Best dedicated server hosting provider?

[Tim]

Hey all,

This might be in the FAR LEFT FIELD here on the MB site, but I was wondering, does anybody has recommendations for a dedicated server hosting provider? I am going to be in the market for a buncha servers.

Right now I've been liking Softlayer - A LOT!

Softlayer.com is who I used with Wowhead, who I used far before that, and far after that. I'll probably go with them unless I can see a good choice that people recommend.

Thoughts?

I'd probably go with a server with 24G or 32G RAM and hardware based RAID5 (or even 10) across 4 or 5 disks, probably 2TB SATA. I'd need 100M to the `net at a min, prefer 1000M.

[xartin]

An old friend of mine is the CTO at hostgator.com. if your interested I could arrange a meeting. message me on skype i'll see if he's around.

IMO the dns servers he built for hostgator ran baidu for a day after someone hacked baidu's dns records a couple years ago

http://praetorianprefect.com/archive...ian-cyberarmy/



I may also have a second option but it would require a skype meeting as well mostly for an introduction unless you know someone in europe.

Another friend of mine from europe used to own a small bittorrent website in 2002-2004 called Suprnova.org

Now he definitely knows some folks in the hosting and datacenter community in europe. I have another close friend renting a 10GBit dedicated server at https://www.ovh.co.uk with his assistance.

according to wikipedia OVH is one of the top ten global hosting providers on the planet and one of the hosts of wikileaks.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH

"In 2009 it was classed as the 6th largest host of servers on the internet and the largest in Europe."

I bandwidth tested it once and got 26000KB/s sustained download from usenet but that's only because it's not running raid10 or a double digit ssd raid array.

OVH is an extremely competitive option for hosting and not many if any north american colocation or dedicated server providers can even come close to what ovh can offer with a 10GBit fiber connection included...

They have for some time unfortunately had one stipulation to get a server located in Europe. The account holder must be from Europe and have a credit card to pay for the server rental fees which is why I asked my friend that used to own supernova.org if he would be willing to offer some assistance.

If you know someone in europe that would be willing to offer you a hand tim this would be a VERY nice option. They directly offer installations of VMWARE ESXI 5.0 and Gentoo Linux

https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_serv...011_bestof.xml

The big benefit of Gentoo Linux as an OS option over debian or ubuntu is the ability to run a fully threaded LAMP web stack.

The server my friend has been running at OVH has been using debian but unfortunately debian and any debian based linux distribution does not natively support threaded php worker module for apache. Your forced to use the prefork php module that tends to overload a very busy server with thousands of php processes.

Anyway... Luckily far left field is my specialty

[xartin]

I also just discovered that OVH apparently launched services for canada and usa. I'm not clear on the details of how you would order from ovh however this post might shed some light on the details

US, Canada, Asia, Brazil Network - OVH Forum

[Tim]

Hey Xartin! Writnig from my phone, take a peek at Dedicated Server Hosting, Cloud Servers, & Managed Hosting Plans whatcha think?

[xartin]

It appears as if OVH outclases softlayer for price and included base competitive options

OVH can offer 10GBit lossless fiber with 30 TB of bandwidth use included on an E5606 xeon with 24GB of ram, LSI MegaRAID 6 Gb/s SAS raid option included for the less money than as softlayers best single cpu server package that only offers 10MBit base bandwidth, 3GB of ram and no "perks" whatsoever.

ovh also supports more OS options including full support for managed ESXI 4.1 and 5.0

Here's the OVH server package i was referring to

http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/mg_best_of.xml

For the additional $800.00 you would have to spend on ram addons at softlayer you could pay for a server at OVH for two months

[Tim]

That is one helluva deal! But do they have something in the US with that deal? I would probably jump all over it asap.

[xartin]

if u wanna order from ovh.ie they will sell to the usa. you just need to give them a copy of a bill and drivers license confirming the address and they will not charge the european 20% VAT tax. Myself and another friend confirmed this.

the datacenter is in france but the routing and latency is fantastic. i tracerouted from here to the server my friend was renting in the france datacenter and it was only 11 hops including two hops for my cisco router and my modem with around 140ms icmp latency via new york.

[Chamassa]

Originally Posted by xartin

if u wanna order from ovh.ie they will sell to the usa. you just need to give them a copy of a bill and drivers license confirming the address and they will not charge the european 20% VAT tax. Myself and another friend confirmed this.

the datacenter is in france but the routing and latency is fantastic. i tracerouted from here to the server my friend was renting in the france datacenter and it was only 11 hops including two hops for my cisco router and my modem with around 140ms icmp latency via new york.

yea the speeds on OVH are insane, even to the US.

[pinki104]

i was going to purchase the £105/month vps but it seems they cap there connection for vps but on the dedi servers it goes upto 10gb i think

[Tim]

I am probably going to go with Hivelocity, they have some wicked good deals.