Dedicated Server Smackdown! Who's the best?

Who's the best?

  • Softlayer

    Votes: 22 47.8%

  • Rackspace

    Votes: 13 28.3%

  • The Planet

    Votes: 11 23.9%
  • Total voters
    46


LeFluffy said:
As a caveat, if you have more than 5 big dedicated boxes, you really need to look beyond your standard "hosting" and move into "the cloud" (god, I hate that term!) or some serious specialized hw you don't get "over the counter" (IBM BladeCenter and the like)

Otherwise you're just throwing money out the window.
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If they are in the same data center you can link them together and share resources. I shy away from using "the cloud" because it's mainly for people who have large jumps in resources, be it from them putting in a huge amount of instances of something to simulate usage spikes by people using a program in development, running games, etc.

For running websites, your resources are pretty much fixed after a certain point and you know what your traffic is going to be. So, paying a premium on bandwidth is just a waste of money.
 
LeFluffy said:
As a caveat, if you have more than 5 big dedicated boxes, you really need to look beyond your standard "hosting" and move into "the cloud" (god, I hate that term!) or some serious specialized hw you don't get "over the counter" (IBM BladeCenter and the like)

Otherwise you're just throwing money out the window.
Click to expand...
That really depends, especially because finding a place that can deal with the power density required for multiple blade enclosures can result in a huge increase in colo pricing. (Not always - but in enough cases that it should give you pause!)

If you're technically comfortable enough to manage your own virtualized environment, though, I would still recommend renting. The costs of colocating on top of what you pay for for the actual hardware can take quite some time to provide savings over leasing machines, and when a virtual environment will allow you to easily transfer over VMs as newer and more efficient hardware is available, there's a lot to be said for having that kind of portability.
 
What about going with CDN like Akamai or Amazon's CDN? And then setting up a database server? One machine for serving the pages, pulling the images from CDN and database queries from another optimized db server?

Or is cloud really a better option?
 
CDN bandwidth is significantly more expensive than just getting bandwidth for a server, and is really much more of a situational thing. Why are you looking at CDNs? Generally CDN usage is to increase delivery speed geographically, and prevent traffic from overwhelming a server.
 
I've used several.

Burst.Net and Turnkey offer some really good spec'd servers at affordable prices. I've found both to be very reliable too.

For me personally, Softlayer's great support does not warrant the prices they have in comparison to both Burst / Turnkey.
 
WEBAIR said:
This makes my job so worth while =)

BlitzedMonkey - Thank you so much for this random act of kindness. You kinda made my weekend!

So I'll make yours =) You just won yourself a free dedicated server from your friends @ webair.com

let's go with with this config:

WEBAIR BUSINESS 1

Intel Core2 Duo E7600 3.06Ghz
Operating System of choice
2GB DDR2 (Upgradeable)
250GB SATA
15 Mbps Transfer Per Mo
11 Unique IP Addresses


If you need to add or change any of the config let me know i'll see what i can do for you =) I will be away this week on business, but if you shoot me an email I'll be able to get you rolling - mike@webair.com

Thanks for the kind works my friend!
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... the guy been with webair for 4-5 years, didn't say he needed a new server, wouldn't it be in better gesture to offer the OP who is looking said opportunity?
 
Rexibit said:
That wouldn't be rewarding long-term members giving unbiased referrals though, just stimulate people who aren't members asking for handouts.
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True indeed, but I see this gesture being bestowed on a 1-month old member around the same time WebAir started popping up within the forums just out of the blue. :P While I have no problem with a provider rewarding long term members, said appearance may backfire given the other conditions involved thread-wise.
 
WEBAIR said:
Hmmm... I'd have to call you on that thread, do you have a link? It's rare we would give away a server to a one month old member, unless the circumstances were extreme.

BTW, Did anyone ever tell you that you speak like abe lincoln?

"Four score and seven years ago, i saw this gesture bestowed upon a one month old client in a similar thread...."

I don't know why it reminded me of that! ha

Anyhow, have a great week guys I am off to Barcelona for the affiliate summit! PEACE!
Click to expand...

One month old on Wickedfire is what I meant, joined Aug 2010. ie: Said member who joined only last month, bestows a review of WebAir which also started popping up a couple weeks ago, then you offer him a free server for said review as a reward. See what I mean, not saying thats the fact, just the appearance of doing such in this thread with those conditions may backfire.

Course in my opinion if you were to make such an offer to a long-term client it could/should have been handled privately, with a simple thanks publically because as I mentioned above it doesn't exactly look kosher, like other threads where you see these new members (of the forum) backing up a seller all the sudden. So for appearance sakes : meh.
 
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Depends on what you need your server for..I'm primarily a mailer

For what is worth,

Cari.net
Calpop

Webair and Rackspace are way expensive, but you can work with them.

Rackvibe
Iweb
Singlehop
Multacom
Softlayer
 
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