Suggestions for Dedicated Servers based in SA

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juro

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Hi,
I am thinking of moving my development server off-site and am looking for suggestions regarding the company to go with. I have checked Hetzner and their offer looks ok, although pretty much double the price for the same setup in Europe (and that is excluding traffic).

Any recommendations?
 
Does it have to be in S.A.? I'm using http://www.slicehost.com - I have a couple of slices with them to throw things around in. I'm pretty impressed with how they're handling load - by far the best of any virtual machine provider I've used. Their control panel is really slick, and every time I log in the choice of operating systems are increased. Right now they have CentOS 5.5, Debian 5 (Lenny), Fedora 12 and 13, Gentoo 10.1, Oracle EL JeOS r5 u3, Oracle EL Server r5 u4, RHEL 5.4, Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Arch 2010.05, all in 32 and 64bit flavours. Highly recommended.
 
I haven't used Web Africa for dedicated servers, but I don't think you can wrong with them even if you are paying a little extra. I know if something goes wrong they will be able to provide proper support and fast.
 
There's something warm and fuzzy about hosting locally where you can physically access your server/data even if it's only space you are renting. Overseas sometimes gives you that sinking feeling........
 
I had a look at WebAfrica's offers and they didn't strike me as competitive at all. I know that Hetzner's service is great, so that isn't really a selling point either (anyway, it very much depends on who you talk to - as long as it is relatively easy to get past the first level support ....).
This is - by the way - not about virtual machines, so Slicehost doesn't really feature (also, they are expensive).
I want to have the server in South Africa. Most of my clients sit here and when Seacom went down, I was getting a few "distressed" calls regarding "taking too long" and "not fast enough"... If this were not the case, I would get this http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4/
As to budget, probably under R1000/month preferably under R500/month but I guess that is another price to pay when living in South Africa.
 
Under R1000/month for dedicated hosting in SA? Good luck. First off, most hosting companies, including those overseas, at some point need to make the money they spent on the hardware back, in the case of new hardware. Most will want to make it back within 6-12 months, after which the next 1-2 years are more profit, that is if you stay with them. Some will then have a cycle in hardware, replacing them after 3 years, at which time some hardware will start giving more problems than it is worth keeping.

That is all without taking any bandwidth into consideration. You might get it cheaper if you try co-located hosting, which I know Vox/Datapro does, not sure if Hetzner still does co-located hosting. With co-located hosting the company only sponsor you the rackspace and network connectivity, in which case it is possible to give you cheaper hosting, you just need to buy and supply the hardware.

As for WebAfrica's offers, at least they give you a bit more bandwidth and really really nice hardware, same that Softlayer uses I think. 6gb memory, quad xeon ect.
 
juro said:
I had a look at WebAfrica's offers and they didn't strike me as competitive at all. I know that Hetzner's service is great, so that isn't really a selling point either (anyway, it very much depends on who you talk to - as long as it is relatively easy to get past the first level support ....).
This is - by the way - not about virtual machines, so Slicehost doesn't really feature (also, they are expensive).
I want to have the server in South Africa. Most of my clients sit here and when Seacom went down, I was getting a few "distressed" calls regarding "taking too long" and "not fast enough"... If this were not the case, I would get this http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4/
As to budget, probably under R1000/month preferably under R500/month but I guess that is another price to pay when living in South Africa.
Click to expand...

I have the same server, have it now for about 5 months no problem with Hetzner at all.
 
+1 to hetzner.de Had some experience with the eq4 recently, and their support is actually pretty darn good (getting email replies in 5-10 min on a sunday morning for support related queries). I'll be moving over to them sometime soon. WA support is great (instant chat especially), but the prices are just too high.

But ur concerned about international:/
 
shogun said:
But ur concerned about international:/
Click to expand...
Not really - normally I would have taken EQ4, but for my business purposes it just isn't really logical. The clients (and I) are sitting in South Africa and I don't want to lag around waiting for the connection to upload git repositories, etc just because Seacom is down or something.
 
In that case it is all about compromise, price vs being local or not. What about using co-located hosting with Vox then?
 
Tinuva said:
In that case it is all about compromise, price vs being local or not. What about using co-located hosting with Vox then?
Click to expand...

I run a bunch of applications on my inhouse server. Everything from GIT, to LAMP, Mysql, IMAP, etc - not sure whether that will work 100% on a virtual machine.
 
juro said:
I run a bunch of applications on my inhouse server. Everything from GIT, to LAMP, Mysql, IMAP, etc - not sure whether that will work 100% on a virtual machine.
Click to expand...

There's no reason why it wouldn't. The only thing you have to remember is that you're sharing a machine. If you have applications that constantly use 100% CPU, you need a dedicated box (several, actually). If you have an environment with sparate application/web and database severs, you may want to look at what your database needs are before you stick it on a VM. But then, most VMs have much better disc I/O than a real serve for even twice the money would.

And then there's the issue that most developers have a very dim understanding of configuring MySQL for performance anyway.
 
co-located hosting is not virtual hosting, it is where you go and buy your own hardware, and supply it to the co-located hosting datacenter to use, all they give you is rackspace for 1u or 2u or whatever and network connectivity. So all you need to do, is make sure the hardware you buy will be able to run all that and store the data you want to back up offsite.
 
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