Thanks man....

I was actually more curious about price points for a box that had just SSH and SFTP access... I could care less about having Cpanel (well, at least for the interim). Also, since I could care less about Cpanel, what's the admin charge from a hosting company for hooking up DNS, setting up email accounts as they're needed and even the most basic: starting / stopping a server in case I make one unstable.

Basically -- I'm coming from an environment where I've had free reign to request servers + the software on them, as a developer playing with whatever software I want. How would one, as myself, find something like that in a hosting company if I were to be on my own?

in case it got burried and people would miss this reply :winkwink:

Thank you too, man.

I dig when GFY has some peeps who provide some solid advice and much appreciate the time you took to write your response.

anytime....don't hesitate to ask me anything...I'll always help out if I have
time to do so....:thumbsup

I might put up resource site with hosting related info.....I haven't seen any good
ones out there the last time I checked...

I've answered so many questions so many times I'd safe time putting up
a knowledgebase with most common questions I get. Every new thing
will be added to it automatically so the knowledgebase grows by itself.

I guess it's time to finally do this as I have thought about it many times
before.....I'll announce it in this thread once it's live. I'll start working on
script to do it right now.......lol

If you need help building that and wouldn't mind giving one a little RoR playground, I'd be happy to help :)

*Note: for some reason, I've been on an RoR kick. Dunno why. Guess I wanna see how scalable it is: mod_proxy -> many mongrel_servers.

Well, if you just want SSH and SFTP(scp), that's damn easy. Virtually any host could give that to you for whatever their baseline/going rate is.

Usually they charge little to nothing for DNS. I've never seen it cost more than $2/zone, and that was back when you could get away when charging for it.

Usual 'starting'/'stopping' as in rebooting is included with the basic fees, but to have someone go in and restart services for you, you'll often have to pay for partially managed services. It all depends on the provider.

If you're familar with the software, and can install it yourself, of course, you're golden, but if you need support, that's where you either get a fully dedicated system with administration included, or folks like ServerGenius, and I come in.

Folks such as ServerGenius and I usually offer either a 'pay by the hour' or an 'on call' service where you retain our services for a flat rate for a given time.

Many of the 'fully managed' systems you can get will not give you root access, and you need to open a ticket for any changes, and hope that it's done within 72 hours or so. Being on this side of the fence, I can't rate any hosts in-house services beyond their network and customer service skills.

I am quite pleased with the support I've had working with folks such as ServerGenius, and WebAir.

BTW - this thread turned out lovely... at least for my knowledge.

Thanks folks. :)

I know what I'm going to throw down is pretty dumb, but i haven't had to deal with such questions .... but:

So there are hosts, out there, who will give you a box (or even a VM-ware one) that you can fuck with as much as you want, host a site on and purely rape (in the nicest sense of the term *shrug*) ?

Any one providing price points for that?

I have them through http://www.cyberwurx.com/

And Chris has always answered my really stupid blonde questions ASAP :)

I have had the pleasure to work with both ServerGenius and GrouchyAdmin. Both are extremely skilled and knowledgeable in what they do, I recommend both to anyone who is looking for the best systems administrators in the business.

Jim

I guess I gotta turn sigs back on and change my hosts file...

:) I dunno where anyone's coming from.

Yep. There are some who will give you a machine that you can kill, and when you're done, they'll re-image it back for you. Some offer this as a free service, but many do not.. especially if you're making them reload it every other week.

I can't say of specific price points, myself, but you generally get what you pay for. If you want a machine you can just beat the hell out of, and don't care about production, almost any of the cheaper dedicated services are good for a couple months. You can get a dedicated machine as cheap as $60, or a slightly better deal with a VPS. If you want something you can use for production, however, you want to go with one of the larger guys.

WebHostingTalk is a good place to find about the various hosts, any specials, gripes, and complaints. I would link to it, but I believe even talking about it is technically against the rules, as they're another forum.. however, I believe that mentioning them for this purpose is not considered to be an indiscretion.

Just a note on virtualhosting.....I never used virtualhosting myself and I'd
advice ANYONE to do the same unless it's hobby project not intended to make
you any money.

No matter how good your provider is the fact that a whole bunch of people
use the same server is reason enough not to risk any of your business with it.
The more options you get related to installing/running scripts etc, etc the riskier it gets in terms of things that can go wrong.

Poorly coded scripts eating server processes even if the provider is smart
enough to limit resources per user. Traffic usage and last but not least the
risk you run for a virtual server to get attacked coz some idiot pisses some
body off enough to get his sites DDoS'ed or what not.

Support wise virtualhost servers aren't usually on the top of a provider's
priority list which in case of problems may result in longer downtimes or
stuff that may be affected by virtualhost problems.

