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Where Would You Outsource Your Datacenter?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-do-you-trust-to-get-it-right dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I want to outsource everything in our rackspace to reputable online providers. After wasting valuable time every day on mundane problems and upgrades, I'm convinced it's cheaper to pay monthly than maintain our hardware and staff time. So I ask you, Slashdot: who would you turn to for reliable and secure outsourcing of a VPN server, Exchange server, online backup, and webserver hosting?"

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Linkage. by Cave+Dweller · · Score: 4, Informative

    WebHostingTalk.com -- these forums, although owned/sponsored by EV1.net are proven to be full of quality advice and populated by people who usually know what they're doing and whom to order to rent the hardware/bandwidth/services from.

    Ask there if you want to get advice from a multitude of people who deal with those decision on a daily basis.

    (No, not affiliated w/WHT or EV1).

  2. Totality by infonography · · Score: 2, Informative

    If your in a larger scale organization IMHO you should take a look at Totality they do the heavy lifting on our servers running Solaris, Oracle, and Weblogic they do a rather fanatical job. We just put in tickets and they do upgrades and installs, do late at night recoveries, take tapes out of the backup server, etc. They have a nice blend of on-site and remote management. They fix stuff so I can sleep.

    --
    Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
  3. My advice by wikinerd · · Score: 2, Informative

    My advice is to continue managing your own hardware. Having my own rack hardware in my property and my own dedicated Internet fat pipes, while being able to modify and hack the systems in any way I want is my dream. True, I'm a nerd, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying changing some RAM or a SCSI hard disk occasionally. It may mean you may have more downtime and maybe even lose some money if your servers support your business, but money isn't everything in this world, there is happiness too, and I personally love to delve deep into hardware.

    But because I'm not a yuppie I do not own my own servers, dataroom, and fat pipe. Therefore, when I wanted to start my website, I had to buy the services of a webhosting firm.

    I chose WestHost (the link leads to my affiliate page for them, their website is www.westhost.com) which is based in Utah, USA. I have my website hosted there for a year and I really like their immediate support. When you send them an e-mail you can usually except an answer within hours. The services they offer are VPS and dedicated servers, all with ssh access of course, but I am not sure whether they do colocation. It's not a big firm, I think it's family-owned, but they have a beautiful professional datacenter (they have photos somewhere on their site) with P4-3GHz servers with Redhat-based OS (equiped with a nice control panel they have developed) and a very useful forum where existing customers and prospective new customers can discuss, so perhaps you can go there and ask us (the existing customers) about our experiences with them.

    Therefore if I was in your shoes, I would first reconsider and try to continue managing my own hardware, and if I could not, then I would ask WestHost whether they can help you.