Fasthosts DS250 Hosting - Any Good?

[stevietee]

Tweet

Ive outgrown my current reseller hosting package and am looking to upgrade. Does anyone have any experience of the DS250 package with Fasthosts:

https://admin.fasthosts.co.uk/DedicatedServers/Add

Its decently priced, but not sure if the server has enough grunt.

[trevHCS]

Depends how many web sites you want to run off it and whether they're straight HTML or run databases, PHP, Perl or similar. It should be able to serve up just HTML files to a lot of users at the same time, so unless you've got stupid amounts of traffic it's probably fine.

IF you're doing databases and say have 100,000 uniques a month running through the sites then I'd look for something more powerful. What you've got there is kindof equiv to our test server (well technically my server) and it's ok for testing but not exactly quick (sometimes noticeably), and I wouldn't want to serve anything significant off it.

1GB Ram would be my min for a production server serving dynnamic content, 2Ghz+ CPU (not celeron) and probably as much hard drive space as you think you'll need multiplied by 3. Ideally I'd want a server with Cpanel on it as you should also get Web Host Manager (from Cpanel) which is a lot better than any custom system I've seen.

Also find out if this is a managed dedicated server as if it's not and you don't happen to be a linux expert you could find yourself with expensive hourly bills to fix even small problems. At that price i seriously doubt it will be. All servers will have little or not so little glitches and it's easier to have someone who knows what they doing advising or fixing it.

Thing to remember is that it's a right pain upgrading servers later and usually more expensive, so get summut that will significantly out-do what you currently want.

You might want to look at Virtual Dedicated Hosting as that usually is a good step up from std hosting, but you get a lot of the benefits, without having to fork out for the entire server.

Oh and can I add - for the love of all that is holy, don't use Fasthosts! Fast, yeah if the server works and they don't lose your passwords, and you can get tech support and they don't try billing you when you leave for several months...etc...etc. Do a quick Google lookup and you'll find they don't exactly have the best rep.

There are several on this forum who seem honest and get good reports (sure a few wlll be along soon ), or PM for the people we use.

Trev

[ep90]

Oh and can I add - for the love of all that is holy, don't use Fasthosts! Fast, yeah if the server works and they don't lose your passwords, and you can get tech support and they don't try billing you when you leave for several months...etc...etc. Do a quick Google lookup and you'll find they don't exactly have the best rep.

Trev

I'll second that - I lost of lot of revenue due to downtime when with Fasthosts (I had two dedicated servers) You need to remember you get what you pay for, stop looking at the price and start looking at the service level agreement and support response times.

You just need to work out how much money you'll loose when your server is down to realise how much you should be spending on your hosting.

[suedeapple]

I have a heart internet dedicated server - Not had any problems with it at all.

I did have a FH dedicated server at one point, didnt have any problems - I only moved away from them because their server specs were getting a bit old... hence why they are selling them off for cheap now.

In terms of maintenace, having a dedicated server is fairly straight forward, and shouldnt cause you any problems if set up correctly. I found the servers from FH/HI worked well out of the box, with good online documentation to get you going.

[j0n3s3y]

Ive had a 250 for the last year and it runs a number fo sites which have in total about 20K page views a month, holds up well and youve got full control over them. Ive never had any downtime on the server other than my own enforced downtime for reboots and software installs. Speeds are excellent and ping rates for sites are low.

However, the new server stocks are available which are better specced and im considering moving to one of these now.

The cheapest is a DS300

2.8GHz Dual Core Intel® processor
2GB RAM
500GB SATA hard disk drive