When it comes to finding the perfect hosting company for your startup there are many things to consider. This is even more the case when you are a bootstrapped startup as cost plays an important part of who you ultimatly choose and not just quality alone. The hardest thing with making a decision is weighing out quality vs price and assuming you arnt the offspring of a (mi/bi)llionaire businessmen this becomes a major cause for stress...
Currently we are developing on a single 4xCPU 900mhz xeon box with 4 gigs of ram connected to a 20mb downstream and 1mb upstream internet link. Remote access to the team not on the servers LAN is provided through a VPN. For development this is fine but recently we started looking what what we would use for our production boxes.
Yesterday Marko and i reviewed the different vendors we had spoken to over the week and we shortlisted a few vendors to look at. There was Hostingshop, rackspace, peer1 and theplanet. Hosting shop and theplanet looked pretty good but ultimatley after much discussion it came to either (peer1 - serverbeach) or rackspace.
I called rackpsace first because they have the best reputation for service, reliability and scalibility. After my initial discussions with them and also through numerous exchange of emails I agree. Their service seems to be top notch, however I noticed a few things. I was assigned a solutions designer who later gave me a call and after talking with him i found that this particular solutions designer was extremely pushy. Also comparing pure paper specs of server to server I noticed that rackspace prices are very expensive in comparision. I know that quality comes with a price but as a bootstrapped startup i think its difficult to overlook.
For example the rackspace Essential Server is $399 USD and included in the package is a Quad-core amd 1354, 2gb ddr ram, 1x250gb sata and 1TB bandwidth, ok the server is good and the service is fanatical but when you compare it to what you can get for $399 else where - server to server comparison its over priced.
The solutions designer at rackspace was also very pushy and used various different sales tactics to try to secure the sale. First he tried to downplay other vendors by stating that when they said dedicated they didnt really mean dedicated (i tried to ask him what he meant but all i got was 'it isnt really dedicated your not getting what you think') I really wanted to know what he meant because if a vendor says the server is a dedicated server then i assume all resources on that server are mine and if this wasnt the case i was interested to hear what he had to say.
Also everytime i mentioned whether they could provided a better deal because company XYZ can provide bigger disk, more bandwidth or more memory for a cheaper price he would always ask 'why do you need that', and provide a pitch on how we are just starting and that amount of memory/disk/cpu/bandwidth is not required. He would say if we ever needed this resource they could help us scale easily. Fine no problem with that but the question i keep finding myself asking was why is he saying this, i can get a bigger/faster machine now for a cheaper price why would i get a slower machine at a higher cost and scale to what i can get now for cheaper ? Just didnt make sense ... Then he told me that purchasing server services from XYZ company would mean i would get a server no more powerful then his macbook ?!? I mean fine maybe he has a great mac book but i just felt that comment somewhat distasteful.
To top it all off this call was at 2am in the morning Australian time. I was between yawns and i kept getting pushed and told of the excellent service that i would get if i was to signup now for the essential server. I think it was just this particular solution designer, all in all i just found the conversation somewhat uncomfortable. I had spoken to a solution designer prior to this when i made my first enquiries with rackspace and the experience was alot more comfortable.
After all the discussions and looking at the price as quite an important factor i decided to go with Peer1. They have a good reputation from what i have read and supporting some very big clients. This is not to say that i wont go to rackspace in future i just cant afford to go with rackspace right now so its going to be peer1 until revenue dictates otherwise. Is this the right decision ... time will tell ...
Anyway the server I will be purchasing this coming week from peer1 will be as follows:
- CPU: Dual processor Dual Core 2ghz
- Memory: 2GB
- Disk: 1TB Split into 2 sata 500GB disks
- Link: 100MB
- Bandwidth: 5000GB
- Backup: 10GB ftp backup on Peer1 servers
This all for $190 USD which totals about 3000 AUD a year paid upfront. Big different to the $399USD a month for the essential server thus making me pretty happy !
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