Notice: This is a discussion thread for comments about the SitePoint article, [url=http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/dedicated-hosting-comparison-10-plans-reviewed]Dedicated Hosting Comparison: a Review of 10 Dedicated Hosting
Plans.
There are lot of other provider such as Softlayer, Rackspace and GigeNet, which provides quality hardware as well as awesome support.
Nice article, though it seems to be rushed.
There is a lot of errors in the description/stats for Liquid Web, which makes me wonder if the same might be the case for the other hosting companies.
The article also does not discuss the most important part at all, the support offered by the company. In my opinion the difference of having to talk with Indian tech personnel and fight both with language barriers and lack of skill from the personnel side, compared to to talk with someone who has the knowledge to understand and solve the issue in a matter of minutes, is more than worth a higher price point on the service/product offered.
That also brings up another point, how fast does the company on average answer the phone or support ticket, how long does it go on average before your issue/case is solved?
Choosing a company that provide a good and fast support is vital and is worth A LOT more than the difference in hosting fees. Instead of thinking how much more you must pay per month by choosing company A over company B, consider how much money you would potentially lose per X minutes of downtime.
Over the years we and our clients have used many different hosting providers (multiple of them are discussed in the article). The one we have decided to stay with and have moved all of our clients over to is Liquid Web. The reason being mainly their support staff knowledge and response times. Sure their higher server packages are more expensive than many other hosting companies, but remember that just one incident with the server or any of the software on the server going down can turn out to be more expensive than the difference in price…
HostGator offers the Intel dual-core Xeon processor in its Standard plan, which is probably the best processor for server platforms.
This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Front page worthy? I think not.
Hi TheRedDevil,
Could you please point out any specific inconsistency for LiquidWeb? To be honest, I don’t see any.
Hi Bitmesh,
I think it’s the word “probably” that is bothering you in the quote that you mentioned. The Intel dual-core Xeon processor is indeed the best processor for servers platforms. What I mean however is that it is probably the best among all the reviewed web hosting providers.
I wouldn’t ever host with most of these companies, especially those that run large shared hosting businesses and only tack on dedicated hosting as an upsell service. With that many low paying customers, their support can’t be oriented around the kind of service dedicated clients need. We need high level techs, who work in the data center with physical access to the boxes, available 24 hours a day, that treat every ticket as a priority ticket.
That’s the kind of level of support you get at companies like Softlayer and Rackspace, and with their unmanaged and cloud offerings, it doesn’t come at an enormous premium either. Since they have a different average customer profile, they can afford to provide that kind of service. If a hard drive goes bad at 4 in the morning, I know that within 15 minutes someone that knows what they’re doing in a server will be able to pull the drive for me, connect another one, boot the system without leaving it hanging at a disk check prompt, and get me back on.
At a good number of the hosts that were reviewed, I’d have a support ticket in a queue waiting for morning staff to read it, then escalate it twice before it gets to anyone in the right building. And their internal networks and control panels for managing physical servers just don’t compare to what someone like Softlayer provides.
The article isn’t written from the viewpoint of someone that has to run a website requiring dedicated servers. We’re not looking for “a host that includes an SSL certificate”, buying an SSL certificate is trivial, that’s just a marketing gimmick. If I “think that your storage requirements may increase dramatically”, I’m not interested in “plan upgrades”, but which companies can easily hook me up to a SAN / NAS and don’t charge for high speed traffic over an internal network.
I don’t even see MediaTemple, if you want knowledged people, look at MediaTemple. They not only maintain but invent. Their Update system for (dv) is amazing, and they know what they sell.
further to this, how do the mentioned companies go about load balancing or segregated hardware security? what happens if i want multiple machines, are they in the same rack or in different parts of the building? what sort of physical security is in place to protect the data on my drives? what about CDN service integration? Akamai partners? edge server support? multiple data centres to target specific customer bases?
if your app is serious enough that it needs dedicated hosting, then bang for your buck should be least of your concern. Support, security and reliability are way more important, and way more costly if its not available.
Last year I rented a dedicated server with HostDime and they have a wonderful support, and now they have a live chat that I used a couple of times and I got responses and solutions with no delay, amazing.
Regards
joejac
I am with brinkster. and they guys are really great. they solve problems within seconds.
I think you had your own criteria for the search?
Softlayer is a good provide,especially their service is good.
Softlayer and ThePlanet are basically the big ones. Quite good, another one is fdcservers with DC’s in Chicago and Denver.
You can use a point system to help you decide on a host.
Give each specification on a table a score from 0 to 10 on importance. If it is very important to you a 10, if you don’t care a 0.
Then give each host a score from 1 to 10 on the value for each specification (how good the specification is compared to the other plans).
For example:
Storage may be very important to you, it would be 10.
LiquidWeb might get a 10 for value since it has the most. multiply by importance to get 100 points.
LunarPages might get a 2 for value. multiply the value by the importance…20 points.
Then add up the points for each specification to see which host has the highest score.
Thanks for the article, and also thanks to forum members for your suggestions. I will be looking at dedicated hosting in the next few months.
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You can use a point system to help you decide on a host.
Good idea. Online pole will be the best way to understand what people really can recommend.
I vote for Liquid Web! lol
As a liquidweb customer, I’d like to mention that their tech support is a phone call away, making late night issues easily and quickly corrected. Their support is the best I’ve ever worked with to the point that I model my customer support after theirs.