I researched the new web hoster extensively before making my decision to move the website to the new hoster. That is probably the most important step in the process to ensure that the hoster has excellent customer support, servers and connections to the Internet. Wiredtree was all that and more and I learned during the server transfer that their 15 minute reaction time to customer support requests was not just a figure that they picked out of thin air.

I had to deal with customer support in a few occasions especially during server migration to ensure that everything went underway smoothly. Wiredtree was always prompt to response with a solid solution that solved my requests. They also contacted me after three months to find out if everything was as I expected it to be. Support is therefor excellent, cannot be better in my opinion. But what about the server and hardware?

I ordered one server upgrade in that time; A backup server to store backups of all the websites and databases that were on the server regularly. The performance of the server itself is great and capable of running Ghacks and a few minor websites without problems. The load average, cpu, swap file, hard drive and memory utilization of the server were much lower than on the old server. More importantly than that is the fact that the server never crashed under the load so that I did not have to get up late at night after receiving a SMS that the server was down to fix the problem.

The Wiredtree server is not as cheap as it can get but it is still a cheaper priced server especially compared to other web hosting companies who charge double or even more of the amount that I’m paying for a comparable server. The excellent hardware and connections of the dedicated server in combination with top notch customer support make Wiredtree the hosting company that I recommend to all my friends and colleagues. It cannot get much better than that. We (that’s Everton from Connected Internet and I) are for example hosting Windows 7 News on another Wiredtree server and had no complaints (only praise) there with the hardware or customer support there as well.

I will do another review in 4 or 8 months to see if they are keeping their high standard. I currently have no reason to believe they do not.

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File Server is a simple http file server that can run on local computer systems. The program is a command line tool without graphical user interface. A user wanting to share files need to manually edit the FileServer.conf file with a text editor to add the right root directory and port for the file server.

The IP and port of the file server can then be shared with users who are allowed to access the file server. All that these users need to do is to point their web browser to the IP and port.

The software program will automatically display a html directory listing of all files and folders that are stored in that root directory. Files can be instantly launched by left-clicking them. Another option is to right-click the files to use actions that are presented in the context menu. This include actions to download the selected file.

Every get request is shown in the command line window. File Server is a tiny software program that uses less than 100 Kilobytes on the computer’s hard drive. It supports download resumes but lacks many features of similar products like password protection, IP filter or multiple file handling.

Users who simply want to share a folder on their local computer system with friends or colleagues without having to install and configure advanced software might want to take a closer look at the server software.

File Server is available from Softpedia. It requires the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable.

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AutoPutty is a portable software program for Windows that can manage servers for all four software clients that have been mentioned in this article. Manage in this regard means that system administrators and webmasters can add server information, that is hostname or IP, port, username, password and type (WinSCP SCP or SFTP, Putty, Remote Desktop or VNC) in the program to connect to the server more quickly.

The system administrator can access the options of Autoputty to define the paths to the various applications and other settings like commands that should be executed or private key files for authentication (where supported). It is furthermore possible to password protect the application itself so that only authorized users are able to manage the connections and servers.

Autoputty (via Techie Buzz) is a free download for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and uses less than one Megabyte of computer memory in minimized state. The biggest benefit of the program for system administrators is that it can manage servers for several applications which makes it a tad easier to maintain and connect to them.

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It does not take long before the SSH or SFTP server is up and running. All it takes is to start the server in the server management console and add at least one user account. User accounts require the usual set of information that include a username, home directory and a password. A public key can be added as well to provide public key authentication. The server administrator can define the user rights in the very same user creation dialog.

It is possible to enable command and shell access, sftp and forwarding separately from each other. The login requirements can also be configured. Users have basically three options to log into the server: password authentication, public key authentication or keyboard-interactive authentication. The server admin can make any or all of the selected methods a requirement.

The server management console contains several settings that are of importance. Administrators define the server-key file location and log path in there, session timeouts, the server port, ssh and sftp security settings like forcing a delay on new connections or blocking IPs after a number of failed connection attempts. The management console itself can be password protected and configured to a specific port and IP.

