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Need Fully Managed Dedicated Server
| Posted by sfling, 07-26-2007, 02:34 PM |
| Hi, I'd appreciate any recommendations for a fully managed dedicated server. I don't care what it prices, I just want all server related issues handled, including backups, upgrades, preventative security measures, restore and clean up after hacking, all of it. I only want to go into WHM to setup the accounts, nothing else. And I definitely not want to have to do anything that requires SSH and command line scripts.
Right now I have a dedicated server that really seems to be a VPS, semi-managed, and the backups I thought I had do not exist. Here are the specs:
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz
2G Ram
2x200GB SATA HDD SW RAID-1
1000GB of monthly transfer
I have 76 accounts on this server.
I've done a bit of searching and reading other threads and Fastservers.net seem to be highly recommended. Also Rackspace and Liquid Web. Any strong recommendations? I want the best, I do not want to have to change servers any more.
Thanks.
Sharon
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| Posted by Frimon86, 07-26-2007, 04:18 PM |
| Paying for a managed server flat out will cost you allot, because the company you are worth is going to charge you a little more than paying a 3rd party company to do it. Seeing as you've got cpanel/whm I highly recommend you choose http://www.PlatinumServerManagement.com to manage your cpanel server, they are all usa based techs, 24 / 7 and have been in business for over 7 years. Give them a try to manage your server!
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| Posted by dean1012, 07-26-2007, 05:49 PM |
| AxisHost!
They provide full management with all servers. $189 and up is the pricing. They offer full, proactive management no extra cost.
axishost.com
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| Posted by Apolo, 07-26-2007, 08:38 PM |
| Hi Sharon,
It seems you need proactive server management, and in that case, PlatinumServerManagement (mentioned above) would not be suitable.
I believe the providers you already mentioned are a best fit. If you just want to take care of WHM, then I recommend you to look for a proactive service, where they keep your server secure and up to date all the times, by themselves, better if they don't provide you with root access.
Regards,
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| Posted by UK-smith, 07-26-2007, 10:21 PM |
| Hi Sharon,
You would probably be best off with Axishost.com They have a wonderful review if you will do a search on them. I would say that is the best dedicated server hosting company i have seen in a long time.
Ticket replies within 30 minutes.
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| Posted by sfling, 07-27-2007, 12:31 AM |
| Ok, thanks for the replies so far, I'm checking them out. In the meantime, I just signed up with PlatinumServerManagement.com in hopes they can help me undo some hacker mischief (IFRAME code inserted into my all my index pages). Then I can take my time and find the right dedicated hosting provider. If anyone knows of any proactive services, please let me know. Thanks.
Sharon
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| Posted by old_expat, 07-27-2007, 03:58 AM |
| Hi Sharon,
Any details the PSM can give on how the iframe hack got on your server will help a lot of others. A number of PowerVPS VPS servers (including mine) was hit July 2.
Many people don't realize the hack is there.
FWIW, you will probably find it on Apache manual index.html pages as well.
Last edited by old_expat; 07-27-2007 at 04:02 AM.
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| Posted by Fixago, 07-27-2007, 04:33 AM |
| Forget PSM, the best support out there it Touch Support. Those guys are on top of the ball! Pro-active to backups to everything else you listed.
http://www.touchsupport.com/outsourc...rver-admin.php
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| Posted by frattay22, 07-27-2007, 06:20 AM |
| just out of curiousity, have you ever used them?
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| Posted by Frimon86, 07-27-2007, 06:45 AM |
| Curious to know as well..
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| Posted by Solidhost-John, 07-27-2007, 07:47 AM |
| Hi,
I would discourage you from choosing a server management company over a fully managed provider that offer Proactive support. I don't mean to be doubting the ability of the various management companies mentioned but there is only so much these companies can do when they themselves aren't the host.
Last edited by bear; 07-28-2007 at 05:17 PM.
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| Posted by Frimon86, 07-27-2007, 12:09 PM |
| Might be because you offer fully managed services yourself?
I honestly don't recommended it because when you buy a server that is "managed" it prices 10x more than their normal unmanaged server. For example $129.99 unmanaged server, managed $189.99. Pay for an unmanaged server $129.99 get Platinum Server Management pay $159.98 total. I dont know about you but saving moneys a good thing, espcially then its a run for your money!
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| Posted by sfling, 07-27-2007, 12:13 PM |
| Hi Solidhost-John,
That's why I'm looking for a fully managed dedicated server, as I stated in my original post. And I'm still looking. Any suggestions?
Sharon
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| Posted by dean1012, 07-27-2007, 12:14 PM |
| Management doesn't always cost more!
