Advice for buying my first dedi server?

UberTiger

UberTiger

UberTiger

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I'm looking into buying a dedicated server to host a few sites I'm looking to launch shortly.

I'm currently on a cheap VPS and my host doesn't do dedicated servers.

Any advice on good companies to go with?

I think I'll need a manged one as I'm not too comfortable using SSH yet or how to go about troubleshooting server issues.

Another thing to bear in mind is that there will be multiple forums on the server and I need to make sure that I have an SMTP server on it set up correctly, or use an external provider. I've read that the RDNS needs to mach the domain account sending the email in order for it to not be flagged by as spam?

To do this will I need multiple IP addresses? One for each domain?
 
I host with VeloxServ and I highly recommend them. Small company means they genuinely care about your business, so the support is very very good. Prices are reasonable too, especially for Windows servers.

One of the most important things with sending email and avoiding coming up as spam is to make sure you have an SPF record set correctly for your sending domain name (it needs to list the IP address or CNAME of the server that's sending mail on behalf of the domain name). Also the content of the email and the frequency of send is important too, but I can't help you there :P
 
Second the Vidahost and TSOhost nod.

Vida has my pref because it's Seb and Dominic's creation and having met them in person I know that they built the company for customer service and quality. You couldn't find a more helpful company.
 
If you do feel like going down the un-managed route we have a couple of servers with Poundhost and they've been great. Even though it's un-managed if you do something stupid like kill your network access they'll usually respond to tickets in a few minutes and sort you out.

We run hMailServer for email on them as it's lightweight - one server has a few users and about 20GB of emails on it and it's still running smoothly.

For an extra £10/month or so you could always go down the Windows server route, it's pretty difficult to break, and gives you access to ASP.NET :).
 
Thanks for the replies guys :)

I've been shopping around a bit and I'm not sure I do really need to go for a full dedi at this point in time, especially looking at the cost of some of the dedis with Vida and TSO. £300-£600 :-o

Their VPS' are pretty expensive.

Vidahost.com VDS £90 +£30 Setup fee
4 Virtual Xeon CPUs
3GB Ram
80GB Space
1600GB transfer

TSOHost.com VDS £100 +£30 setup cPanel Free
4 Virtual Xeon CPUs
3GB Ram
80GB Space
1600GB transfer



My current VPS is actually really cheap (granted no where near as powerful as the above) :p


Mini VPS VPS £10 Single core
1GB RAM
1 IP
40GB Space
400GB Bandwidth

I'd even contemplate a dedi from OVH, who are apparently pretty big but based in France. Seems like a lot of hardware for the price. No management though.

OVH Dedi £65 No Setup Fee
i5-2400 Quad 3.1
16GB RAM
2 x 2TB Sata2
100Mbps

30 Day free trial



Now, I'll probably get slated here for suggesting it - but what about 1&1? I've just looked at their Dynamic Cloud Server package, which is currently 50% off and the discount stays with you for the life of the contract. So if I need to upgrade or downgrade the price doesn't change.

I can get considerably more RAM for the price, which will help with database focused forum sites wouldn't it?


1&1 Dynamic Cloud
£48
4 Cores
4GB RAM
200GB Space

£66
4 Cores
8GB RAM
200GB Space

It would also mean that I could drop the requirements for quiet periods, and when I anticipate a busy period I can jack up the number of cores to 6 and RAM to 24 GB. That would work out at a maximum of £138 per month when I need the extra juice.

This could be a good compromise on flexibility considering this is a new business project I'm launching and I don't really know how busy the sites will be?
 
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What sort of sites are these and what sort of traffic do you anticipate? This is the first thing...
I usually find that if someone has built something that requires real hardware then they usually know what you need to run it, and how to manage it. Otherwise shared/VPS tends to be all they need in reality.
 
It's really hard to say.....It will be 3 or 4 forums running XenForo

But I will be doing a very heavy marketing push for a two week period at the end of this month for launch. If the marketing goes well and lots of users visit the sites on certain days during those two weeks, I don't want to to risk it not being available or the users getting a poor experience and therefore poor first impression.

That's what's making me think the cloud solution could be good. I can crank up the requirements for that 2 week period to ensure everything runs smoothly, then cut back on the resources once things settle down and I get a better feel for how many returning visitors the site may experience in the following couple of months.
 
Hmm, well without really nothing much it's hard to really suggest anything. But I suspect like I said that if you don't know about this, and also if you think £90/month is expensive when you're launching a business then the reality is you probably won't need much at all. You don't need significant resources to run most forums.

It's very quick and easy to move a small forum around, takes mere minutes - only delay is DNS.
 
I just though it seemed expensive relatively speaking compared to the cost of some dedicated servers that I'd seen for less.

But you're right, I really shouldn't be worrying about amounts like that. It's just that I feel a little swamped by some of the server side stuff when I should be focusing on getting a few other parts of the business worked on.

I'm trying to do a lot on my own here and some of it's pretty new territory. The uncertainty of knowing if anyone will use the sites is making me be more cautious than I should be about spending cash or getting locked into any contracts...I guess I've just gotta go for it and hope for the best! :)
 
Check out http://www.hetzner.de/en/ been using them for years and they are the cheapest I have found.
Amazing service really tbh.

€49 per month gets you http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quadcore incl. Hyper-Threading Technology
RAM: 16 GB DDR3
Hard disks: 2 x 3 TB SATA 6 Gb/s HDD 7200 rpm (Software-RAID 1)
NIC: 1 Gbit OnBoard (connected at 100 Mbit but can be upgraded for extra)
Backup Space: 100 GB
Traffic: Unlimited (There are no charges for overage. We will permanently restrict the connection speed to 10 Mbit/s if more than 10,000 GB/month are used (the basis for calculation is for outgoing traffic only. Incoming and internal traffic is not calculated). 100 Mbit/s speed can be optionally restored by committing to pay 6,90 € (incl. VAT) per additional TB used.)
 
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UberTiger said:
I just though it seemed expensive relatively speaking compared to the cost of some dedicated servers that I'd seen for less.

But you're right, I really shouldn't be worrying about amounts like that. It's just that I feel a little swamped by some of the server side stuff when I should be focusing on getting a few other parts of the business worked on.

I'm trying to do a lot on my own here and some of it's pretty new territory. The uncertainty of knowing if anyone will use the sites is making me be more cautious than I should be about spending cash or getting locked into any contracts...I guess I've just gotta go for it and hope for the best! :)
Click to expand...

Grab a bottom spec VPS/Cloud package from TSO or Vida as they have great support round the clock, but I strongly suspect you'll find that you only need a shared package in the end.
 
I have a tiny little VPS from Vida, no problems with it really and costs me a tenner a month. I don't do much with it but it's enough to run a small site on. I do wear a Unix sysadmin hat professionally so don't mind (and have the know how) to look after it myself.

It ocassuonally hard locks, and I need to get the Vida guys to give it a kick - but they are fairly quick about it.

You can get a tiny instance free on AWS for a year with some storage and such.
 
Pay a little more and get much better service.

I once had a problem with F*sthosts for a website I manage. Rang them up because website was off and got put in a 45 minute queue.

Whereas with Vidahost, one client had a problem with their website going off once or twice in a month. Thought it was hosting (but doubted it). Dominic at Vida analysed the website (Drupal), found a problem in it, with our consultation corrected it, and website has been fine ever since. One very happy client, wish I'd saved and forwarded their thank you message over to them. It had been driving them nuts for over 6 months. A truly awesome company ... saved my client about £6,000 for a new website that they were going to spend (and couldn't really afford).

(not my website client though, we just do some marketing with them)
 
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