Right on Mike, I couldn't agree more bro. You know I don't post very much anymore and typically Never about hosting as I try to keep my biz off the boards, but rest assure I read all the pertinent threads.


Milan, you are also right on que boss.:thumbsup

Not true...

In fact, most colo space allocation offers less bw then a " dedicated server " .

The logic behind that is a colo server will probably be a powerfull server, so more likely to use the allocated BW.

Most dedicated servers, mainly in the low end, use maybe 20% of the allocated bandwith.

Where I will agree with you is that a colo can be more interesting because much cheaper to upgrade ...

:2 cents:

No offense taken. With all due respect, having been in the business since 1995 as a profitable company that has continued to grow each year, IMHO we'd qualify as a "steady and long term hosting company." While some of our largest initial clients were government consultancies, in 1996 we signed up several large adult webmasters -- some being colocation customers and others being managed dedicated customers. We're well aware of how complex and demanding the industry is, and we do have the 24/7 support team that this industry requires.

If we were not confident in our ability to support this new business, we would not have posted here in the first place.

Thanks for your input, minusonebit. Our picture of the adult industry may be a bit off, as many of our LARGE adult customers are ones that colocate their own equipment with us. Admittedly, we do have more adult customers leasing dedicated machines, but the ones buying the most bandwidth (more than a gigabit) are primarily colo customers. Perhaps that's just a fluke, so I'll discuss the potential for modifying this promo with my management.

Great input -- thanks!

I'm chiming in late but anyway... I do agree that a new member who have just joined and first thing they do is offer an "unbeatable deal" are going to get flamed the fuck off. I sort of feel sorry for you, cause you just have no chance, but on the other hand i do understand my fellow webmasters. It is a tough industry and many people have been screwed in the ass trying to make it. Hence they are careful and will not get pushed around anymore. But that's just a side note. Maybe you should have taken a different approach, such as sign up, and participate in general talks until you get the feel of the board and get familiar with how it works around here. One you're past that point, then is the time to offer them something.

That being said - do you have any references to provide? I'm in the market for a start up dedicated solution, but just as every other adult webmaster, I'm gonna think twice before I entrust everything I have been working on past 5 years to the hands of someone.

I have one server on the sweetheart plan. The other 7 of them I own and have colocated at various datacenters.

If you don't buy shit (Dell) then stuff rarely "breaks". A web server is not like a car that gets out of alignment and needs a new tie rod every now and again. I build my own servers or in a couple of cases have bought Sun boxes. I use only top notch hardware and so I dont have shit failing all over. Dell and thier ilk make some of the worst servers ever so I can see why you'd be worried about buying one of them and shove it off somewhere that would require an airplane trip to go fix every time it shit itself.

Hard drives are somewhat of an exception to this, but even then most severs built today use shit drives. I use only enterprise class drives in my servers and sure, they cost alot more but they don't fail very often. And if they do, I don't care. RAID takes care of the data and next time I at the data center I swap failed drives out, replace them with new ones, rebuild the images and send the dead ones back under the five year warranty. All of my stuff has hotswap bays (Chenbro cases rock - most of mine, IIRC are built on the 3U RM31408 or the 1U RM11704B), so if I am not going to the DC for a long time I will send the DC new HDDs, tell them what to swap and pay for admin time and give them a label to send me the dead ones back in the box that the new ones came in.

And who the fuck ships severs? I'd never trust UPS, etc with something that important. You want something done right you do it yourself. When it comes time to move a server, I go rent a car or van or whatever and drive to the data center and do it myself. Its costs just about as much and I can write the whole thing off, making a few vacation stops on the way home. I don't move servers that often. Thats because I don't change hosts often and thats because I wont set shit up in a data center that I am not 110% satisfied with and have checked out before hand. For most of my hosts, the one in my sig excepted, I am one of the oldest customers they have.

Directfiesta, you're exactly right. There are pros and cons to each approach. Many of our larger bandwidth customers do in fact colo with us, but there are many valid reasons for choosing a dedicated or a managed dedicated server. It's all about your initial budget, support requirements, and your overall business goals.

