I'm in the process of upgrading from a shared hosting site to a dedicated server. I still havent chosen a host. Im in absolute shock at the pricing structures being used by these operations. Consider an upgrade from 512mb to 1024mb memory. Add a setup charge plus 20-40 per month for a RAM stick that costs them about $80. Over three years, Id be paying over a thousand bucks for that RAM AND I'll still have an obsolete machine to trade in and start all over again.

Add a 2nd Hard Drive and the kids can forget about college. You get my point.


Question: I dont mind paying more up front from processing power. Are there hosts where the upgrades are front end loaded into the setup charge and NOT gauged into the monthly charges.

Insane, absolutely insane.

Alan

Unless you rent to own from ezzi.. you'll just have to pay those prices

You don't have to fall for this con.

Do a bit of googling and you will find some places who will do the right thing and just charge you upfront for an upgrade.

I didn't think I'd ever find a hoster who would do that as there seems to be a cartel going on. But I did find a UK site which was willing to charge upfront for upgrades.

Note that I tried negotiating with a few of them and whilst I could get the price down the majority insisted that all upgrades had to be paid monthly.

The more people who complain about this and tell the sales droid to sling their hooks then the sooner the industry will stop ripping us off.

I suggest you to view http://www.freewebs.com/web-hosting-.../dedicated.htm

Why?

Where's the deal for upfront "upgrade's". Yes, the monthly's look good but will you charge a one off for upping the ram and adding a second disk?

BTW,

That Xmas special you have on. Tell me, is that for last xmas or the next?

you're right. not much there. probably a commodore 64 inside an atx box (of course upgradable to amiga 500 on request).

i like the couple sites i saw with upfront, one time fees, but they come up short on some of the other must haves, like good tech support.

I have another issue on dedicated servers which is twisting my brain. I build my own home machines but can't translate the processing power of a p4 2.8 to a server getting hit with xyz page requests per minute, hour etc. also what overhead audio/video streaming has on performance.

I had a chat with a sales guy at one host. massive storage, bandwidth, p4 3.0 with 1 gig. Now I bring up streaming media, and he goes...well, you know, if you're using several RM streams the performance hit will too great. say what?

Alan

I don't know about streaming and the impact on performance. I would have thought that performance issues are with the bandwidth and the processor would have little to do with it (unless it's a 2.0Ghz Celeron). Certainly a lack of RAM would have no impact AFAIK.

I'm more into big databases and this is the problem I had when looking for dedicated. Basically I needed a good 2Gb of ram so that the databases would be cached (read only) and other software I had could utilise a 1Gb ramdrive.

What really cheesed me off was the attitude of hosters when trying to get a simple one off up front cost for going from 1Gb to 2Gb. I either had to pay an extortionate monthly or go for some 'dilithium package' which also gave me disk space I didn't need, and bandwidth I'd never use etc.

I think you need to find a hoster who specialises in streaming or even gaming as surely these would be optimized for bandwidth.

If you don't like their attitude, make sure you look elsewhere. There are a lot of good dedicated hosts out there, but a lot more of the bad ones.

If you aren't comfortable BEFORE they have your money...imagine after they have your money...

Hmm, I'll tell you another shocking story.

I moved to a new server about a month ago. The prices are brilliant - half of what I was paying with XYZ hosters and a newer, faster spec to.

Yesterday I put in a request with XYZ to cancel the old server and they replied with:

"We don't want to lose you, we'll match any price and knock an extra 5% off".

Really

I said I doubt you'll match 789 hosters price and I proceded to show them the price I am paying for the new server.

They came back and did offer a price 5% cheaper than the new hosters!

That was rubbing salt in the wound. For the past year I have been paying £185+vat and now they will give me a newer, faster server and charge only £95 a month for it.

I feel dissapointed with this. Betrayed even.

If only they had said this two months ago when I asked them for a simple upgrade from 1Gb to 2Gb. The sales droid insisted it would be £25 a month for it and I hinted that I would be looking elsewhere.

I had exactly the same response when I moved from ZZZ hoster 4 years ago. Why is it that they only make you an offer you can't refuse after you have already moved your data and customers to a new hoster?

Is it just another cynical ploy to make them feel good, and us punters bad for moving? Are they bluffing? What if I said, yes, I'll take the super spec server for £95 a month thank you very much.

This reminds me of dealing with my first Net credit card processor back in 1998. They were all so sleazy back then because 90% of the Net businesses were adult sites. I held my nose and got the best deal I could get. Nowadays my corner bank handles my Net credit cards, without an issue.

But I dont have another 5 years to move my site, It pays the bills and its outgrown shared hosting. Unfortunately finding a reasonably priced dedicated solution from a company I know will be around as long as my web site is a tough tough job. Certainly tougher than I expected after 20+ hours of research.

My next move will be to buy a server cheapie from one of the better looking companies, maybe the 79/month Celeron root special, and put one of my inactive domains on it (I collect them, as Im sure many of you do). Then build a "fake" but public web site to measure speed, company uptime, tech support response and my dismal unix/perl/asp/php programming abilities.

If I were 20 years younger, I'd see this situation as Blockbuster-type opportunity when all the mom and pop video stores popped up. A Wal-Mart style category killer is needed desparately by webmasters worldwide.

Alan

The cheapest dedicated servers with good support is http://www.ev1servers.net/ I host my websites there and have no problems for over a year. All other "cheap hostings" take extra fees for every movement - $15 for reboot, $20 for trouble ticket, etc.

We host our server in ev1servers data center too, they are extremly good in what they are doing, all operators are nice, fast answers etc..