managed hosting
I’ve been experimenting with managed hosting lately. I ended up going with Fastservers.net for a pilot project, and so far it’s been totally smooth.
So far I’ve only had a West Coast US presence, and managed seems like the best way to get an East Coast and European presence (FS has datacenters on both coasts, as well as in Amsterdam and Tokyo).
I requested quotes from over a dozen different vendors, the primary reasons I went with them had to do with:
- responsiveness - they actually got back to every email, did not ask repeat questions, etc.
- upfront pricing - they included prices on my quotes, and did not hesitate to break it down for me to use for my internal reporting
- turnaround time - in addition to server/network uptime, their SLA covers bringing up new servers (within 24 hours) and hardware replacement (within 2 hours).
Anyway, exciting stuff. I should be able to go live with them very soon, going to just go with round-robin DNS for the initial launch, although I am starting to look into hosted GSLB vendors. I’m not sure that GSLB is such a great thing, but it seems like a marginally acceptable choice among the set of complete bagbiting loser WAN load-balancing methods out there that we have to work with out here in the real world (with apologies to jwz).
September 8th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Greetings:
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September 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
i am dealing with similar growing issues at the moment with the small company i work for. we are currently in the process of migrating from some extremely overpriced managed servers at verio, to a more reasonably priced server at theplanet.
did you get any quotes from theplanet? i’d be interested in what you thought of them in comparison. i didn’t spend too much time choosing a new host, I just wanted something reasonable (as the verio solution was ridiculously overpriced). We have a fast server, growable space up to 2tb, lots of bandwidth, and i’m looking into amazon s3 for a scalable backup solution.
-nick
September 20th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
@aaron: Thanks, we’re busy working out the logistics of the launch now, but I’ll drop you an email.
@nick - yes I did contact someone at theplanet.. they wouldn’t give me pricing upfront, and kept asking for my requirements rather than giving me a quote (I was just looking at the email thread, I would send the reqs, wait a day or so, ask for status, they’d ask if the reqs had changed, I’d say no, go back to step 1
).
This pattern happened for a lot of them. I wanted to just do a little pilot project with a few servers, and had very detailed requirements and no time to talk on the phone with someone (so they could price me out, I’m guessing).
Maybe it’s just the reps I got, or I am too impatient, or something
I am very happy with fastservers.net, but I love that there is so much competition in this space.
I am definitely looking at Amazon web services, in particular EC2 and S3 for image hosting.