Need advice on dedicated server

[staticanime]

Hi guys,

I w3as wondering if anyone could point me at a good, reliable and cheap dedicate server provider.

I do need a few things tho:
1) Large HDD ~ 750GB <-> 1TB
2) good fast ram/processer (64-bit too)
3) Unlimited/unmemtered bandwidth/network speed
4) Access to install my own linux OS from scratch (vKVM or something would be nice)

Any one have any good recomendations/links?

I'm with OVH (SuperPlan) at the minute, and it's ok, but their KVM only works with Windows

[till]

I can recommend Hetzner:

http://www.hetzner.de

[staticanime]

Sounds good, the only thing I don't like about it is the 72Gb bandwidth limit. I am kinda looking for unlimited, or possibly more. Although, it said that they sorta do ulimited, but at a 10MB/s link to the server instead of 100MB/s. Is that true?

[till]

Hetzner has no 72GB bandwidth limit on their root servers.

The servers are connected with 100Mbit and they switch the connection to 10Mbit if you have more then 1000GB traffic a month. The connection will be reset at the beginning of the next month to 100mbit.

[staticanime]

Cool, Thanks

[baldur2630]

OK, we run several servers, a Fedora 8 box, several Novell 6.5 Servers and a Novell / SuSE OES2 server. This is a home network, but we are a family of professional IT people MCNE's, MCSE's, CLE's etc

The best advice I can give you is build your own server from scratch. If you are in Europe, try BackOffice - they have good prices. If you are in the UK, try Scan (scan.co.uk) they also have good prices. We use Intel motherboards and dual-Core P4 Processors and for the Linux boxes we use 64-bit and 2GB RAM (more than enough) the NetWare boxes run all manner of stuff and they all have 4GB RAM. Be careful what RAM you buy for the Intel Boards. Check the specs on the Intel site.

We use 2 x 500GB Hard Drives in each box and eQuip 4-Port KVM switches.

We use (what used to be) Versatel - now KPN for an ISP and we have 4 static IP addresses and plenty of bandwidth we use Netgear Wireless Routers on the Linux Boxes and Border Manager on the NetWare boxes.

The ISP is quite expensive (around €200 Euros per month), but we do websites and a lot of remote support work.

If you "roll your own" servers it works out a cheap option and easy to replace anything that fails.

Fedora for a Server OS is OK but stability in the longer term is a problem, so is Centos, and OpenSuSE. Depends a lot on what you want to do with it. Make sure you setup a good firewall (the Netgear Routers stop some of the trolls out there). Move Port 22 SSH to a Port above 1000 and install Denyhosts and / or fail2ban. we used to get more than 2,000 attempts to hack our Linux boxes until we installed those.

[baldur2630]

There is now an even better solution - again, not sure where you live, but in Europe you can get an HP ML110 G5 Server for around €550. It comes standard with 512MB RAM and a 160GB Hard Drive.

To this you can add 3 x 1TB SATA III Drives @ around €100 each and up to 8GB RAM @ around €100 per GB.

You can download VMWare ESX 3.5i FREE and if you look on the web, youi can get a 5-User Novell Open WorkGroup Small Business Suite for FREE which includes a Novell GroupWise Mailserver and Messaging.

I bought one of the above HP boxes and have already 8 Servers running on it quite happily!

[sjau]

Hetzner got a 72 GBit connection for their root servers.

[id10t]

I'm a very happy long time linode.com customer. Their "small" machines do what I need - not sure if they have something that would scale up to your requirements, esp. re: disk space.

www.linode.com

[sbovisjb1]

I suggest that you go with leaseweb. They are a little bit more expensive than most, but I have never had any problems with them and their product is better than most.