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Geek Culture / Webhosting opinion on a company

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Nicholas Thompson
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 10th Apr 2006 14:22
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Has anyone heard of or used:
http://www.flexservers.co.uk/

Specifically, this package..

I have a website I want to make and I want a setup where I can at least have some form of terminal access. Its gonna be a site with an image gallery of fairly high res images (more than 1 Megapixel).

Anyone have any thoughts?

My requirements:
1) A fair bit of bandwidth. At least 5Gb I would have though... Not sure though.
2) Hard disk space - probably 1Gb is enough...
3) Support - I dont want to contact support consisting of a moron in front of outlook express... I get enough of that from supanames.com and o2.co.uk...
4) Reliability - I dont want a server to keep breaking!
5) The majority of my visitors are likely to be in the UK - therefore, so should the server...

Cheers guys


http://forum.antiblog.com, http://thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/new/
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Jess T
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Location: Over There... Kablam!
Posted: 10th Apr 2006 15:13
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Quote: "I dont want to contact support consisting of a moron in front of outlook express... I get enough of that from supanames.com"


What do you expect with a name like that? Sounds like some massively 1337 person came up with that one


About your question... Never heard of 'em myself... But, have you checked out DreamHost?

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 10th Apr 2006 15:37 Edited at: 10th Apr 2006 15:37
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Dreamhost look pretty good value! Where are they hosted? UK or US? Do they allow SSH/terminal accesss?

EDIT: This site looks good too...
http://www.vpsland.com/xenplans.html


http://forum.antiblog.com, http://thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/new/
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Jess T
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Posted: 10th Apr 2006 15:48
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I couldn't say where DreamHost is...

However...
A reverse DNS lookup says their registration info is for "Huntington Park, CA" ( I assume that means California )...

Contact support and ask where their servers are, and if they have any in Europe

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Jeku
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 11th Apr 2006 00:48
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Yes, Dreamhost supports SSH access, but check it out for your package.

I'm on the cheapest package with unlimited domain hosting and gobloads of hard drive space and bandwidth, which BTW gets added to every single week.


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Nicholas Thompson
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Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 11th Apr 2006 09:09
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Dreamhost looks fantastic, my problem is that my connection to them is slow as hell. Not only is my ping to their main server 162ms (compared to the 20ms to my current ISP, Supanames), but I get 10% packet loss too. I dont know whether thats general loss due to nodes on the way out there or if its their server misplacing them, but 10% loss is pretty high!

Flexservers.com's site has an average ping of just 16ms for me along with 0% packet loss.

Jeku/Jess, could you ping flexservers.com and see what kind of ping you get please? I'm interested because its not good having a site thats quick for me and poor for everyone else. I'd rather it worked for everyone else and was a little slow for me! What kind of ping results do you get for dreamhost.com? Jeku - you use a Mac dont you? The mac's ping is Unix and give better results than the windows one which is only accurate to within 1ms compared to the unix 0.001ms


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Jeku
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Posted: 11th Apr 2006 19:13
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Quote: "Jeku/Jess, could you ping flexservers.com and see what kind of ping you get please? What kind of ping results do you get for dreamhost.com?"


Sure, no problem. And I don't use a Mac

Ping flexservers.com - Average 168ms
Ping dreamhost.com - Average 41ms

I can definitely tell there's a speed difference, but that's to be expected with a Europe vs. NA comparison.


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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 11th Apr 2006 23:34 Edited at: 12th Apr 2006 01:37
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do you get any packet loss?

EDIT:
http://a2b2.com/index.php

Could someone ping them? I get about 80ms.


They're also REALLY cheap and all reviews seem to be fantastic... Has anyone used them? I mean for £5 a month I get my own VPS (Virtual Private Server) + 3Gb space + 30Gb bandwidth + the option to install and run pretty much anything I want (bar P2P and IRC). I can do almost whatever I like.


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Saikoro
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Posted: 12th Apr 2006 08:25
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I get 158ms flexservers, 25ms dreamhost, and 108ms a2b2. I'm in California, United States.