Once again, and for the last time in this thread, I will recommend AxisHost.com
AxisHost gives all servers full management. Their pricing starts at $189/month and you might even find a special offer on WHT.
You won't go wrong with AxisHost. Full proactive management +more for a low price. I love my service.
Do a search for reviews. You'll find numerous good reviews dating years back - including two of my reviews.
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| Posted by Solidhost-John, 07-27-2007, 12:16 PM |
| That is probably true. But what are your server management companies going to do if/when your server goes down? Oh I know some call the host and even you, to inform you, but then what? They have to wait for the host to fix what ever issue it was. At that point they are more or less useless to you. Then, depending on your host choice, you could have a long delay in getting your server back up.
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| Posted by Solidhost-John, 07-27-2007, 12:19 PM |
| I think there might be some rule about Companies recommending other Companies or people recommending Companies they have not had first hand experience with.
My initial post was merely to discourage you from getting an unmanaged server and then adding management from a third party, as some suggested.
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| Posted by hosteur, 07-27-2007, 12:59 PM |
| DedicatedPlace, JoneSolutions...
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| Posted by Frimon86, 07-27-2007, 02:47 PM |
| I figured that was true
You might be right about the reboot time but it all depends on your host and how long take to reboot it for you. Another thing is most providers will give you a remote reboot port so you can reboot the server yourself. My current server management company (Platinum Server Management) always sends me an email when my server is down and also contacts my data center to reboot. Keep note not all hosts own their own hardware and run things in a data center so this does not give smaller hosts an disadvantage, its just what features you got with your dedicated server. So ultimately, paying for an unmanaged server that comes with good features like remote reboots things like that, and then hiring a 3rd party server management company like http://www.PlatinumServerManagement.com will cost allot cheaper than paying for a "fully" managed server. To add, some hosts purchase unmanaged servers and make them fully managed, meaning if your server goes down they cant go into the DC and restart the server they have to contact the host in which they purchased from to have it rebooted. To sum everything up, I guess it depends on what features you get with your server so you don't have to rely on a host to reboot your server. So it all doesn't matter
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| Posted by Craig [CT], 07-27-2007, 03:04 PM |
| You don't care how much it prices!? I'll personally fully manage your server daily for $1999 per month - and I'll give you my cell phone number!
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| Posted by Apolo, 07-27-2007, 03:30 PM |
| Usually, a fully managed server comes with proactive updates/upgrades, which of course cost more. Also, usually fully managed server providers reply & resolve issues within 2-15 minutes, not within 1-24 hours... that means quality service and more-staff-per-servers ratio, which also cost more.
It's a matter of choice and target. Not every provider is suitable for every customer...
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| Posted by Linux Admin, 07-28-2007, 10:02 AM |
| Hello,
What i have seen so far on the forum is that Rochen has some good support and they also provide managed dedicated servers.
Also Acunett is a good server management company and i think you can also purchase a dedicated server from them and get it managed by them.
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| Posted by sfling, 07-28-2007, 01:08 PM |
| Thought I'd post an update on my quest to find managed dedicated hosting.
I've narrowed it down to LiquidWeb and Fastservers.net. They both seem to have a good reputation, although both have had some knocks against them if you search WHT. The biggest beef people had about Fastservers was the setup fee, which they no longer charge. I've seen reviews where people have reluctantly left Fastservers because they couldn't afford it anymore, but still praised them to the heavens. I found one bad review where it took over 24 hours to replace defective hardware, but their SLA has changed now to 2 hours or less.
Re. the IFRAME problem, I have PSM working on it, although they state that this sort of thing is outside their usual service. The more I read about it, the more I think it's attached to the server itself, somehow resident in memory. I manually changed the index pages for my main site and copied them over, refreshed and the IFRAME code STILL appears. Since my hosting provider can't seem to get rid of it, the only way I'm going to get rid of it is to leave. Which I'm doing. The fact that this happened to other customers in early July and we didn't get any warning is inexcusable, another reason I'm leaving. It has taught me to ask very detailed questions before signing up -- I spent an hour on the phone with the Fastservers rep and did not feel like he was in a rush to get off.
So it's still a mess, but heading in the right direction. At least my site is still getting some leads -- the warning only appears with particular browsers.
S
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| Posted by HE/LW-Sam, 07-28-2007, 01:39 PM |
| I can recommend servstra.com from past experience.
But yeah if you need quality 3rd party management, try jonesolutions.com, have heard good things about touchsupport.com as well. I have tried many of them including the one cheerleaders mentioned stay away unless you know issues of a server well.
