When to go dedicated...

[electricfox]

I'm looking for some tips on growth here. I've been pretty happy with vortech, but now that I've reached 25 clients (with two real biggies), I'm beginning to have dreams of owning my own boxes. I'd love be able to control the destiny of my services, install my own components, not worry about script-kiddies, etc. In sum, my clients use only about 1.5GB and about 15GB bandwidth in a month.

Granted, I see the smiles now (25? you gotta be joking!) -- and I know these dreams are pre-mature, but I was wondering - at least some of you also own your own boxes in addition to using matrix - so when do you think it makes sense resource-wise to move to your own box? Financially it's more than matrix, but not that much more. Are there any affordable places where I can have my own box, yet have it monitored by a third-party in case of crashes?

And despite all it's problems, I do like h-sphere - is it possible to run h-sphere on one box?

Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

[Funnyhat]

Having your own box that you control gives you a lot more flexibility. I started out with one box over at (RS) and now I have three of them. It is a lot of work to keep up with patches and all, but for not much more than I am paying here for my 3,000mb of storage I have much more room and about 12x more transfer I could possibly use each month. The draw back is it is only one platform. Why I keep my account here at Matrix it is only because of two reasons. 1) Windows 2000 support and 2) The great customer service they provided with me over the last eight months. I am amazed at the people who complain about service here… Either they are new to web hosting or forget quickly how bad support is else ware.

All in all it is more work running your own box, but you have many more possibilities not to mention over selling disk space but who needs that with 70+ gigs of storage to use up .

Good luck

Mark

[Funnyhat]

Originally posted by electricfox
And despite all it's problems, I do like h-sphere - is it possible to run h-sphere on one box?
[/b]

As far as I know you can run h-sphere on a single machine, but you will pay $2.50 per account plus so much to get the box setup.

Most providers include some sort of control panel software... Ensim, Cpanel or Plesk are most common but there are others.

Sorry I would have said this in my first post but totaly spaced it out.

Mark

[jmbeach]

Originally posted by Funnyhat
As far as I know you can run h-sphere on a single machine, but you will pay $2.50 per account plus so much to get the box setup.

Most providers include some sort of control panel software... Ensim, Cpanel or Plesk are most common but there are others.

Sorry I would have said this in my first post but totaly spaced it out.

Mark

Psoft does talk about using only one machine - http://psoft.net/h_sphere2_info.html - but I think it's highly recommended to have at least 2 (3 if you also want windows). Seems like unless if you only have a small number of domains hosted, one server is really going to get a workout with all those services running simultaneously.

[Vixen]

Originally posted by jmbeach

Seems like unless if you only have a small number of domains hosted, one server is really going to get a workout with all those services running simultaneously.

Why do you think we are constantly adding machines.