Dedicated Server Companies

AmishBob

AmishBob

Assistant to the Regional Leadership Manager
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Hey All, my company is looking to take our software product to a hosted solution. For that we need a dedicated server hosted offsite.
Does anyone have companies that they recommend from experience? The system requirements are pretty low for our needs spec wise.

We do need: Windows Server 2008 or 2012 and sql express.

Thanks!
 
Rackspace, SoftLayer. Both great companies.
 
Managed or Unmanaged, do you want to have full control over the setup or do you want them to basically set up your web server add and adjust the major shit. There is also comanaged which can get pretty damned expensive.

Are you slinging downloads of this software product or is it something that is running on this hardware. If your slinging files you are going to need to know what kind of speed you want and how much bandwidth your using. 100 Mbps uplink is pretty slow as 10 customers can pull 1.25 MB/s down theoretically. But if you don't anticipate more than a few simultaneous downloads this might not be an issue and 100 Mbps unmetered is fairly affordable.

I used to host for several android developers and everyone loved me because I had a 1 Gbps uplink i was dishing out firmware as fast as some people's 125 Mbps cable could pipe in. Problem is the line was metered. I made the mistake of taking on an oem firmware leak operation. One morning a 4.1 Jelly Bean leak hit for the the AT&T Galaxy S3 and we were talking GB per minute of usage. I have a feeling your usage won't be like that but still have to gauge needs if you want an uplink that can easily handle 100+ downloaders at a time.

The other thing is think about VPS's and please stay away from 99% of the companies out there. If your dishing out product files then your write you don't need a super server. Especially if its on 100 Mbps. 1 Gbps will rape a mechanical raid setup if your dishing out a lot of different files but at 100 Mbps even a shared raid on a VPS won't choke. I was doing it all on NFO's VPS's under windows 2008 and 2012 and were talking 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month.

On a dedicated unmanaged box when something goes horribly wrong you may end up dishing out alot of money to have a tech do a reinstall. Most unmanaged plans allow for free restarts and OS reinstalls so its not always end of the world expensive. But with an unmanaged VPS if your end goes belly up a reinstall is pretty easy and you can VNC to the virtual guest as if you were sitting in front of it so even if the ethernet driver isn't installed you can still login and work inside windows until the problem is fixed. You don't get that with a dedicated server unless of course your running virtualization on it which hey alot of companies do.
 
Yeah, Essentially we have a client/server application that reads and writes from a (very very small) database (sql server). We typically only do onsite installations behind the company firewall, but there is an increased demand for a hosted solution for our product. We definitely want an un-managed. There will be little to know transfer of files between the clients and the server. Eventually we will have 10-20 clients hosted on this server, each pointed to their own database. Thankfully we have smarter people than I to deal with the installing and configuration.
 
From the OP i understand you intend to run the SQL server on the same box. Thats for the best either way because external access to database servers being available opens up a whole can of worms regarding security.

Shit dude if you truly need not very much power you can rent dedicated Intel Atom blades for cheap. I mean were talking Pentium D processing power and enough ram to run a database server for a moderate vBulletin site. But 100 bucks a month will get you somewhere from a Core 2 Duo to an i3 level Xeon with maybe upwards of 4 GB of ram. If you need more than that I mean its somewhere between renting decent hardware and building yourself and colocating. Colocating means failures are on you and remote support is near 100 bucks an hour. Usually better to rent so they deal with failures except for software side.

Stay away from OVH. They offer dirt cheap servers but they have no problem kicking thousands of legitmate customers off their boxes. Its mostly forums but when a legit forum (read, hundreds) with no malware or problems gets shutdown for "spam" a host loses my respect.

Might want to hit up one of the webhostingtalk sites if you want alot of opinions. Even though its basically an application server. Thats something else to consider is something like Amazon AWS. Cloud based servers with redundancy I mean a little beyond a VPS with alot of scalability. Its not for everyone and if your not sure on your numbers its hard to calculate costs.
 
Thanks for the feedback. We'll do some shopping around and see how it goes. Like you said, we don't need a ton of power so price shouldn't be an issue.
 
I've been using singlehop for almost 2 years. Had some good luck with them so far.
 
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