can you recommend a dedicated server provider close to rackspace?

Don't have experience with rack-space or any other comparable hosting provider but one thing I want to say that rack-space price is quite high compared to other hosting providers like blue host, iPage etc.

I agree rack space is expensive! Thats probably why I never used them ;-) so I cant speak for their service.

I've used Hetzner for 3 or 4 years now. If you are ok with your own server management its hard (impossible?) to beat to their prices in europe. eg atm you can get 32gb + 2 x2tb for Eur49.

Or managed 16gb boxes for eur100 upwards.

I heard some people have issues with the hardware they use, but in my experience it works very well, and they give great service.

regards

l.

I would suggest not to use Hetzner. I've had about 6 servers from them and their ways of doing things is not good. No DDoS mitigation so your server could be locked for 12 hours+ just because someone attacked it with 100MB/s for 2 minutes. They use old HDDs so you will have to replace a drive every year. At least they provide RAID1 by default. They're cheap but there's better.

I've also been using OVH personally (and business). https://www.ovh.co.uk or their side company (just as good) https://www.soyoustart.com They both support DDoS mitigation and free firewalls to block IPs or ranges. I've only had to replace one drive on an OVH server and that was after doing 40TB of disk activity a year. They've also recently brought out DDR4 RAM servers which are really nice.

You can see my servers I have on my site: https://bashy.im

I'm not with either companies and have no referral setup. This is my personal opinion.

@bashy I've heard before about hetzner reusing drives, but I dont know that they use them in new build boxes. I know they have the "bidding" boxes which are recycled - but then they are very very cheap.

Anyway I speak as I find - and I've had 1 drive problem in 4 years, it was in a raid and swapped in minutes so a bit of non issue really that highlighted good service.

But I just had a quick look at OVH site - and their system/service does look very good. Reasonable prices, and you do get free IP's which cost quite a bit extra extra at hetzner. Even on the 'essentials' you get 16 free - I might give em a try

and as bashy said - no affiliation, just my personal opinion

l.

Hi everyone, thanks for your input.

It makes me realize that its indeed about experience and using a provider to really see if they are good or not. And you can not really tell how good your provider is unless you run into some real shit.

I setup a website for a financial services company, forex , integrated with 4-5 different systems and 8-10 payment gateways etc etc. They setup a server at rack-space as i advised them but they soon transferred to another provider since they were like 20% cheaper. When they were under a DDOS attack they provided zero help, we had to figure things on our own. They moved to another provider and when we had some issues with the server setup they insisted its was a programming error ( my code can never be wrong! :) ) but after serval calles and tickets and days later they fixed it after realizing it was some apache configuration causing the problem. Then they moved to another provider which one day said the hard drive died, they that the policed got it, i never found what really happened. They had zero backups or anything to help! Luckily i had recent copies on my laptop i used for development and i saved the day restoring 3 sites and 20-30 databases. They lost some data but got back operational after a day! of course here it was their fault of not setting up a fault tolerant solution but what gives.

I am with rack-space for ten years now and surely their servers are expensive but the thing with rack-space is that you are not buying the bare server specs! you are buying into the reliability and managed services rack-space offers. i get daily incremental backups for the whole server. i get monitoring, i get hardware firewall, i get technicians to solve easy weird problem you will find on top of constantly knowing that someone is looking after my server in terms of security and keeping it up to date.

My problem is that I can't afford moving to another provider to save 30% or even 50% of my server costs and loose my big clients when there is a big issue and it take several hours or days to resolve.

Yesterday i was looking at http://www.softlayer.com servers and when i selected the same server solution and backups and everything i can get from rack-space it ended up costing more, and when i talked with their support they basically said that the servers are self managed. They said they do provide support if there are problems but I would be expected to mostly manage the server myself. They dint convince me on the level of support i would be getting!

The problem with most dedicated server providers i look into its not if they are cheap or expensive but most of the time is hard to tell what level of support they will be able to provide to help you run your business trouble free and effectively. And am not talking about hosting 2-3 sites on a server but 100+ small business websites with many of them relying on their websites and emails i provide to do business!

RackSpace is good for that, yes. They do offer a lot more than normal "dedicated server" providers. Managed servers are going to be more costly of course.

Its hard to find an alternative provider if you are used to that level of managed services. I am surely capable of setting up a lot of stuff on the server on my own via ssh however i know that there is a whole lot more to it in order to keep a server secure and trouble free.

i guess my best option is to get a secondary server from another provider and see how that goes over the years while using it for a few projects that are not very critical

Hello u can to take dedik server on prohoster.info It is very cheap and easy )