I'm with you there. Support is really important -- if you've built up a certain level of trust with your host, you should stay with them. Many of our clients are still with us since 1995 and have stayed with us for just those reasons.

Global Crossing, Time Warner Telecom, Peer1, nLayer, Hurricane Electric, Cogent, PCCW/BtN, Layer42, Xeex, wvFiber, and some private peers.

Hurricane Electric is a big component of our standard network -- we have a few 10GE pipes to them and generally see very good performance. We have other providers as well, and the network is fully n+1 redundant and does not rely on any single provider in anyway. We can -- and have -- withstood provider outages that have lasted several hours with no impact to our uptime.

There are also advantages to leasing.

1) Quicker setup time. Shipping costs may also be an issue if you're located in a different area or country to the DC.

2) Tax is simpler because you're claiming it as a simple ongoing cost rather than fooling with depreciation schedules.

3) Cash flow. You don't need a large upfront payment to set up decent hardware.

4) Easier upgrade path. You can hop over to a new server in a year or two with significantly better hardware for the same price. (Sometimes less)

5) Easier to change hosts. If your server(s) is/are only at a single location, how do you switch without downtime? With leasing you commission a new one and can have them running concurrently for as long as you need.

6) Hardware failures. Because the host provides the hardware they are experienced with working on it, and may also have spare parts on hand. What happens when the oddball RAID card in your self-provided server fails on a friday evening?

Anyway, just some food for thought.

The vast majority of people in this business lease their equipment from their host.

I love how the guy who doesn't pay for his hosting tells the rest of us we should pay cash upfront for our servers and then pay to co-locate them somewhere.

I can rent a dual xeon for around $150 a month, and when something breaks my host uses their spare parts at their expense to fix it. If I decide to change hosts I don't have to have servers shipped around the country or worry about downtime, I simply have the data copied.
Or I can buy one from Dell for about 3K. It would take roughly 2 years of server rent to equal that 3K price, but by that time I'll most likely be upgrading to the next generation of server.

This is my whole point, you have no "street credit" here. Just because you're a paid advertiser and you've been around for however long, it's obvious that you don't understand the needs of the webmasters that post here so nobody is going to come running to host with you.

If a company like techiemedia, natnet, isprime, mojo, etc came on here and offered a similar deal they would get alot of business....but to us you're just another host, here today and gone next month. (I'm not saying you will be gone, but we've seen to many come and go over the years to leave who we're with for a "price match")

Also this part
is pretty offensive.

Why would I give a flying fuck if your management takes me seriously? You're the one who's here trying to get our money, we're not the ones begging for someone to sell us bandwidth.

You need to go back to sales school. :2 cents:

Thanks for your input with regard to being just another host here. My point is that if you were to spend some time researching, you'd find more information on our clients, our history, and our happy clients that have been with us for years.

I was not indicating that being a paid sponsor gives us more credibility, I was just indicating that it is our reason for posting to this forum -- GFY administrators asked us to do so.

I'm the offensive one here? Your constructive criticism is appreciated, but if you're so disinterested in our offer, no one is forcing you to read this thread or to respond.

This is why I said you need to go back to sales school.

You're here trying to sell something, and then telling your prospective customers to search for you on google to learn more about your company.

I may come off as an asshole sometimes but I've given you nothing but good advice here.

Good luck.

Not a slam of you or your management, but clearly they don't know much about adult if they assumed that. Most of the people here, even alot of the big guys, are still on leased, fully managed dedicated servers. People that should be on dedicated servers are still on shared hosting and buying VPS plans "reseller" accounts and crap like that.

To be honest with you, I have alot of respect for anyone that tries to make money in hosting and catering to an adult client base because any profit you earn you are gonna work your ass off for. Adult webmasters for the most part are extremely cheap and extremely short sighted when it comes to things like webhosting. They buy only the capacity they need today, rarely have things like warm standby boxes or distributed networks or databases that are replicated across multiple DCs and multiple boxes and often take the way out that offers the smallest up front investment.

I left shared hosting years ago. I think I had my first leased dedicated when I was 14 or so. I colo'd my first a few years later when I finally learned about the leased hardware game. It all started when I wanted another hard drive and they wanted $400 plus $20 a month for it and I said "Hey, wait a minute, I can buy one for $500, why don't I just buy it and send it to you, and you put it in?" and they said no and I started thinking about it. I started looking and said "Hey, I can build a 1U box for $6K with three times the specs of this thing and then I can pay $100 a month instead of $350 a month and then at the end of it all I can eBay the box and still get something for it, and the box will last me five years and while granted towards the end of those five years it will be underpowered and be relegated from production to shit like development box, mail server, file server, offsite backup server, etc, it will still be so much cheaper in the long run!" and while granted this was several years ago back when hardware cost much more (today you can build a kickass 1U for $3K) the general principle still applies.

The other thing is if you run on LAMP, you don't need to waste money on a "fully managed server" because there isn't much that can go wrong with a LAMP box. The biggest part of running and securing LAMP boxes is keeping stuff up to date and patched and I am sorry, but you don't need a fucking tech team to do it. You can teach yourself how to do it and if you spend a couple of hundred dollars on books from Amazon you can save yourself probably a few million dollars in admin fees over the course of a lifetime. Adult webmasters love to waste money on fully managed LAMP servers, too.

Part of this all goes back to the point that most adult webmasters mismanage the money that comes into their companies and spend quite alot buying drinks and whores at shows and not nearly enough keeping up with their business, because if they buy friends at the shows they are cool and they somehow think they are successful.

Everyone on here likes to cry "My host this" and "my host that", and so they switch hosts alot. The real problem is not their hosts, its the fact that they are trying to run a million dollar a year company off two shared hosting accounts and a couple of Plesk reseller accounts.

Your presence here may be a good thing for the industry. Maybe give people the kick in the ass they need to move into the real world and host their shit themselves and reliability as a whole would probably increase as a result of it.

I'm with you on that Mike... People that jump on this forum to dump their "specials" just to make a quick buck in the adult don?t really understand how much work and effort we (ALL the steady and long term hosting companies) are putting into to the support, network and customer service, it's not about selling the products it?s about servicing this COMPLEX and DEMANDING industry.

adultbandwidth a really personal note (and hopefully none offending one) if you don't have the support team that this industry requires, search elsewhere or they will easily flame you without even flinching...

Good luck though!

Smart answer :thumbsup

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