Its going to be different depending on where you are, obviously. Good luck.

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"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"(One People, One Kingdom, One Leader)-Adolph Hitler.
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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 12th Apr 2006 11:31 Edited at: 12th Apr 2006 17:03
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Quote: "Woah, woah, woah! NEVER use dreamhost, they are HORRIBLE..."


Interesting - care to elaborate?

Quote: "I get 158ms flexservers, 25ms dreamhost, and 108ms a2b2"


Now THATS strange. Flexservers were quicker for me than a2b2. I think its good that, although a2b2 are not the quickest, they're consistent.

Thats strange - just pinged it from my works dev linux box...


Why does it keep getting a different domain on the reverse lookup?

EDIT: Ok - I went for a2b2.com... Their support time is fantastic! It was litterally two sips of coffe between email responses when I contacted them this morning. Even when I messaged them at midnight about it, one of the support team emailed back before I even woke up to tell me that the sales team would contact me when they get into work in the morning!


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Jeku
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Posted: 12th Apr 2006 21:23
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One of the only reasons I chose Dreamhost was the fact that they've been around since '97. I've seen too many "too-good-to-be-true" hosters come and go within months.


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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 13th Apr 2006 01:04
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Thats true... I agree - a new company is a risk (this one is not even 1 year old) however, I've also learned that an "aged" company is no garuntee.

I thought supanames was good. I was told by members of this forum that they were poor. I'm starting to see how poor they are. Things like:
1) I requested help with use of the shell_exec() command in PHP so I could create a remote backup script using tar. Their first step was to disable my FTP and cease contact. Then they inform me that the shell_exec() command and all related commands had been disabled for security reasons.
2) Response time is apalling. It seems to be around the 24 hour mark right now...
3) I'm not sure its that great-a-service for the price... Granted, its not BAD... But its not as great as when I first got it.

Still - I'll give reviews of a2b2 as I get them. So far they seem good. Friendly and quick support emails, VERY nice online payment system (you get your own members area/invoice thingy)...

Cheers for the help guys...

Does anyone else use a VPS?


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Richard Davey
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Location: On the Jupiter Probe
Posted: 13th Apr 2006 22:50
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Quote: "5) The majority of my visitors are likely to be in the UK - therefore, so should the server.."


Flexservers are based in the Netherlands.

a2b2 are a UK company but their servers based in New Jersery, USA.

For me Flexservers give the best response time, at 43ms.

a2b2 give 106ms (which is consistent with me being in the UK and them being in the US).

a2b2 haven't been around long enough for me to risk hosting anything serious with them, and I dislike their web site massively (but that isn't a reason not to use them). I have my personal high traffic sites on Pair.com and my development sites on Dreamhost, both of which I'm more than happy with. I've used Pair.com for a decade now!

Bite my shiny metal ass
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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 14th Apr 2006 00:31 Edited at: 14th Apr 2006 00:38
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Pair looks good... I'm currently playing with my new VPS server Its quite cool. To say it was a bare minimum install is an understatement! I have just manually had to install Yum and all its dependant files (and all of theirs too!). Now I'm waiting for it to install mysqld and php. Its nice to have it on a 100Mbit connection...

Oh, btw... In the time it took Supanames "support" team to reply to an email, a2b2 had answered 3 queries, sent me an invoice, accepted payment, set me up a VPS and I'd already logged in and assigned a domain to it!


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Torsten Sorensen
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Location: Seattle, WA
Posted: 15th Apr 2006 07:37
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Quote: "Jeku wrote:
One of the only reasons I chose Dreamhost was the fact that they've been around since '97. I've seen too many "too-good-to-be-true" hosters come and go within months."

Didn't you sign up through my referral not to long ago? I'll look it up.

Your signature has been erased by a mod because it's larger than 600x120...
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Jeku
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Posted: 15th Apr 2006 08:30
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Yes I did I have 12 domain names with websites that I needed hosting with, and Dreamhost is the only webhost I've found that allows me to have unlimited domain name hosting.


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