Can any web hosts beat this?

[internetspaceships]

I really can't get excited by the comparisons between hosting companies speeds etc.

It's all pretty much there and there abouts and let's be honest there really shouldn't be that many problems.

Our site has been down once in three years. We use Zen.

 

[RedEvo]

We use Zen.

I love Zen and have three broadband accounts with them. I tried their hosting on a dev site and they eh......lost it..... A server crashed and they lost the lot

d

 

[Root 66 Woodshop]

Can't go wrong with Rochdale born and bred Zen

Helps that my niece works there to.

 

[bdw]

Vidahost get lots of good press in here but I have not personally used them.

I have used UKWSD extensively and they have been great apart from one major incident last month when they had a serious crash. Their support has always been great except for during this incident when they went missing for a day or two. I think may have been down to a case of all hands on deck getting the problem fixed.

Do not go anywhere near 1&1!

 

[chip_y2kuk]

It's not all about specs when it comes to purchasing a server, there are a thousand other things to consider.

Take this for example - http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/superplan_best_of.xml

Looks great, right? And it is, the server is absolutely amazing, the bandwidth provision (15TB @ 100mbit/s) is great and yes overall the server is great. The issue with OVH* is what happens when things go wrong... You'll be left in the dark for quite a while, there is no 24/7 technical support without calling France directly and dealing with a language barrier whilst you talk to a technician, and even then, you have to wait quite a while.

1&1 is virtually the same, perhaps not everyone's experience is identical, but when I had one of their dedicated servers you're left waiting in long queues on the phone, only to be told that they will create a ticket and look into it.

As the saying goes you get what you pay for, and whilst 1&1 may be cheap, their whole business is based on upsale/firesaling as far as I've worked out, and their service (not product) isn't great. This was a couple years ago, maybe they've changed, but I've never seen anything to support that

* OVH actually get a hell of a lot better when you go into their EG/MG range, 1&1's service has been the same at all times from what I read.

I actually have to disagree with your comment about ovh.... yes you have press 1 for sales, 2 for technical, 3 for billing etc but once you get through that... i've never been waiting more than one or two minutes and my problem has been sorted while i waited on the phone (one was getting my account activated).... support does slow down at the weekend for non-critical stuff.. but you can always submit an incident ticket (which i'm assured will be responded to quickly and urgently, but most things can be done by you on their web interface)


also the one thing that i see with 1and1's vps is they use RAID 5 which would be ok for a few VM's per node but not very good for more than that the IOP's would be too low to write/read from for anything meaningful (look for raid 10, means more drives but better read/write performance (usually))


joe

 

[Rudi]

I actually have to disagree with your comment about ovh.... yes you have press 1 for sales, 2 for technical, 3 for billing etc but once you get through that... i've never been waiting more than one or two minutes and my problem has been sorted while i waited on the phone (one was getting my account activated).... support does slow down at the weekend for non-critical stuff.. but you can always submit an incident ticket (which i'm assured will be responded to quickly and urgently, but most things can be done by you on their web interface)


joe

Due to the low quality resold servers that OVH actually uses I had the unfortunate event of the hard disks failing.

Ticket raised on 2pm Friday, no response. Made a call at 6pm to their support line. The UK servers are not covered by 24/7 support. The issue actually took around 6 days for them to resolve (replace the hardware), even then they only half fixed it as they only replaced 1 disk. They then subsequently charged me €140 to ship the disk to me, because they would get money back from SeaGate even though the disk was broken, supposedly.

Anyway this is not to say I dislike OVH, if they change their idiotic support policy I would go back in a heartbeat. Oh, and if they got rid of the torrent seedboxes filling their network too

 

[chip_y2kuk]

Due to the low quality resold servers that OVH actually uses I had the unfortunate event of the hard disks failing.

Ticket raised on 2pm Friday, no response. Made a call at 6pm to their support line. The UK servers are not covered by 24/7 support. The issue actually took around 6 days for them to resolve (replace the hardware), even then they only half fixed it as they only replaced 1 disk. They then subsequently charged me €140 to ship the disk to me, because they would get money back from SeaGate even though the disk was broken, supposedly.

Anyway this is not to say I dislike OVH, if they change their idiotic support policy I would go back in a heartbeat. Oh, and if they got rid of the torrent seedboxes filling their network too

The UK servers are not covered by 24/7 support. The issue actually took around 6 days for them to resolve (replace the hardware) < do they even do servers in the UK? there DC is france?.

i've not had any trouble with them yet (i've got two servers with them)


joe

 

[Rudi]

I had 6 servers with them, all EG range. 3 of them failed which forced me to move from them, was with them since 2007

When I say the UK servers, I mean those purchase via the UK website. They're the same as what ovh.fr sell, but they're covered under different SLAs. If you buy them from ovh.fr you get 24/7 telephone support, as you can see here:
FR

Incidents
Téléphone, 24h/24 et 7j/7 09 74 53 13 23
N° non surtaxé

Emails, 24h/24 et 7j/7 Contacter le support

UK

Incidents
Emails, 24/7 Contact support

The "24/7" incidents team exists, yes, however they are NOT technicians, they cannot solve your problem. They're analogous to a company's first line support team.

When you call / email France, you get through to their actual datacentres in Roubaix. I did this and the problem was resolved on the Wednesday by UK because the FR team did not have the authorisation to touch the UK servers. The whole UK portion of OVH is amateurish, the French side on the other hand seems to be quite good.

BTW: What it says here:

Level 1
(Unavailable server, faulty component)
- Intervention (GTI) 1 hour

Their "Intervention" is an automated system and it triggers a reboot when the server is seen to be down.

- Repair (GTR) 2 hours

Their "Repair" is after they have manually classified it as being a hardware issue.

EDIT: To be fair to them, they did offer compensation for my downtime experienced, but any dedicated server host that does not have a team available to work at weekends (or even outside of normal 9-5 working hours) is absolutely ridiculous.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

OVH is certainly a fascinating example of extreme automation and great scale (their new Canadian facility will be a monster!) - a friend has a server with them and gets exactly what he pays for - the system is reliable and he's never used support. It's completely unmanaged of course and it just a budget box for playing about. Cheap power in France is probably a very helpful part of their location

As for beating the spec posted by the OP, it depends on the exact details of what performance/reliability/service is offered/required. We tend to keep our VM servers on the smaller side (no 192Gb monster servers just yet!) in order to provide fewer servers per physical system as, while perhaps slightly less efficient, it means we cram less in which makes all sorts of management/troubleshooting items easier and performance can be better too.

 

[astutiumRob]

Can anyone beat this price on like-for-like specs?

When dealing with cloud/vps/servers, you need to be more focussed on service than price - it's easy to be cheap, it's much more difficult to be good ...