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Ask HN: What are the "big five" dedicated server hosts to look at first?

16 points by GigabyteCoin ↗ HN
I am after a basic entry level dedicated server and don't want to go with a fly-by-night operation.

What are the first 5 dedicated server companies I should take a look at before anyone else?

18 comments

[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 604 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
If you look at five of them you are overthinking it. You only need to pick one.
GigabyteCoin
I am not looking at 5 but I wish that I were.

What is your dedicated server host of choice? Or did you just come here to detract from the conversation?

ScottWhigham
I think that I'd start with Rackspace, Amazon, Softlayer, and "other".
austengary
Rackspace, Softlayer, Savvis, Hetzner, ServerBeach.
beat
Pick the one that feels gut-right, and look for reasons to shoot it down. Giving yourself a menu of choices leads to analysis paralysis.

Better yet, back it up a level... why do you need a dedicated server, rather than cloud hosting? Dedicated servers go strongly against industry trends.

austengary
Why do you think that is? Hosts push cloud as it furthers their bottom line.

Cloud is popular because it is cheap. For consumers and providers. If you know exactly the resources you'll need and have infrastructure in place to scale then sure, VPS/cloud hosting might be good if you're looking to cut costs.

In the end though, you'll always be sharing and limited. If you're approve dynamic allocation then you'll just be paying for it at a premium.

beat
Not saying that cloud over dedicated host is the answer. Saying that it is an important question (and the answer should be application-specific).

When you find your business decisions going against the herd, you should really ask yourself WHY you're going against the herd, because our herd is pretty smart. That doesn't mean you should never go against, just that you should make sure you're thinking it through.

austengary
I did receive that from the upper portion of your response. I was just eloboarting further for the OP as your first did insulate that de facto equals to correctness. Yes precisely but one with such a question has already deomstated anayalsis to a level of a threshold where such alternatives would not hwve been considered if not for the existence of prior sufficient evidence for valid uncertainty of accepted standard.
tokenadult
What is Wikipedia hosted on these days? The last time I looked at Wikimedia Foundation's tax exempt organization documents, a big part of the foundation's expenses were paying for web hosting.
t0
You can build your own server for several hundred dollars and ship it to a colocation datacenter. When you do the math, paying $100/month for a $300 server doesn't make sense after 3 months.
ethomson
You're not paying $100/month for the machine. You're paying $100/month for management, and paying $300 for a server is a waste of $300.

I admit, it's been a while since I've done any systems administration myself, but I wouldn't even trust my personal blog to a $300 machine. I'm not even sure I'd trust a $300 rackmount chassis.

When I start to think about colocating my own server - and thus being the one responsible for its maintenance - I immediately think of redundant everything. That means RAID. That means dual, redundant, hot swappable power supplies. That might mean two machines.

Because even if I live in the metro area that I'm colocating in, me driving in to get physical access to the machine means downtime. And that assumes that I have exactly what I need to restore that machine on-hand. (I probably don't.)

And these are things that I'd rather pay somebody else to deal with.

JoachimSchipper
You'll get better answers if you ask a more specific question. E.g. Hetzner is an established company that will give you lots of server for your buck (and you may be interested in http://www.serverbidding.com/); but if you're trying to run a game server for your buddies in the US, the fact that's in Germany means that you won't have the best ping possible.

Similarly, OVH's budget brand KimSufi is unlikely to go under any time soon, but your questions won't exactly be a priority for support. RackSpace is the opposite - they try to offer excellent support, but they definitely aren't the cheapest.

Finally, AWS and Linode have their own advantages; unless you're sure you want to stick with dedicated, at least consider those - if only because you can claim "cloud" experience. ;-)

GigabyteCoin
>Similarly, OVH's budget brand KimSufi is unlikely to go under any time soon, but your questions won't exactly be a priority for support.

What kinds of questions won't be a priority specifically? "What is linux?" or "Can you please reboot my server?" types of questions?

JoachimSchipper
From sniffing around a bit a year or so back, while considering them, they're pretty fast with "please reboot", but you'll have to get "real" OVH if you want support that will help you with more complicated questions. Reading HN, it seems that this is still the case.

OTOH, as you suggest, there are lots of questions a capable sysadmin can find the answer to without help.

Pyramids
I'm surprised Internap hasn't been mentioned, they're quite large, have a great network and support.

Other worthy mentions include Rackspace, SoftLayer, Leaseweb, Peer1 and SecuredServers (aka PhoenixNAP) all of which are large companies by hosting provider standards.

Also, in Canada there are iWeb and Netelligent who have great networks.

Based on personal experience with all of the above, Internap, Rackspace and Netelligent have given us the best value and overall experience.

ohashi
Our data here might help you: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare/#tab3

We show any company offering them, so they may not specialize in them. I don't want to bias your own process for evaluating though by injecting my thoughts. I hope the data helps and if you have any questions, I would be happy to try to answer them.