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We lease some of our servers through The Planet (formerly EV1 Servers and before that Rackshack) -- I think The Planet is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the U.S. -- perhaps the largest in the world? I've been a client of theirs for about seven years and am very happy with the service I get. If you watch the sales, they often offer very ...

You already have the correct legal advice, now use it. Take the lease and cross out anything you don't like. Add in all the things that your lawyer says are missing. (Type up a page or more in Word). Set your own maximum fees for things he mentions but doesn't price out. Your rent should cover maintenance- so set that item to zero. Set your own ...

For 10+ years we owned the hardware and had to maintain it. Our systems became very large and complicated. In the end, the primary cost (and risk) wasn't the hardware, but the systems administrators to maintain it. I've since outsourced all hardware to so called "cloud providers" such as Rackspace, GoGrid, Amazon's AWS, etc. Smartest thing I ever did. While ...

I assume you are referring to the United States. There are a variety of laws and executive orders in the "fair housing" category (Wikipedia has a good list) which mostly cover protected classes. Although low-income is not a protected class, there is a risk that if the net effect of your change was to exclude members of protected classes, you might be risking ...

and welcome to this site. I'm sorry, but as a guy who knows a thing or two about the cloud, I don't really see any way to answer your question with the information given. Cloud hosting has some tradeoffs, there are limits on disk I/O, SQL DB server size, network latency and other things that make it less than ideal for some use cases. You didn't say what ...

Do you know already what the capacity you will need to run your business in terms of broadband and storage? If you are moving from one option to another and already have real data then it is one thing. However, if your advisors base their estimates on some case of scenario, then it is a totally different thing. 80K sounds like a major hardware purchase. Why ...

Number 2 sounds reasonable. Let him know you want the office. Also tell him this is a first lease for you and you'd appreciate his time to answer several questions about the terms of the lease. Obtaining liability insurance is standard for all leases. Many of the questioned items (like late fees) are there to protect landlords from the all-to-common ...

I think this should be discussed based on what the business requirements and risks are; not what the intrinsic differences between colo of own equipment / server lease / cloud computing are. Very shortly, the intrinsic differences between the 3 models as I see them: Colo benefits: Cheapest in the long run, allows for specialized hardware (SSDs, crypot ...

The biggest lesson I have learned in my career (as a serial entrepreneur!) is to trust my gut. It seems from your writing that you are concerned about this guy so be careful. Having said that it does not seem like there are many options. Ask to see copies of the last few quarterly bills so you can see how much they are. Ask who is responsible for ...

If you really want to have some ratios for housing cost ratios then perhaps you can use the ones followed by banks or for getting FHA mortgages. Those certainly are vetted insofar as legal issues. Being a landlord is not without risk. Cover yourself with strong leases, background checks and thorough screening.

For vehicles and travel, it comes down to mileage vs actual expenses. You can either deduct $0.50/mile (or whatever current rate is) traveled to/from qualified locations, or you deduct what your actually spend (gas, repair, lease, etc). You can simply run the numbers and decide how nice of a car you want to lease to see which is better for you from a ...

The pitfalls is that a lease usually costs more than owning a car. You could just purchase a car, and lease it directly to yourself. So rather than leasing a mercedes benz, buy it. Then lease it back to yourself for what the lease rate would be. Leases are nice and 100% of the payment is a write off, but the drawback is that you usually end up paying ...

Maybe if you use a hosted solution they won't let you burn incense around the servers to improve their Chi? 80K = Get a second opinion unless they want to put up half (and take a picture of the expression on their faces when you ask). Programmers love control and don't want to have to tell you "We can't do that." because of something out of their control. ...

I've been using Rackspace's Cloud (formerly Mosso) for the past 4 years. Originally we used the $100 a month server but found we needed full control of the server(adding Sphinx to the database server was one issue). The newer Cloud Servers product is absolutely awesome for development and testing as you can clone existing servers and scale their resources ...