dedicated server options
The needs of some clients are great enough that they require the resources of a complete server.
Our dedicated server plans:
- Devote an entire machine (mostly) to your needs. We say "mostly" because you'll still be participating in our clustered solution, so you'll be using DNS and backup mail services on other machines, and will likely be providing secondary/tertiary DNS and backup mail services for other machines. This doesn't affect performance, but greatly increases reliability through redundancy for the entire cluster.
- Are managed. Basically, we expand our cluster to include your new machine, so security updates and patches are performed on your machine at the same time they're deployed to the rest of the server. Your machine is controlled using the same control panel our shared hosts use.
- Provide solid machines. Your dedicated server will have a hardware RAID array just like our shared servers do -- this costs more, but we don't believe in tempting fate. Data is too important to lose to something as common as a hard drive crashing.
- Include the same high level of service you're used to. If you need software installed, just ask. The same goes for tweaking the server for performance, just like we normally do. Regular backups (every four hours) are also provided with every plan.
Huge promises from most web hosting providers
If you're shopping for dedicated server hosting, you'll find some great advertised deals out there. Deals that are so good that we can't buy that amount of bandwidth for the price they're quoting. These web hosting providers can do this because most clients won't use anything close to the thousands of gigabytes of transfer per month that are promised.
For example, I used to host a vBulletin site that had 900 simultaneous users at peak hours, and got along just fine on what's now 7 year old hardware (for the geeks reading this - 2 P3 processors, SCSI RAID, and 1.5 Gigs of RAM) without any complaints, using about 60 GB of bandwidth per month. That's a pretty big web forum (we had around one million posts at the time), and it's likely that our needs at the time were greater than the needs of most current dedicated server shoppers; options from providers who promise 1,000 GB per month in transfer are offering sixteen times the bandwidth this site used, and they know the user will likely never need the bandwidth they promise so they'll never need to deliver it (and the user can be eliminated if they do).
We don't want to make promises we might not be able to deliver on, so we work a bit differently.
Custom quotes for our dedicated servers
This is pretty simple: we'll look at your current usage, guess what growth you're likely to see in the next year or so, and offer you a quote designed to meet your specific needs. This means:
- You only pay for what you need. If you used 30 GB last month and hope to more than double your users in the next year or two, then we can offer you a package with a guaranteed 100 GB/month, with the agreement that should you exceed that you can do so for 25% more than our bandwidth cost (either averaged over the month or using the same 95th percentile measurement we pay). We don't need to try and decide what the odds are that you'll use thirty-three times the bandwidth you used last month (which is what 1,000 GB represents) and pad our package price to compensate for that chance.
- You can buy more as you need more. Our clustering solution makes it easy to move your account between servers with zero downtime for web access (and a few minutes for mail and database migrations -- see this page for details). This means you can start with a single-processor machine with reasonable disk space, and migrate to a more expensive plan if/when you truly need it. Instead of asking "how much do I hope to need in 6 months," you can pay for only what you need now. Our lack of setup fees for dedicated servers facilitates this.
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