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Hello all!

I would like a little advice and information. My current web host has become very unreliable lately. Constant outages. Sluggish speeds. Extremely poor customer service. My site was down Friday & Saturday because of a server board failure. I know hardware failure is not anyone's fault, but waiting until Sunday to respond to my emails to tell me what happened is inexcusable. I was in the dark with a dead site for 2 days.

Ok, so anyways I've decided to go ahead and get a dedicated server and I'm full of questions. I have some good donations lined up to cover the setup fee and the 1st month. Hopefully, I should be able to sell enough hosting along with donations to pay the bill after that. There's lots of good deals out there on dedicated servers right now. I've seen everything from $29 to up in the thousands.

What kind of processor/memory/bandwidth is needed to handle a small to medium size forum with ease and still handle a few dozen reseller accounts as well? I can see my forum having about 1000 members a year down the road. I want to plan this for future growth. Just how processor intensive is IPB? Does more ram help more or better cpu speed? How big of a difference does dual processors make?

I've always used cPanel and I'm very familiar with it. I like the Fantastico feature. What about Plesk, Webadmin & Ensim. Are they better? Which one is easiest to use for selling hosting?

Which dedicated server companies are the most reliable? If you're happy with your host, tell me about them.

I've narrowed things down to a few companies that have been around a long time. aplus.net, serverpronto and serverbeach seem have good offerings. Anyone use these companies? Any others that I should consider?

Minimum specs I'm currently considering: Pentium IV 2.0 or better or AMD 2000+ or better, 1 gig ram, 2x80 gig hard drives, cpanel w/ WHM, 1,000 gigs/mo premium bandwidth, free remote reboots. I'm looking at about $169/mo from serverbeach or I can go with a dual xeon 2.4 GHz from aplus for $30/mo more. Worth the difference? How many sites can I comfortably host on these configurations while of course retaining a very fast IPB site?

I'd appreciate any advice from those who have already travelled this path... TIA for your help!

gamecock

Well I have a 1.7GHZ Pentium 4 server with 512MB Ram, 60GB HD and 1TB of Bandwidth.

I have many domains, along 3 Forums and 1 web site and like 3 FTP accounts on the server.

2 of the forums are very quiet, 1 of them is a private board I setup for a friend and one of the others would be mine, which has no more than a dozen active people on at any 1 time. My main web site is integrated with my forums, and gets more hits than my forums. The 3rd forum is another forum of mine that I setup for others, it has over 1000 members and usually has a hundred or so people on at 1 time. The most people we had at 1-single time was about 600 members during E3 2004.

With that kind of "normal" activity my server is getting at the edge of crapping out. During the E3 days, it killed the server, we had to keep on rebooting it.

My server specs can barely handle the load for what I described and I am pretty much sure I would need something better such as a Dual Xeon to handle the requests. All my stuff runs on PHP/MySQL for the forums and the main site, so it's doing a lot per-user click.

I don't use more than 75GB of bandwidth a month for all sites and forums combined, even with my graphic-heavy forum and main site. And bandwidth was never an issue, it is always server performance.

So maybe this info could be of use to you.

Rent it from the same place as Invisionize

There server has to be good

And they have cpanel on it

Try it

http://invisionize.com/cpanel
or http://invisionize.com/whm

I use http://nrghost.com and they are very reliable and have a 24/7 support team, I have had to contact the team once and the support is very good. It is also a cpanel host.
Another host you could try is: http://voltagehosting.com/index.php?action=shared I haven't used them but they seem good and the owner is nice (He encrypted something for one of my mods...)

My personal recomendation is find some good cheap host and use them as selling hosting is just not worth all the effort, especially since you have to sell it at rock bottom prices for people to even buy it...
That or get a reseller plan somewhere before getting a dedicated server as to get a good server and host you would have to pay at least $100-200 a month.

whats your site about??

i am hosted by hckyblaze, and he recently double my memory

Thats quite expensive

I've seen one (i have it)

10gb space, 80gb bandwidth, unlimited everything else for $10 a month (reseller)

I use the basic dedicated server package at Hostgator.com.

I've been with them for nearly 4 years and started with a basic hosting package, moving through all their packages into reseller, and finally my own dedicated server. Their dedicated servers are -managed-, meaning you are not left to fend for yourself (example 1&1.com on plesk?). If something happens with the server, you call or email and they fix it. Make SURE whoever you choose uses a managed server system.

My server specs

2.4 Ghz Super Celeron - 174.00 US / mos
80 gig HD
1200 gig bandwidth / mos
Cpanel with Fantastico

Get AutoPilot installed on your WHM, it runs your hosting billing. It's fabulous and is free.

The customer support is par none. 24/7 via email, IM, or telephone. It's run by a few mid 20 something guys and they take their CS seriously. Response time is usually within the HOUR, not a day, not 3 days, not a week. Within the hour.

I'm not sure if the prices are comparable, but for me, customer service is ALL. Hostgator has it in spades.

My affiliate ID is Larke, if you want to give me credit for the referal

That looks OK Larke, I might get that if/when I get a server

I got mine at http://hostdime.com
It is very reliable and if you get less then a certain % of uptime you get money back.