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| Posted by ServerManagement, 07-28-2007, 04:59 PM |
| No Fixago has not used our service, we have no record of any name matching, and since he has not replied, I think it is safe to assume he has not used our service.
That is not in any way what we said. You are more than welcome to paste our exact ticket response here. Please be more precise in your posts to avoid giving people the wrong impression about us.
The iframe hack investigation and server hardening is definitely part of our service (which has already been done), and backup restoration is too (but you don't have any backups).
The only part that is outside of our service is the manual removal of the html code from an infinite amount of html pages on your server. But we still said we will be more than glad to help with this as a courtesy.
Since you do not have backups to restore, it is not any server management provider's responsibility to edit the html design of every web site on the server.
Unless someone already happens to have a custom programmed script to automatically remove html code from all the pages on the server, this is not the responsibility of any server management provider to manually edit the html design code of every web page on the server. I know this as a fact because we have many people come to us all the time from different managed server providers and different server support management providers in the same predicament, after their server is hacked, and without any backups, and say their current provider told them they can't do anything and that they should've had backups.
Last edited by ServerManagement; 07-28-2007 at 05:04 PM.
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| Posted by midwestwebsites, 07-28-2007, 05:13 PM |
| Quite honestly, I'd recommend that you buy your server from NetDepot.com and then get a management company like Acunett.com to manage it. We almost went with LiquidWeb, but the prices to do this was more expensive and I've seen several things on WHT where people have had issues with either the speed of LiquidWeb's support and a couple people complained about the speed of the servers with them too.
We use Netdepot / Acunett and are very happy with the results.
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| Posted by sfling, 07-28-2007, 05:38 PM |
| I was not being critical of PSM, just letting people know that fixing of the HTML is not part of the regular service. Looking back at my post, I see that's not what I wrote, but that is what I meant. PSM has stated they will help me with it as a courtesy, and I certainly appreciate that. They're doing the best they can in this "closing the barn door after the horses have escaped" situation.
I will continue to post updates, as I know many people are in the same boat as I am, and had IFRAME code injected into every index page on their site. Hopefully their backup setup worked better than mine did -- supposedly "it didn't have enough space to perform backups." even though during pre-sales I was told "We'll need to hold a bit of disk space back from the dedicated VPS for backups, but no issue there and no problem with setting it up to do a full and daily incrimentals then rotating them after a week."
My fault for believing what they said and not checking to make sure the backups were being created. So I've signed up with an external backup service that will use rsync to automatically back up files everyday.
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| Posted by old_expat, 07-28-2007, 11:53 PM |
| What you presented was a restricted scenario. If the person wants CPanel, what you suggest may be true, but what if they want DirectAdmin?
10X
In any case, PSM and at least one other server management company won't touch the server. And the ones that I found that will manage a DA server charge more .. from $40 to $50
So your ($130 + $30) then becomes $130 + $40-50 or $170-180
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| Posted by old_expat, 07-29-2007, 12:01 AM |
| I have a PERL script that is "supposed" to be capable of replacing the iframe code server wide. By the time I got the code, I had already downloaded/removed/reloaded.
I can't vouch for the script at all , but if anyone wants it, just PM me.
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| Posted by app11, 07-29-2007, 12:23 AM |
| This seems to be a really dirty thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpFxbsPFgjs
Removing could be difficult: http://buzz.typo3.org/teams/security...nded-to-typo3/
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| Posted by old_expat, 07-29-2007, 12:38 AM |
| NetDepot's servers don't seem to be any cheaper when comparing specs to LW's current special unless you pay a substantial 'buydown'.
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| Posted by sfling, 08-01-2007, 07:09 PM |
| Update:
Have signed on with fastservers.net and have PlatinumServerManagement migrating the accounts over. PSM has been awesome! Even though my account with Fastservers includes DEFCON2 support, I'm keeping PSM because they do lots of things that are not included in advanced support by Fastservers, such as migration of data from the old server and backup restores. After the dust settles, I'll decide whether to keep both or get rid of one, but after the hell I went through this past week, keeping them both sounds like the way to go!
Re. the IFRAME crap, my VPS provider was finally able to remove it after running the script 3 times over 3 days. Unfortunately by the 3rd day, Google had come by and now my site has a warning "this site may harm your computer". Wonderful.
There's a special place in hell waiting for hackers. I guess they don't think about the fact or care that their actions take food out of the mouths of children...
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| Posted by homer2, 08-03-2007, 05:26 AM |
| I would also recommend Rackspace if you have the budget for it. An added incentive in July was the announcement
that Rackspace was recognised by Microsoft as its 2007 Worldwide Hosting Service Provider of the Year.
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