The free version of Silvershield SSH and SFTP Server should be just fine for smaller networks. Users who want more connections without having to pay for the SSH server can take a look at FreeSSHd A Free SSH Server For Windows or the Windows SSH Server WinSSHD.

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WinSCP comes with the tools to backup the session data. The setting is hidden in the preferences of the scp client.

Server administrators need to check the Advanced options box in the lower left corner of the application to reveal addition options that include backups. Preferences will appear in the list of options after enabling the checkbox.

Selecting preferences in that menu and a click on the appearing preferences button will open a new window with lots of new options. The Export button in the left corner can be used to save the session information as an .ini file.

The ini file needs to be transferred to the new computer system. The easiest way to use that ini file is to delete the existing winscp.ini file in the new installation and replace it with the old file. The old file needs to be named winscp.ini as well. It can be that the storage settings of the program need to be edited as well if the ini file is not recognized by WinSCP.

WinSCP supports storing data in the Windows Registry or in ini files. If the former is the default the ini file will not be loaded. The storage location can be edited in the storage options under Preferences.

WinSCP should then use the ini file and display all stored sessions properly in its interface.

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The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

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The server is not running after starting up the Windows SSH Server. It is up to the system administrator to start the server so that other users can connect to it.

Users with a Windows username and password are able to use SFTP and SCTP file transfers, access a command prompt via a terminal console and to route TCP connections through WinSSHD by default.

It is up to the administrator to modify the access rights or remove accounts from being able to access the system at all. The administrator can disable services provided by WinSSHD or restrict user access. Both methods can increase the system’s security and should be dealt with before starting the server for the first time.

A good start is the WinSSHD user guide which explains the core concepts of the SSH server and offers tips on how to configure and secure it properly. Interested users can download the WinSSHD SSH Server from the developer’s website

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That’s highly problematic and reduced the experience of many visitors that discovered the site for the first time. Ghacks will be up and running on the new server in less than eight hours if everything works out as planned. You will then be able to enjoy a better connection to the web server that will serve the website faster to your local computer system. It can take between 24-48 hours before all DNS servers have propagated the changes and are routing users to the new server and not the old one.

The worst case scenario is that something goes terribly wrong during migration which could mean a short, medium or long outage or even a transfer back to the old dedicated server for the time being until the problems have been sorted out.

There will be no more posts until the migration is completed. Comments that are posted today might not be taken over to the new website as well. If you want to contact me use the contact form on the top. Thanks for your patience and lets hope for the best!

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A lot of research should go into such a decision and that’s what I did. One tip that I would like to pass on is to take a look at the dedicated server forum over at Webhostingtalk. Web hosting companies post special offers in that forum that will give you benefits such as double bandwidth, server memory or discounts on the price.

My business partner and I moved our Windows 7 website recently from a hosting company in the UK to Wiredtree in the US using one of the discounts found in the forum to get a great managed server for a good price and absolute reliable and fast support.

I decided to do the same and order a managed server at Wiredtree. Here is what I got for the yearly price of $2315.8 (second year will be $199 less due to setup costs which would reduce the price of the server by $25 per month for its lifetime which means it pays of after eight months). I got a deal with double server memory, bandwidth and a discount of $70.

Intel Core i7
12GB DDR3
Primary Disk:250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache

Plan is to add another server with a faster hard drive (raid I suppose) that will run the database eventually. The server is currently setup by the Wiredtree support team who will also handle the migration of the website. It could mean some downtime in the next days but the website will definitely benefit from the new server with speed improvements.

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Many web hosting companies offer backup space and create backups regularly. Some on the other hand ask for additional payments or do not offer this backup service at all. It then is up to the webmaster or server administrator to ensure that the data gets backed up regularly so that it can be restored when needed.

