would be the best way to keep the data same on both web servers? This is a web cluster for a very high traffic forum with a lot of uploads every hour so it has to do real time synchronization. I heard that DRDB is only one way and not two way so I'm not going to be able to use this.
I am just colocating servers and managing them myself, and renting services off of them. In the future I would like to start offering dedicated servers as well. I am wondering if many companies do this, or if its more of a general practice to just setup as a reseller? The worst part that comes to mind is thinking of how to do billing for the bandwidth per month. With my setup I would only be offering flat bandwidth packages (like 2TB a month) but even so, I cant think of anyway to automate it so WHMCS knows if they went over, if so, how much, etc.
I have recently purchased new hosting with a new supplier which uses a different kind of control panel - cpanel. So before I transfer our organisations website across I want to spend some time playing.
We purchased our domains with 123 reg and the host we have been using for a while is namesco our new hosting package is with neither of these suppliers.
Before I transfer our primary domain to the new host I'm doing a dummy run with one of our other domains and that's where i've come up with this name servers question.
The new host gave me the name of their 2 name servers.
But when I went to my control panel at 123 reg to change the name servers they were not using namesco name servers they were using 123's.
Do I want to change the name servers to the new name servers or not? I'm a bit confused as i was expecting to see namesco names servers?
Is that possible to have ns1.mydomain.com ns2.mydomain.com
Two differnet severs that means each having two different IPS? If so how?
the reason I ask is that I see a lot of hosting companies have thousands of users and many severs but they all ask their customers to point only to two name server ns1 and ns2
Say you are renting 2 (or more) dedicated web servers. How do you go about getting it so that www.yourdomain.com goes to one of the web servers? Do you need a 3rd server to redirect the request, or what?
if anyone had a recommendation on where to buy a decent used server (Just for DNS Purposes). Anywhere other than ebay? Anywhere local in the Greater Seattle/Everett/Tacoma, WA Area?
Cannot see my servers from office but sites are up and running. Servers are at AtlantaNap. Maybe weather?
Tracing route to mysite.com [xx.xx.xx.xx] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1 2 30 ms 30 ms 30 ms 10.21.1.1 3 58 ms 30 ms 30 ms at-4-3-0-1710.CORE-RTR1.PORT.verizon-gni.net [64 .222.212.44] 4 44 ms 44 ms 44 ms POS3-0-0.GW12.BOS4.ALTER.NET [208.214.102.193] 5 44 ms 44 ms 44 ms 0.so-3-0-0.XL2.BOS4.ALTER.NET [152.63.22.182] 6 63 ms 63 ms 137 ms 0.so-2-3-0.XL2.ATL1.ALTER.NET [152.63.101.49] 7 63 ms 63 ms 63 ms 0.so-7-0-0.XR2.ATL1.ALTER.NET [152.63.86.102] 8 63 ms 63 ms 63 ms 194.ATM7-0.GW9.ATL1.ALTER.NET [152.63.85.109] 9 63 ms 63 ms 64 ms internap-gw.customer.alter.net [63.122.231.198] 10 64 ms 65 ms 63 ms border2.tge-4-1-bbnet2.acs002.pnap.net [64.94.0. 83] 11 64 ms 63 ms 64 ms giglinx-13.border2.acs002.pnap.net [70.42.180.15 8] 12 * * * Request timed out. 13 * * * Request timed out. 14 * * * Request timed out.
Does anyone know of an FTP client that lets you transfer files directly between one server and another (to avoid downloading/uploading)? Preferably that runs on Linux!
