OK, it seems like we're having a bit of a "hosting issue" at the moment. Currently, our sites are hosted with two different companies. Flash-MX is hosted at a reliable ColdFusion hosting company and is completely unaffected (yay), but our other sites (mostly book or blog related) are on a reseller account on PHP based sites. Well, it seems that at some point over the weekend, this PHP hosting company had a hardware failure and had some downtime. "How much downtime", you ask? Well, at the time of writing this, we're sitting at 16 hrs, 13 mins, 4 secs (and climbing). What seems to be the problem? They don't really seem to know.
Needless to say we're going to be looking for a new hosting provider rather shortly. Since Flash-MX is the only site that absolutely requires ColdFusion the new servers don't have a strong need for ColdFusion (but it would be nice). One place that has been recommended to me by a good buddy of mine is Server Matrix. While it is more expensive than I'm paying now, it also offers exponentially more bandwidth, which would allow me to host videos or whatever else I may need down the road. The contract is also month-to-month, so that's nice since I typically hate longer-term contracts. Basically at Server Matrix I could get 1200 GB of bandwidth a month for only $109 US.
Super Server 2.4
- Intel Pentium 4 – 2.4Ghz
- 1024 MB Ram
- 80GB ATA 100 7200 RPM HDD
- 1,200 GB Bandwidth
- 99.9% SLA Guarantee
- RedHat Linux, Windows 2000, 2003
Anybody out there ever use these guys or hear any horror stories? If I could find a ColdFusion shop, that would be preferrable since it would allow me to move all my sites to one single account and pay less money. But I've had a really tough time of finding anybody who has reseller accounts and ColdFusion and doesn't charge and arm and a leg. But hey, somebody prove me wrong [please!].
Posted by peter on December 20, 2004 at 08:43 AM
Peter, ServerMatrix is pretty good. We don't use them directly. We are actually with ThePlanet (parent company of Server Matrix) and have been quite impressed with their level of service. We colocate our own servers (custom made our servers to be the most reliable in the industry) then use the rack space from ThePlanet to host them. If you're looking for colocated, they are #1 in my opinion. However, you need to consider the management side of running a web server + software upgrade costs...etc
On the other hand, we offer Windows reseller packages with Windows 2003 Ent., ColdFusion MX 6.1, SQL 2000, ASP .Net , Web Stats, Web Mail, control panel for you and your clients...etc
I could get you a reseller account where you'll host all your websites in one place. As far as reliability concerned, our servers run on Dual Xeons with 4 or more redundant hard drives all RAID-1 mirrored and backedup on daily bassis.
Reach me back and I'm sure I can help you out.
Posted by: Tamouh at December 20, 2004 10:43 AMI love, absolutely love rackspace.com. it is dedicated servers, and you could put cf on it and host all your sites from the same server, as well as add as many as you want. The price seems kind of high, but for 99.9999999% uptime (personally) and absolutly unmatched customer support it is well well worth it. especially if you host several sites on the box.
I also use 1and1.com for a dedicated box, which is very good bandwidth and space, for about 100 bucks i beleive. Customer support isnt as good, but its still a good deal.
Posted by: Ryan Guill at December 20, 2004 02:37 PMwell, it seems like the sites are back up, so the total downtime for all of our multitude of sites sits at a record of "29 hrs, 59 mins, 42 secs" for a monthly uptime of 93.787%.
Ouch.