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I am looking to dump GoDaddy, the company I was with for the last 5 years or so. Yesterday my dedicated server went down for at least 5 hours. I was not impressed with the support I received and at the end they informed me that my hard-drive is probably about to die and that I needed to move. They want me do do it on my own or charge me for their support, even though, as I pointed out to them, that they sold me a lemon and I am only half-year half through my lease term. Instead I am looking for a new provider, that will send less promotional emails and will provide a better support. My current needs are not that great but I do need a dedicated server.

Any suggestions?

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7 Answers

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First of all, don't dispair -- GoDaddy is famous among web developers for being one of the worst hosting services out there. It's not you, it's them.

I'm with others who said you'd likely be better off with a VPS (virtual private server).

I highly recommend Linode.com as a provider. Linode is extremely stable. Their pricing is reasonable, and their service outstanding. In addition to using the official support venue (their ticketing system), you have the option of hanging out in the company IRC channel and get answers from other users and help from Linode staff.

Note: I have no affiliation with Linode, I'm just a web developer and ecstatically happy Linode customer.

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I've also heard good things about linode. – jimg Nov 4 '10 at 17:12
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My suggestion - take a close look at the chatter on http://webhostingtalk.com and review the latest offers there. They have a specific forum for latest offers.

Given the phrase "my current needs are not that great" you may want to consider virtual private servers - a good unmanaged xen vps solution will bring you pretty far. review vps vs dedicated? for some insight.

I've used http://eapps.com (dedicated & vps), http://serveraxis.com (vps) & http://slicehost.com (vps) with good results.

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up vote 1 down vote

My 2c...

If the needs are not great at the moment and you would love to expand, I would choose a VPS instead of a Dedicated Server. The advantages of VPS's Dynamic allocation of CPU, memory, Disk generally outweigh the Dedicated Server approach..

I have used VPSNOC, and they seem to have one of the best Servers

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I need direct root access because I run a few scripts that convert audio and video. Is it possible with VPS? Also I have multiple sites, can I add any number of site to the same plan? Thanks – usabilitest Nov 4 '10 at 15:10
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@slatecaster A VPS is effectively a complete self-contained server. You can choose your own operating system and install whatever you want with full root access. The only difference between a VPS and dedicated hardware is that there is not a 1:1 mapping between "servers" and physical machines. The hosting company will run multiple VPS instances on single, high spec multi-processor machine. Your VPS gets a guaranteed chunk of memory, disk space and processor time. – Dan Dyer Nov 4 '10 at 15:27
Yes, root access is a standard feature of a VPS (only a few outliers don't offer it), and apache or most other web servers can easily be configured for multiple vhosts. – HedgeMage Nov 4 '10 at 15:38
IN some cases, a "managed" VPS (like eapps, for example) may put some restrictions in place (example: you can't change from apache to nginx since doing so would break the virtuozzo provisioning panels) – jimg Nov 4 '10 at 17:18
Which is not a virtual server ;) Virtuozzo containers are virtualized sandboxes, not virtual servers. – NetTecture Nov 4 '10 at 20:28
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I've been using since 6 months Hetzner and haven't had any problem so far.

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I switched to slicehost VPS, but you have to do all you administration and installation.

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Amazon Web Services is launching a free service that will be available to new customers starting November 1. The free service will give AWS customers a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for one year. It means that developers get a year to use Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer. AWS maintains that the free service allows new users to run anything they want in the cloud. That means the ability to launch new applications or test existing applications. So why not trying it out FREE for a year while you looking for alternatives?

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In the days of cloud-computing being all the rage, it makes little sense to stick with dedicated servers that are somewhere not in the scaling-out cloud... ability to have your (even single) server sit behind a load-balancer and a minute's notice scale out to multiple servers indefinitely, is priceless.

Depending on your platform check out Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, or a ton of other cloud-computing providers

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