Of course you want to keep things cheap when you start up a new project
but you should ALWAYS realise that in order to start up something and make
it successfull you need the basic requirements to do so.....proper hosting is 1
of them. If the costs of decent hosting are an issue you should ask yourself
if you believe enough in your project to start it at all. You rather run new
projects on a dedicated server you already have than going for a vhost solution.

I see so many times that turnover of sites is limited by the hosting it runs on
you wouldn't even believe it. I'm not selling hosting myself so I'm not trying
to make money when I'm saying that hosting should be the last thing you
try to budget on.

You can have the best sites/product you can think off if your audience isn't
able to get to it at all or in a fast way no way in hell will you ever be able to
sell it.

You rather use different providers for different things you run.....put the
critical on top notch hosting and throw banners/galleries on cheaper hosts.

Tours/galleries and other marketing stuff is key to load FAST. Members
content should always be available and never down....it never should be
slow but speed is less an issue than with the stuff where people decide to
pay money for something or not.

Every project is different there's no such thing as saying for paysites I need
provider A and for galleries I need provider B. There's way too many variables
that determine what's best for your project. Most important variable is where
does your traffic come from (country, region, continent). The Best provider
in the US may be worse than a average provider based in the region where
your traffic comes from.

You should ALWAYS start questioning yourself and make a list of all the things
that are key to your project. Then start looking for companies/packages that
best fit to what you have on that list.

Names, Reputations, Speeds NEVER apply to EVERY project or situation.
This is the single reason why you should never just go by other peoples
advice or experiences unless they do exactly the same as you do and in
the same region.

Thanks Jim....It means a lot to me when people are happy enough with our
services to happily refers others to us. :thumbsup It's been a pleasure working
with you too:winkwink:

Hans - you have to do something about your compulsive 'return' key.. unless I fullscreen GFY, your replies look really strange. :1orglaugh

Another thing that you slightly touched on for VirtualHosting, but didn't explain, was that not only are you all sharing the same webserver on that machine, most sites are running as the same user.

So, if someone's running WordPress on domainA.com, and it gets hacked. If you're on the same server as domainA.com, there's a very good likelihood that the person who hacked that site will drop things on the server.

One of the most commonalities of that happening is the people finding that their blogs now have <iframe> exploits which installs spyware on the surfer's computer. When this happens, the webmaster has little recourse, as they're on a virtualserver, and as Hans noted, they rarely give a shit.

Even worse, if they do re-image the machine, and the webmaster for domainA.com puts their buggy install back, then it's just a matter of time until they get hacked again, which may start this whole process over.

Thank you for the kind words, Jim. It's always great to know when a client is pleased with your work! :thumbsup

Yes and no if you don't know anything you could be tricked when given
a virtual server instead of a real dedicated server but it's not rocket
science to know this when it happens. But yes if you don't know it's
possible.

That said if you know what you want from a host and ask questions before
signing just up and get decent answers to them I wouldn't worry too much
about that. You can tell by the answers to your questions if a provider is
knowledgable or not. If they're not this is where you spot it right away.

Any good provider would be more than happy to answer any question you
may have before you signup....really good ones will tell you even if they
can't provide some of the things you require as in the long run that will
benefit them more than selling you something they don't have.

It's better to get 1 client less for now and get his business later than having
unhappy clients....in the end unhappy clients cost a lot more than having a fe
less but happy clients.

Allthough not EVERY provider would agree with me on this :winkwink:

lol yeah I forget to hit return quite often and have that fuck up the layout
of my reply.....lol I hate wordwrap.

Yes I haven't touched security issues in regards to virtualhosting and what
you say is true.....buggy scripts, wrong file/directory permissions are an even
bigger risk on vhosting than dedicated. I'm not even gonna start on providers
properly securing their servers or the servers of their clients no whether it's
dedicated or virtual.

NEVER assume your servers are properly secured unless you've done it
yourself. Dedicated servers usually have an out of the box OS install on them
and you are responsible yourself for securing it. If you pay for fully managed
ALWAYS ASK what has been done and what hasn't. Ask if they setup a
firewall, ask for the rules they've added to it. Ask if they perform security
upgrades and how often. Ask what kind of monitoring they provide for your
server.

With anything goes ALWAYS ASK, NEVER ASSUME or you'll end up dissapointed
at some point :thumbsup

ok that's it for now, I'm off watching some tele, feel free to hit me up on ICQ
if you want to ask more detailed questions, I'll check back in this thread later.

With the risk of turning this thread further into a circlejerk: This cannot be stated enough.

