managed hosting
Monday, September 8th, 2008I’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).