You make good points, Rowan. There are advantages to leasing. I suppose it depends on how you approach things. I am a control freak and I don't like anyone else having root that I didn't specifically give it to. Maybe that has something to do with it.

My strong feelings about this started when I bought a fully managed dedicated many years ago off WHT from some little oddball Netherlands host and when they were sent in to fix a problem with the host tables getting buggered up everytime the box was restarted they decided format the HDD and put a new image of their generic install (instead of Slackware, like I wanted) and in the processed wiped out about 45 GB of shit I had just moved in there - all without asking me first. Soon thereafter I dumped all my dedicated servers except for two which I still have - one at OC3 (which actually replaced one at a datacenter that had one too many fires and floods for my liking) and another one at Wholesale Internet in Kansas City.

I would, however, argue that #6 is a result of people buying crap hardware. You do get what you pay for in most areas of life, sever hardware is no exception. If you use your host's hardware then its no big deal if something fails. If you build your own shit it is a big deal, but it can be minimized alot by using top notch hardware to start with and keeping spare stuff in stock.

And if my oddball RAID card fails, I am going to grab one off the shelf and FedEx Next Day Early AM a new one to them (or go do it myself, depending on what is going on) pay for the admin charge and let them deal with it. I use the same RAID card in all my boxes that I built and I have several spares here for just such an occurrence, or to build new servers with. Same with MOBOs, HDDs, power supplies (don't keep but one spare of those, since they are triple redundant, the chances of needing to swap one out in an emergency is not too likely) and such.

And your ego. :)

You're a fucking idiot. A certifiable fucking asshole and an idiot.

Hardware fails....PERIOD.
I don't give a fuck who makes it, who tested it, or if you paid 8 fucking million dollars for it....shit breaks, that's the way it is.

Maybe you like driving across the country with servers in the backseat while your sites are down...but the rest of us have real sites with real traffic....we're not buying TGP skim to send to blogs like a fucking retard...and we need our sites up 24/7/365.

So why don't you just STFU and let the grownups conduct business mmmmkay?

Join Date: Feb 2006



Things that make you go hmmmmmmmm

You think I got my first sever when I joined here? LOL

minusonebit
This message is hidden because minusonebit is on your ignore list.

Good riddance, asshole.

good deals... !!!

Thanks for the input. I understand why people who are not familiar with us would be wary. Don't feel sorry for us, though. We've been in this industry for longer than most or all of the hosts that have been mentioned here -- we were incorporated in 1995 and began hosting then. We may not be a very common name around the GFY scene, but we do have some large businesses that depend heavily on us.

In addition, despite the way this thread has gone, we've actually gotten several sales inquiries with regard to this promotion, so some of you must have some interest.

With regard to references, we'd be glad to provide them. Our existing clients are important to us, though, and we respect their privacy. Generally I'll ask a client each time I intend to give out their info as a reference, so that they are not bombarded. Rather than posting this information publicly, if you submit a sales ticket by e-mail Sales (at) inforelay (_dot_) com, we can get you a quote as well as some references.

Impressive, you've got transit from just about all the ghetto tier2 networks. I've not seen someone "collect them all" before.

Not all of those are tier 2 providers. And yes, we're proud of the number of providers that serve our network. The number of routes and networks to which we have access to gives us a performance and redundancy edge over companies that connect to just one or two tier 1 providers. Given our large list of providers, we're also able to cater to price-sensitive customers while maintaining excellent reliability.

do you have any boxes that are NOT physically housed in the US?

That's awesome ... Minusonebit who we all knows makes pennies on his own blog posts and writes blog posts literally for pennies for other people, now wants us to believe he has 8 servers scattered around the country.

Couldn't just be more lies now, could it?

We do, but pricing is generally higher since our economies of scale are not as large in the overseas locations (we don't have as much rack space and our bandwidth commitments are lower).

Yeah and according to him I'm an idiot for leasing my servers when I could be cool and own them like him.

That's why I put him on ignore....good riddance