Matt Cuff wouldn't agree with you and ARIN would ask you to justify if they knew :winkwink: But i'm pretty sure the assignations are not yours directly.

bump for evening crew

get real
 

Google doesn't block or penalize ip's they do domain names, so unless you are trying to cheat Google with a bunch of bogus circle trades there is no point to get a dedicated ip unless you need a ssl.

If you want to rank well like we do :winkwink: then find real link trades and keep working hard on it, end of story. And stop listening to people that don't have any top listed sites for substantial amount of time.

We have plenty of i.p.'s to last the next ten years, but I prefer to keep it real.

Dedicated IP's are needed for ssl and that's it.

The topic wasn't just about whether to use dedicated ips for sites or not nor
did it go about SE rankings/SE banning but yes I agree with most of your
points.

SPAM lists DO blacklist using ips instead of host/domain names for obvious
reasons.....content filters also do.....so finding out if the ips of your server
are on blacklists sure can't hurt.

There's a few more reasons you can think off why in some cases using a real
ip instead of namebased vhosting traffic filtering/shaping and firewalling being
2 of them :winkwink:

Yes we have plenty ips for the years to come but only because of the
existing restrictions and requirements regarding deployment. Most cases
you really should use shared ips if possible and only use real ips if shared
ips aren't a possible option.

:thumbsup

Plus Grouchy gives GREAT fucking reach arounds.... :winkwink:

Sorry, been gone to mom's 75th b'day. You of course are correct, I mis-stated. What I meant to say is that people are being told that they are being given dedicated IP's when they are not. Don't accept it as gospel.Well, I am not a programer, so I don't knolw if your assertion is accurate or not. All I know is that when I used domaintools reverse IP lookup tool and compared it with IP's that I do have knowledge of it seemed to pretty dead on target.

If you want to say it is coincidental, fine, but if I look at IP's that I know have 5 sites on it and it shows 5, then check others that show hundreds I am not in a position to dispute them.

I think this happens more that we would like to hope it does.

i highly doubt a serious host would put others on dedicated servers... how would the client not know this? with a dedicated server comes root access, etc etc so you can just see it if there are other accounts on your machine...

believe it or not, there are hosts that do not give root access. there is also VPS . . .

That statement is incorrect. Roll over to WHT or another large hosting community and nearly all "managed dedicated server providers" do not give root access on the machines. Reason being is that too many people screw up their machines when given root access. If your only paying $99/month for a "managed server" that pricing doesn't leave too much room for a system admin to spend the time fixing your broken server.

Most people who buy dedicated servers these days get Cpanel or DirectAdmin thrown onto a server and never use anything more than that. So I could see how some people would buy an unbelievable dedicated server deal for only $49.99/mo and never find out they just got a WHM/CPanel account on a shared virtual host box!

Jim

I see, my bad. But if we can go back. You said there is two reasons for a decicated i.p.: namebased vhosting traffic filtering/shaping and firewalling

Can you explain why a dedicated i.p. is better for this. Not trying to debate I have never heard of these reasons before?

You said something about black lists, if you mean mail blacklists then a dedicated i.p. wouldn't help either since they black list the host names ip not the websites ip.

Precisely why some hosts can afford to sell so cheaply. Hell, we give root to all of our dedicated customers and I bet less than 5% even know how to use it.

Just an FYI, we deal with large SEO companies, and the first thing they ask us for is a sampling of our C's so they no there will be no problems.

Email blacklists are irrelevant as it has nothing to do with SEO.

yes, my servers have dedicated IP's

You just have to pray that the 95% that have no clue what they are doing don't login to root and think they are a system admin :1orglaugh

Jim

Well, our servers are not managed unless they want to pay extra for it. So if they break it, they pay for it. Luckily, that is pretty minimal.

I have to correct myself.....iptables doesn't work with virtual interfaces
so what I was thinking doesn't work......my bad :error I'll think of another
reason then.......I'll get back on this :winkwink:


About the blacklist I never said anything about single ips or ips of websites
being blacklisted. I said it can't hurt to check the dbs of organisations that
maintain blacklists such spamcop/spamhaus in case the previous "owner" of
your ip addresses got your ips blacklisted. Quite often they block a whole
range instead of single ips. If you see any ip within your range is blacklisted
you should contact them and request removal.

Not every blacklist works by FQDN or hostnames many spamlists blacklist
by ip of the MTA caught spamming or as mentioned before a whole range of
ips from the provider that hosts the abusive host.

just for the record I didn't say there's 2 reasons why you should go for unique
ips instead of name based vhosting....I just gave 2 examples which turned out
weren't really good examples ;-)

How exactly does a dedicated server share an IP? Pleae tell.. :error

I know name based host would be the only way, and that would be one fucked up wacked out network.

read the entire thread

I would say that happens more often than just individual IP's . . . easier for them to blacklist a range then whitelist those that approach them.