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mohdowais
Sheikh of Yak Knowledge
1456 Posts |
 Posted - 2004-09-23 : 09:15:33
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| Hi everybody, I've been away lately with my head buried in hundreds of pages of documentation for our new project :) This is good excuse to come see some old friends at SQLTeam!We are looking at hosting our new solution with a decent hosting provider in the UK. This is a large ASP application, so we need dedicated hosting and support for ASP.NET/Windows 2003/SQL server 2000. We'll probably be starting with a couple of servers, and then scale out as we grow. Anybody here have any providers they can recommend (or advice to stay away from some, for that matter)?OS |
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Kristen
Test
22859 Posts |
Posted - 2004-09-23 : 10:42:41
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| FastHosts any good for this sort of thing?We have racks of gear co-located at Energis - I'm sure our lot would be happy to do a deal to put a couple of machines in our racks for you, but that is probably not what you are looking for.Kristen |
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mohdowais
Sheikh of Yak Knowledge
1456 Posts |
Posted - 2004-09-25 : 04:51:05
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Hey Kristen, thanks for the generous offer  I've evaluated a few hosting providers, but I just need to get some real feedback from somebody who's actually used them. What's your opinion of Energis?Our parent company runs a medium sized setup with Verio (NTT) and so far they've been quite happy with the service and support. I just want to evaluate them against a couple of others before we make a decision. Fasthosts seems reputable enough... thanks for the pointer, let me check them out.OS |
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Kristen
Test
22859 Posts |
Posted - 2004-09-25 : 06:31:36
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| We're happy with Energis. They are big, of course, so entry level working with them direct is not something that they are often that keen on - hence we sub-host [is that a word?!] for those of our clients who need dedicated machines. Their bandwidth is enormous, so its handy to be on a 100Mb backbone when some of our gear gets busy (never known them charge us for overbandwidth bursts).They also have some very fancy [ready highly-configurable] firewalls - e.g. we have some "other peoples" servers, also at Energis, which are configured to let through any traffic permitted for our main server [i.e. even if that configuration changes in the future].They are big, so they have some good experts available [escallation can take some effort, but that's not unreasonable - the best guys can't be answering the mickey-mouse questions].They do sensible research into Best Practices for roll out of SPs and machine base-configuration.Any change requires going through a change-procedure-process. That can be a pain, compared to knowing the site enginneers mobile phone numbers and just phoning them up and twisting their arm into making a change in a hurry!!, but the paperwork has the benefit of actually making us think through the problem properly (and in fairness when there has been a real "must do this now" they've worked around the paperwork). So thats a two-edged sword.All in all we're pretty happy.We also use Nildram (not sure if they haven't changed their name recently) - they are a sensible choice for next level down. More friendly style, as they are smaller. Happy with them too, but personally I would prefer my box to be at Energis for the greater peace of mind I think that gives me - in terms of being able to get a really thorny issue solved in a reasonable time If The Worst Ever Happened.I hear good things about FastHosts but have no experience of them. They have a right-sized package for most scenarios, and my view from here is that they have an appetite to do really well in the marketplace - which should be good for their customers!Kristen |
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Hosting provider in the UK