Hosting

[sebtucknott]

Hey guys and gals

I need some advice on hosting companies.

I've been using 1and1 for 8 years, now have 6 servers and 200 sites hosted with them.

Generally they are pretty good however yesterday our main server went down for 18hours!!! Costing my clients and Bright Site possibly £1000s in lost sales and business leads.

Everytime I called them they said they were working on it and will be up within the hour.

This was the final straw for me and essential to move somewhere else I feel now.

I'm strongly considering Rackspace does anyone have experiences with them, good/bad.

What I need -

• 100% uptime (close to)
• Flexibility to increase resource (we're launching 5 sites a month and only going to increase)
• Decent server monitoring
• CDN for file storage
• Full admin control of the servers
• Hourly backups
• 100+ email accounts (can be another company)
• Great support

Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated.

Seb

 

[Muzzy]

I use a company called Avenue Host. No problems for me so far. Have a look at their website for more info.

 

[Bozza]

NSC has been in the Rackspace cloud for a while now. Generally happy.

Given the scale of your operation though, I'm not sure many NSCers will be well placed to give a qualified answer.

 

[Springal]

Would it not help to have some redundancy ?

Uk2 or Rackspace would be one shout.

LCN or ServerChoice (different brands of the same company) are highly recommended by me and the right size to care, but still bigger than a bedroom operation. Own their own data centres in Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City

 

[Couldn't Be Hyypia]

1and1 wholly inappropriate for your needs now. I know Rackspace and Peer1 very well. Plus couple of otger options to consider. If you want a quick chat pm me your mobile.

 

[danielson81]

Since 2006 I have been using Daily.co.uk | UK Domain names | VPS hosting company for several websites and domains, never had a problem.

99.99% Uptime Guarantee - View our Service Level Agreement | Dedicated servers from Daily.co.uk

 

[Westdene Seagull]

Would it not help to have some redundancy ?

Uk2 or Rackspace would be one shout.

LCN or ServerChoice (different brands of the same company) are highly recommended by me and the right size to care, but still bigger than a bedroom operation. Own their own data centres in Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City

I'll second LCN.

 

[Deleted member 22389]

Used to admin a large auction site years ago. Rackspace what can I say, brilliant support. When you have a problem out of hours you get to speak to someone in US who will also sort out problem. It is 24 hour support and they would usually pick the phone up after a couple of rings. They also have really experienced people who know their stuff, especially on Linux Server. We had two dedicated servers with them. It was costly, about 1700 a month, but when the site was turning over 300k a month you need the very best support you can get, you cannot afford the sites to be down for a second. Never liked one and one.

 

[beorhthelm]

99.99% Uptime Guarantee

nice spam there. but im glad you posted this as it raises a point i wanted to make, that uptime doesnt mean sound so good when applied to reality, 99.99% over a year allows for 87 odd hours of outage. even 99.999 still allows for 8.7 hours.

i think ive heard of just about every major ISP and hosting firm have some sort of outage over the last decade. its very difficult to account for everything and acts outside a company's control can impact them, like a major hub or peer going dark which saturates other networks, so makes sites appear to be offline but wont count. hosting and ISPs will priorities large clients at the expense of smaller ones. long and short, no one will guarantee genuine very high uptime without very high cost, and even then its limited. IT is full of tales of the expensive 5 or 6 9's service they use going for a burton.

anywho, you've stuck with 1and1 because (i assume) they've been good for so long, so dont be too hasty. Rackspace is highly rated and so are others, but are more expensive. if you really want to improve uptime consider a few other ways than simply moving provider. firstly you could make your servers over multiple sites. theres caching and service distribution technology that can help this too. also consider diversifying the hosting, so if you have an outage you only have to deal a subset of clients (and price their services accordingly, some on say 1 and 1 others on say Rackspace). whatever way you go assume you will have an outage at some point, rather than assuming you've paid for the worlds first zero-downtime-ever service.

any jobs going btw

 

[Dave the OAP]

Hey guys and gals

I need some advice on hosting companies.

I've been using 1and1 for 8 years, now have 6 servers and 200 sites hosted with them.

Generally they are pretty good however yesterday our main server went down for 18hours!!! Costing my clients and Bright Site possibly £1000s in lost sales and business leads.

Everytime I called them they said they were working on it and will be up within the hour.

This was the final straw for me and essential to move somewhere else I feel now.

I'm strongly considering Rackspace does anyone have experiences with them, good/bad.

What I need -

• 100% uptime (close to)
• Flexibility to increase resource (we're launching 5 sites a month and only going to increase)
• Decent server monitoring
• CDN for file storage
• Full admin control of the servers
• Hourly backups
• 100+ email accounts (can be another company)
• Great support

Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated.

Seb

I work for SunGard AS and if you want I can put you in touch with one of our SME team.

Check out our website. Www.sungard.com We have presence in EMEA as well as the rest of the world. PM if you are interested.

Dave
European Managed Services Lead.

 

[Grombleton]

If it were smaller quotas then i'd highly recommend BigWetFish - i host all my client sites with them and never had an issue.

However, for you i'd go for Peer1 - used them at a previous agency and whilst not cheap, they provide a top service.

 

[halbpro]

If you want guaranteed uptime what you really need is something like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace working in collaboration. Running main and backup servers across different servers is certainly technically challenging, particularly with getting a load balancer that will work in that situation, but there are people who use that and it means that if there's a data centre outage it won't cause you issues.

 

[georg]

There are a lot of related offers on the Net today, but the main problem is choosing the most reliable and cost-effective one. It's a good idea to find as many related reviews as we can and only after that make a crucial choice.