Dedicated Server 101?

[Big Ben]

Hello,

Does anybody know of any good resources where I can learn the basics of dedicated hosting. I am in need of dedicated hosting but am a little overwhelmed by some of the technical jargon.

Thanks,

[imaginemn]

What type of dedicated server are you referring to? Windows? *nux? My first concern would be that if the documentation is too overwhelming maybe maintaining the server may be too much and you might want to consider hiring someone to help you along. At least for the first couple of months until you are familiar with it. There is a lot to maintaining your own server. Some Hosting Providers will assist you and offer all the documentation required to run and maintain your own server. Some even provide a dedicate resource to assist you. Are you already hosting this?

imaginemn

[fishfreek]

One of the first steps is knowing your needs.

Do you need a managed dedicated host provider or can you manage the server yourself. If you need a managed solution then you wont need to know as much about the day to day operations but if you go unmanaged then be sure your well versed in the OS on your server and what some of the day 2 day managment tasks there are.

Know what your need are as far as software and capacity. Do you need specific software to be running. If so what OS does this software run on. If you need to have .NET support then clearly you dont want to be looking at linux solutions for example. Are you looking at dedicated server because your website is resourse intensive? Do you need alot of bandwidth or disk space? etc.

[Big Ben]

Thanks for the feedback.

I only need more disk space. I need about 8GB of disk space for my site.

I am looking for a simple solution for my disk space needs and thought a dedicated server would be a good solution.

I know next to nothing about managing a server.

Maybe a VPS would be a better solution?

[imaginemn]

If all you need is more disk space then a managed dedicated server would be your best option unless you can convice your hosting provider to add more space. Without going into a lengthy discussion a VPS is just like a dedicated server with the exception that you are not on your own server. You can read an article on VPS here.

www.imaginemn.com/virtual-private-servers.asp

imaginemn

[fishfreek]

There are some hosts out there who would have no problem in having an account with a 10gig quota or something to that effect. A ded server would be over $100/month easy where as going on a shared server with just alot of disk space would be much less.

[Big Ben]

Thanks for the input!

[T0d]

If you end up getting a linux/cpanel based server checkout the site in my sig it's a free site for web hosts and people who host their own sites on a cpanel linux based server. And if you need help you can PM me and I will help you personally.

[UKZJ007]

Does anyone know what the price for a good server admin would be per month for example? - 24/7 maintainance or per hour?

[T0d]

24/7 Not sure but I can put you in contact with someone who knows what he's doing. PM me if you want.

If I had to guess I would say someone who monitors it all for you and takes care of it all in case of a problem would be 100-200 a month? Hourly I would estimate 40$/hr not sure just estimates.

[imaginemn]

Originally Posted by Zain Jaffer

Does anyone know what the price for a good server admin would be per month for example? - 24/7 maintainance or per hour?

You don't need to hire someone 24/7. What you need is some site monitoring. When the site is down you or an on-call person get's paged. At that time if you need someone at the server admin level at that time you call one in. Most of the times all you need is a reboot or to restart IIS or Apache. You shouldn't have to pay top dollar for something that could be minor.

If you are interested in a site monitoring service PM me. I can set you up with a low cost monitoring service that will check your site 24/7 with email and/or cell phone paging when a site fails and is back up and running. I can also provide reports on downtime.

Most site monitoring services will charge per URL. We do them in blocks of 10.

$40/mo (up to 10 websites - 60 minute intervals)
$50/mo (up to 10 websites - 30 minute intervals)
$60/mo (up to 10 websites - 15 minute intervals)
$70/mo (up to 10 websites - 5 minute intervals)

We can also detect if your database and com objects are up and running in those intervals with no additional cost.

imaginemn

[T0d]

Since the guy I know only does it for friends right now he uses a 2 min interval and i`m sure the price will be a LOT cheaper than $70 a month for monitoring. Just PM me if you are interested.

[imaginemn]

Originally Posted by ToddW

Since the guy I know only does it for friends right now he uses a 2 min interval and i`m sure the price will be a LOT cheaper than $70 a month for monitoring. Just PM me if you are interested.

That may be true. But when you consider a staff of 30 people 24/7 monitoring, online reports and site monitoring by multiple servers in UK, LA, MN and FL. You don't have to worry if a 1 person shop is sick or on vacation. Even worse, no longer wanting to do it. There are MANY monitoring services out there that will also do it for FREE if that is what you need. I personally wouldn't trust my business to a free service or a 1 person shop unless I knew them personally.

BTW, ToddW all our plans will also allow you to setup up faster intervals during peak times or specific business hours. It's the off peak times that it will revert back to the pricing plan intervals. The main reason you would want longer intervals is to save bandwidth and extra hits on your servers especially if you choose to check COM objects and database monitoring. We also do verified alerts which means we get paged if your site is down. We manually verify to see if the site is really down before we page or call you. The last thing you need is a false automated page. We also have a "hacker" check to alert you if unathorized changes are made to your homepage or url.

Well, this is turning into a sales pitch so I'll stop. Zain, what I recommend is for you to get several quotes from different places and choose the one that fits your needs.

imaginemn

[T0d]

Originally Posted by imaginemn

That may be true. But when you consider a staff of 30 people 24/7 monitoring, online reports and site monitoring by multiple servers in UK, LA, MN and FL. You don't have to worry if a 1 person shop is sick or on vacation. Even worse, no longer wanting to do it. There are MANY monitoring services out there that will also do it for FREE if that is what you need. I personally wouldn't trust my business to a free service or a 1 person shop unless I knew them personally.

BTW, ToddW all our plans will also allow you to setup up faster intervals during peak times or specific business hours. It's the off peak times that it will revert back to the pricing plan intervals. The main reason you would want longer intervals is to save bandwidth and extra hits on your servers especially if you choose to check COM objects and database monitoring. We also do verified alerts which means we get paged if your site is down. We manually verify to see if the site is really down before we page or call you. The last thing you need is a false automated page. We also have a "hacker" check to alert you if unathorized changes are made to your homepage or url.

Well, this is turning into a sales pitch so I'll stop. Zain, what I recommend is for you to get several quotes from different places and choose the one that fits your needs.

imaginemn

Can't argue with a larger staff I was just trying to refer him to someone I`ve hosted with the past ~5 years, and he's getting out of the hosting day-to-day and is moving to server admin, and monitoring so he is sort of what he is looking for. A monitor and server admin in one lol Anyway it sounds like you have a great service.