One option that is becoming increasingly popular is to backup data and send it to an offsite storage space. Backup2Mail is such a script. It can initiate automatic MySQL database backups on Linux servers using cron jobs and transfer these backups to a Gmail account. The only restriction is that the size of the zipped database should not exceed the maximum attachment limit of Gmail which is currently 25 Megabytes.

The developer provides instructions on how to setup the MySQL database backup and Gmail transfer on his website. It basically means that the user needs to edit an index.php file to provide the script with the MySQL information and GMail data. The only thing left after this step is to create a cron job so that the script is executed regularly on the server. Backups will from then on be created automatically on the web server and send to the Gmail account.

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The security program is a portable application that can be started right after downloading it from the Technet servers. It will display a graphical user interface that will list all discovered DHCP servers. A click on the Detect Rogue Server button is required to initiate the scan of the computer network.

The Microsoft Rogue Detection Tool will then display all DHCP servers in the list that it considers rogue servers (It is not clear if it classifies all servers as rogue servers in the beginning). Information like the server IP, gateway address and offered client IP are displayed in the list. It is possible to check the valid DHCP server box to classify the server as a valid server which will make that information persistent.

The program can be configured to run once or at specified intervals. It is furthermore possible to select only specific interfaces. Currently only IPv4 interfaces are supported with plans to add IPv6 interfaces in the future.

Microsoft’s Rogue Detection Tool can be downloaded from the announcement page over at the DHCP Team blog.

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Every server has an IP address and using specialist websites, a list of domains which point to that IP address can be returned. Several websites do this, and many charge for the service.

If one types in a domain or IP address on myIPneighbors.com, the site lists other domains that point to that IP. It can be a little unreliable, though, no doubt due to the site’s heavy load.

I have already mentioned that this site does have practical uses. It’s interesting to see how packed your host’s server is, so you can see how good a deal you are getting, and what they are hosting. This could be useful as it’s something hosts rarely reveal but is very important to company’s reputations.

It could also make an interesting tool for doing investigations. Using it, you can see what projects companies are launching if they’re silly enough to put the domain on the same server.

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Opera Unite is modularized and comes with so called services that can be installed to extend the functionality. This may remind many users of Firefox add-ons but it is actually a completely different technology that requires more than just clicking on an install link. Currently seven services are offered, they are:

• Media Player – Accessing the music collection from anywhere on the Internet.
• File Sharing – A way of sharing files directly between users.
• Fridge – A note leaving application that other people can use to leave notes on a computer system.
• Web Server – Hosting a web server from the local computer system.
• Photo Sharing – Share photos without uploading them first.
• The Lounge – A chat interface hosted on a computer system.

The Opera team has created a user guide to get users started with Opera Unite. Opera Unite is available as a separate preview release which can be downloaded for all supported operating systems from the Opera Labs website. The download will actually replace the current version of Opera 10 if the user decides to install it in the same installation directory.

Opera Unite is then available in the left panel after installation. Starting the actual home server requires an Opera account. A homeaddress is assigned to every user signing up for Opera Unite in the from “http://computername.username.operaunite.com/” with the user selecting the computer name. The username will be the Opera username.

Once that has been setup the service that has been selected by the user gets setup. Setup of the file sharing module for example requires the selection of a directory on the local computer that will be used for that purpose. Each service that has been activated can then be accessed from the created homepage if the user accessing it has sufficient rights to do so.

The file sharing page on the server is for example protected by a password by default which can be changed in the root home directory. It offers three different access rights which make it possible to allow public access (everyone can access them), private access (only the root user can access the files) or password protected access.

Verdict:

Opera Unite offers something that web browsers do not offer out of the box. The usefulness of the service on the other hand depends largely on the user’s system configuration. If the user runs an home server then it might not be needed to run Opera Unite as well. Users who prefer to access everything from one program might find Opera Unite helpful especially if the developers and users begin to add new modules to the service. Not really a reinvention of the Internet but a nice service nevertheless.

