Dedicated hosting - can anyone recommend a good UK provider?

[braddo]

We've run our ecommerce store on a shared hosting platform (TSO) for the past few years. Its been great and TSO have been wonderful to deal with. We're now wanting to speed our website up considerably and this means ditching shared servers and paying for our own dedicated server. We currently pay around £3 per month. To get a dedicated server with TSO, pricing starts at £298.50 per month. Yes - thats a 100 fold increase. I've only just decided to start the ball rolling on a migration to a dedicated server so I really haven't done much research and don't know much about this market.

I don't want to ditch TSO, but I was hoping to find something a bit more affordable than £300/month.

Is £300/month a competitive price?
Any other recommendations?

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Dedicated hosting can be expensive, but from what you are describing you probably don't need to make such a big leap. I would look at a VPS or cloud hosting.

Personally I have been very impressed by Siteground. I use their cloud hosting - it starts at about £60 a month and is pretty fast.

 

[ryedale]

Hi

That is expensive - there is a lot of us on here who could match that spec at a lower price

As said above though, I wouldn't rush into a dedicated

I've lost track of the number of times that people have been pushed towards a dedicated that they simply didn't need once they'd moved to a faster, specialist shared platform

If you want to pm me a link to the site (or post it on here if you want), I'll be happy to have a look at the performance for you.

Regards

Mark

 

[quikshop]

Try HostingUK - up until recently I had a dedicated server with them for several years and it was faultless. Their support is up there with the bigger providers, well worth considering.

 

[braddo]

Thanks for the responses so far! Appreciated.

Where does AWS fit into this mix? Should I be considering EC2? (I sound like I know what I'm talking about. Don't be fooled!)

 

[Xtm_Mike]

Give CloudAbove a try: https://cloudabove.com/

Quite simply the best support you will receive, and I'm sure they'll slash that quote from TSOHost in half.

 

[KM-Tiger]

The key thing with a dedicated server, or VM, is who is going to manage it and how?

In monetary terms the management is going to cost more than the hardware.

So question to @braddo: Are you going to manage it yourself, get the hosting company to manage it, or use a third party management service?

 

[braddo]

I have no idea so I wouldn't be doing it myself. I assume that's why "managed hosting" would be what I should be considering. Does a VPS require management on top of the VPS fees?

 

[dufjax]

Give CloudAbove a try:

Quite simply the best support you will receive, and I'm sure they'll slash that quote from TSOHost in half.

+1 for cloudabove

Ryan's great and I've used his (and now his teams) services for 5+ years without any complaints.
Customer service is second to none!

Infact the last conversation I had with him he told me to ditch one of our servers as we didn't need it... saving us money but obviously costing him.

 

[tukhnet]

Dedicated server hosting is the best that you can get and the most expensive, of course. But there are some cheaper options than you've mentioned, so I can help you if you still need it, just send me a private message and I will explain you.

 

[Digital Oriented]

£300 per month is a reasonable price for a managed dedicated server. It is not the cheapest, not the most expensive.

The determining factor should probably be the value which defined as the ratio of quality to price. You have experience with TSO so know what quality you can expect.

 

[webhostuk]

We've run our ecommerce store on a shared hosting platform (TSO) for the past few years. Its been great and TSO have been wonderful to deal with. We're now wanting to speed our website up considerably and this means ditching shared servers and paying for our own dedicated server. We currently pay around £3 per month. To get a dedicated server with TSO, pricing starts at £298.50 per month. Yes - thats a 100 fold increase. I've only just decided to start the ball rolling on a migration to a dedicated server so I really haven't done much research and don't know much about this market.

I don't want to ditch TSO, but I was hoping to find something a bit more affordable than £300/month.

Is £300/month a competitive price?
Any other recommendations?

Sure you can get some good deals on dedicated server , can you share some details on what platform your ecommerce Store works on , is it magento or something else?

 

[antropy]

I have no idea so I wouldn't be doing it myself. I assume that's why "managed hosting" would be what I should be considering. Does a VPS require management on top of the VPS fees?

Yes you need a fully managed service. Both VPSes and dedicated servers will require that. If you don't want the price to jump us so much, go for a VPS first and then a dedicated server later if you need it but there are some advantages to VPSes such as they're less susceptible to hardware failure.

 

[Xtm_Mike]

+1 for cloudabove

Ryan's great and I've used his (and now his teams) services for 5+ years without any complaints.
Customer service is second to none!

Infact the last conversation I had with him he told me to ditch one of our servers as we didn't need it... saving us money but obviously costing him.

Agreed, they're an awesome team

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

We've run our ecommerce store on a shared hosting platform (TSO) for the past few years. Its been great and TSO have been wonderful to deal with. We're now wanting to speed our website up considerably and this means ditching shared servers and paying for our own dedicated server. We currently pay around £3 per month. To get a dedicated server with TSO, pricing starts at £298.50 per month. Yes - thats a 100 fold increase. I've only just decided to start the ball rolling on a migration to a dedicated server so I really haven't done much research and don't know much about this market.

I don't want to ditch TSO, but I was hoping to find something a bit more affordable than £300/month.

Is £300/month a competitive price?
Any other recommendations?

Don't forget that TSO is now Host Europe, who are part of GoDaddy....

 

[Alan]

Where does AWS fit into this mix? Should I be considering EC2? (I sound like I know what I'm talking about. Don't be fooled!)

AWS, Goiogle Cloud and Microsoft Azure are the big suppliers of cloud based technology solutions.

EC2 & Google Compute Engine (GCE) ( sorry Microsoft I don't know or care enough about your products to describe them ) are the equivalent of a Virtual Private Server (VPS). A VPS is a slice of a bigger server but your resources are ringfenced, so can be in effect the same as a dedicated server in many ways.

With these cloud intrastrure providers they are giving you a Infrastucture as a Service (IaaS). This is a very econonmical way of building scalable technology systems. But note, these are infrastructure services, not total solutions, you ( would have to employ someone) to set up and manage the infrastructure.

So EC2 & GCE are in effect self managed environments, which is fine if you have the technical resources ( either in house or pay for on top ).

As you have come from a £3 a month shared hosting platform, I don't think you are ready to jump top self managed technology.

Your best bets are in my opinion
1. more powerful shared hosting account
or
2. move to a managed VPS

 

[EmC007]

Totally agree that VPS is the way forward.

 

[derick813]

@braddo, Try AWS EC2, It's not that hard to manage and I think base on experience it is cheaper. And as a web developers point of view AWS is reliable and faster. Currently, I'm running my website in AWS.

 

[BREAKLINE UK]

There's plenty of hosting companies here on UKBF to chose from. We use Google cloud and inmotion and never had issues.

 

[EmC007]

There's plenty of hosting companies here on UKBF to chose from. We use Google cloud and inmotion and never had issues.

Do you find Google Cloud expensive?

 

[JPMiddleton]

Don't forget that TSO is now Host Europe, who are part of GoDaddy....

Unless i'm mistaken, TSO is part of Paragon which owns Vidahost.

https://www.paragon.net.uk/about

 

[Xtm_Mike]

Unless I'm mistaken, TSO is part of Paragon which owns Vidahost.

https://www.paragon.net.uk/about

That's correct, however HEG owns Paragon and now GoDaddy acquired HEG lol.

 

[Steve WebStudio]

Check out eukhost reason being they offer very good value managed hosting, I've used their VPS and their livechat and tech support is fantastic 24/7.

I have looked at many options and found managed services to differ greatly in price, these guys are around the lowest price but their support has been some of the best.