Renting dedicated servers - which host?

[eldren]

A friend and myself are looking at renting a dedicated server, mostly for our own use, but also with the idea of reselling services, such as email and web hosting, to buffer costs.
We're looking at around $100 per month, with my friend aiming for tek.net's $99 offering, having had good service from them in the past.

I, on the other hand, am not so sure about tek.net (To be honest, their site looks a little amateurish), so what hosts would you suggest? My priorities are service, uptime, transfer, price, RAM, disk space, and CPU, in that order from highest to lowest.

[arthurleung]

Leaseweb if you can reach one of their special offers (insane bandwidth, excellent peering, and very cheap too)

[DR]

The issue is you get what you pay for - nothing less.

If you pay cheap prices don't complain when it goes wrong.

If your site goes down and you have to spend an hour on the phone to the USA its not cheap.

We have decided on a UK host for HEXUS for thetime being since we co-locate.

The issue is, a lot of the USA hosts appear cheap unitl you bolt on a million things and you end up paying more.

[MD]

I uses these guys, i have one of thier 3ghz boxes in New Jersey, got it at a steal, but still, for an extra $40 a month on tek.net's prices you get over 7 times the bandwidth and a much better system. You also get cPanel and Fantastico, and the support has been excellent on the whole.

http://beachcomber.net/Dedicated-Standard.shtml

Matt.

[Ramedge]

Originally Posted by David

We have decided on a UK host for HEXUS for thetime being since we co-locate.

co-locate?
does that mean your stored in to different places? or just local lol

[eldren]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

I forgot to mention that we would want complete control over what's initially installed on the server (We're aiming for Debian), and would then take it from there. So while Beachcomber's offering is very appealing, they're a little too hands-on for our purposes (Apart from being a hosting server, it'll serve as a testbed for whatever web developement my friend and I do, etc.)

Leaseweb, one the other hand, appear a little too limited in their offering.

David, fair enough, but we need a server and we can't afford to spend overly much on it. We would go the co-lo route, but for South Africa's options being absolutely dismal, due to poor peering, ludicrous bandwidth charges, and overall priceyness (For the same price as tek.net's offering, we could have a machine of ours hosted here, but with only 5GB transfer).

[DR]

Originally Posted by eldren

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

I forgot to mention that we would want complete control over what's initially installed on the server (We're aiming for Debian), and would then take it from there. So while Beachcomber's offering is very appealing, they're a little too hands-on for our purposes (Apart from being a hosting server, it'll serve as a testbed for whatever web developement my friend and I do, etc.)

Leaseweb, one the other hand, appear a little too limited in their offering.

David, fair enough, but we need a server and we can't afford to spend overly much on it. We would go the co-lo route, but for South Africa's options being absolutely dismal, due to poor peering, ludicrous bandwidth charges, and overall priceyness (For the same price as tek.net's offering, we could have a machine of ours hosted here, but with only 5GB transfer).

Didn't know you were in SA - my mistake

[DR]

Originally Posted by Ramedge

co-locate?
does that mean your stored in to different places? or just local lol

No we own the servers HEXUS lives on - and we pay someone to maintain them, the power and connectivity.

[Stoo]

I use http://www.bytemark.co.uk/index.html for one of the sites I help run, and they seem good so far

[Twigman]

Do you actually need a dedicated server? If you are working relatively small scale have you looked at VPS/VMs services etc?

[eldren]

I asked my friend, and he says he's fine with VMs. Basically he's open to anything, proper co-lo (Where we'd have to build and then ship over a server. I'm not so fond of that idea), dedicated server rental, or a VM server. The main criteria then is that we get full control over the machine, ie. root, no quibbling over what software gets installed on it, etc.

I also asked him why he's in favour of tek.net, and he says the company he's with has been dealing with tek.net for 4 or so years, and have thus far had excellent service from them (To quote him, "5 minute service"). But ya, more options would be appreciated.