

Dedicated Server vs. own server, suggestions? - federicola

Ok, our company is growing in users <i>fast</i>!!!, we use a dedicated server service provided by a well known company, but their service sucks, their technical support is a joke, sometimes connection fails, the price is also excessive, upgrading memory on our rental server isn’t really an option, memory upgrade would nearly double our monthly fee. So, we’re looking at buying our own server, the initial up front cost would be high, but we will save some money in the long run.
What are your thoughts on rent vs. buy
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migrantgeek
Do not host yourself. Find a better provider.

With collocation you'll end up responsible for all of the hardware and still
be dependent on remote hands so service could still suck and likely get much
worse.

System Administration is hard and unless you have the $$ to pay one full time,
rent the HW.

Most hosting companies will suck if you don't have much business with them. I
worked for Rackspace years ago and bigger fish always get much more attention.

I do some consulting work now and find myself on calls with Hostway pretty
often and they seem to know their stuff. You might check them out.

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auganov
You have to look at your profit margins and costs to decide what's the right
choice. If you have very low margins and hosting constitutes a big chunk of
cost it's very reasonable to get your own servers. If that's not the case aim
for flexibility and comfort. AWS is very expensive. Many startups simply have
high margins and wasting time on optimizing hosting costs makes little sense.

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/) is a nice
board about hosting.

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incision
Are you sure it will save money in the long run? I feel like most of the
conversation along these lines that goes on is pretty shallow, performance to
dollars in a vacuum.

I'd say flip it around, think about what you're trying to achieve and do the
math on all the options to solve it. Pre-framing it as a dedicated rental
versus a self-managed purchased is unnecessarily narrow.

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dildonics
Have you guys seen Hetzner hosting? Their servers have ridiculous hardware for
very low monthly costs relative to other hosts, and the support usually gets
back to me within the hour.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-ex)

~~~
federicola
Thanks, but prefer service in the states.

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CyberFonic
I'm assuming you have the technical resources to manage your own hardware.

I've built a a lot co-lo solutions for clients. They end up being very
expensive if you use a "name brand" provider. You are paying for rack space,
power, A/C, security, bandwidth, etc, etc. And then anytime something breaks,
you need to send somebody in to fix it. If the provider supplies "hands" then
they charge heavily for that. Remote consoles are good, but not that good.

With so many providers out there, ranging from bare metal to VPS to PaaS - I
find that hybrid solutions work the best. Not putting all your eggs in one
basket, etc.

In my experience, the greater the lock-in the worse the service - of course
YMMV. I tend towards pay-by-month and stay flexible. Whilst AWS is expensive
if used continuously, I find it good for handling spikes. But you do need to
architect you solution to move the workload around and that can end up being
more bother than its worth.

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iloveshw
If you're thinking about hosting yourself it doesn't make any sense. If you
think about collocation then it's better but in your calculations include the
fact that hardware breaks and with dedicated servers you get it fixed for
free, when you buy the server yourself you have to buy anything that breaks
and replace it. Almost always it means more of your time spent in dealing with
it, more time of your users with lower quality/no service and it adds to the
cost. Of course it's an option but you have to keep those things in mind. And
before you do it I would search for some other provider of those dedicated
solutions (or vps) before making that step

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federicola
Thanks for the answer, yes we are thinking in Collocation, we offer different
kind of services, will start moving the lightest service first, just to see if
we can handle the situation and learn from our own experience.

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hashtree
I'd colocate if you have a proven/reliable revenue stream, predictable growth,
you anticipate more than 6-RUs worth of servers, or need very high speced
servers (e.g. 192GB of RAM in one box). You can build entire servers for the
cost of one month of PaaS/SaaS in many situations. There is a whole strategy
that addresses every single issue that has been brought up (e.g. hardware
failing, sys admin, being on call).

Feel free to connect. I can speak to how I do it with about ~1.25 racks worth
of servers for my company for ~5 years now. I've also done it for MUCH larger
international companies. No, I am not trying to sell you something :)

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ScottWhigham
Upgrading memory on dedicated servers is and always has been crazy expensive.
It's absurdly expensive - we had a 4gb Dell server at <big company /> and, if
I wanted to double that to 8GB, it was going to be another $50 per month for
two years. I could've bought the memory outright for $120. It's around that
time that you need to re-evaluate which server you have and whether it's time
to change servers completely.

~~~
federicola
Yes, we have exactly that problem, we will try a pilot project with own
server, for a specific service, and see if it works.

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true_religion
Don't host it yourself unless you're planning on using the same server for 2+
years. If not, then stick withe rentals and find a better provider. At the end
of every year, renegotiate your prices for a better deal if you want to keep
the same server, or bump up to the newer models.

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thenomad
+1 for "Don't host it yourself, find a better hosting provider".

There are lots of very, very good providers of servers out there. Sign up with
one of them.

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cmer
We've been with OVH for about 3 months and over all the experience has been
good. Prices are also very competitive. I'd look there if I were you.

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AznHisoka
What's the one thing you dislike the most about OVH, if you had to choose 1?

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cmer
They've had some internal network problems lately. It's been really annoying
but it's apparently fixed now.

The other thing is their billing system. We have ~30 servers with them and
have to pay for each one of them separately. It's such a pain. I noticed
something yesterday in the web console that I think solves this, but I'm not
sure.

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Theory5
I've always wanted my own server, but then I discovered Amazon's AWS. It's
much much cheaper, and you can scale pretty easily.

~~~
shiftpgdn
If you think AWS is cheaper than ANY bare metal hardware you are out of your
mind or simply just an amazon shill.

~~~
Theory5
I am sure if I went dollar to dollar, pound for pound, it may be more
expensive, but I don't have money for the bandwidth or infrastructure to
install at my house to do half the things I do with Amazon. If you have any
alternatives, please let me know.

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makerops
Hey,

Shoot me an email anthony@makeropspro.com I am developing a service
specifically for startups, that you may be interested in, I can probably help.

~~~
federicola
Hey your website is not finished, you have lots of LOREM IPSUM :)

~~~
makerops
haha..hence the developing! I really just want some feedback, to see if the
business model I have in mind is any good; Ill be happy to make some
recommendations in exchange, the OP doesn't have enough for me to help, and
would like to ask some more directed questions.

~~~
federicola
ok, again in your website, looks better, is your service free or subscription
based?

~~~
makerops
AS far as it pertains to your thread, Ill be happy to help out for free in
exchange for bouncing some questions about the biz model off you (ie, Id like
to know more about your company/current tech etc and start a dialog). But the
plan is to be a subscription based service, basically a completely managed,
hands off server environment for your team, that scales, for a flat rate + the
normal rackspace/AWS/cloud provider rates you pay directly to them.

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devb0x
change hosts, go with a company with history and longevity in mind.