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More recently, shared hosting has evolved into what is called “virtual dedicated hosting.” This treats every sector of the server as if it was an entire, standalone piece of hardware, so that if one site crashes, the others are unaffected.

For those sites that do need an entire server, dedicated hosting is available. This means that an entire server is devoted to one website and all its sub domains. If you are just starting out with your website, even if you plan to have e-commerce features, shared hosting, or virtual dedicated hosting will probably be your best bet, mainly because true dedicated hosting is more expensive. The average web site does just fine with 1 to 3 GB disk space, which is well within the capabilities of shared hosting setups.

The main reason a site might need more is because it offers downloading services of audio or video, or if a site regularly receives over 5,000 visitors per day. Those situations require plenty of disk space and bandwidth. Otherwise, a typical shared hosting package will almost certainly be sufficient and cost effective for you.

You need to know what type of server operating system will work with your site. Don’t panic. You don’t need to know how to program the servers. There are people who do that for you. What you need to know is what kinds of software you will be using, and if that software has to be run on Windows or on Linux, or if it will work on either. The operating system you use for your own personal computer has little to do with whether your site will require Linux or Windows hosting. All you have to be able to do is use your web publishing software.

Linux is widely considered to be the best operating system for web servers. It is reliable, efficient, and stable. If your website is hosted on a Linux system, it will likely have very high uptime, which is crucial for any e-commerce sites.

If you plan to use Microsoft proprietary software such as FrontPage, Windows Streaming Media, or MSSQL, then you will probably require a Windows based host. Most anything else will work with either Windows or Linux platforms. Unless you will be using features that require either Linux or Windows servers, you can most likely worry about other things, like making sure you find a good hosting service with the technical support you need.

Most hosting packages come with email addresses on your own domain in the format you@yourdomain.com. A “catch-all” email, such as mail@yourdomain.com, is a good thing to have, as are a generous number of other email accounts for your employees. Often, hosting providers throw in things like auto responders for when you’re out of pocket, and the ability to access your mail over the Internet, so that you or your employees can check it when they’re away from the office. These are fairly standard features these days, and with the web hosting industry as competitive as it is, you should have no trouble getting decent email service as part of your hosting package.

Uptime and downtime are two words you hope you don’t ever have to use when talking about your business website. Hosting providers have a number of contingency plans up their sleeves to eliminate downtime or at least keep it as brief as possible. They have the ability to distribute the traffic to your site over more than one server if it should reach a level where it’s overwhelming the hardware. If one piece of equipment has a problem, they can begin using a backup server almost immediately. The good web hosting providers can offer you at least 99.8% uptime, and you should accept no less. If they back that with a guarantee, so much the better.

You can check out what others are saying about a hosting company by simply typing the name of the company into a search engine. You sometimes find a treasure trove of information that you couldn’t get otherwise about the company. One word of caution, though: every hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have a few bad reviews. Sometimes it’s the fault of the company, and sometimes it’s the fault of the client for expecting something different from what was negotiated. The point is, don’t let one or two scathing rants cause you to cross a company off your list. What you should look for is a pattern of complaints over time. Also, if you see nothing but glowing reviews, perhaps you should be a little suspicious. No web hosting service is perfect, and less than scrupulous companies have been known to overload customer feedback sites with planted positive reviews. Most companies are more honest than that, however.

Of course, price is a major consideration. If you’re starting a new business, you definitely don’t want to waste money, either for substandard service or for fancy features you’ll never use. A rule of thumb is to weed out the hosting companies that are very high priced and the ones that are very low priced (or free), and work with the ones that don’t seem too extreme pricewise. Cheap or free hosting isn’t always a good choice for a business site (though they can work fine for personal or hobby sites), and expensive hosting doesn’t always mean you get the best of everything. It may just mean that you’re buying a lot of stuff you don’t need.

Finally, perhaps the most important consideration when choosing a web hosting company is their level of customer and technical support. You should expect real 24/7/365 support from a hosting company that has experience hosting e-commerce sites. This doesn’t mean that they have a voice mail tree that you have to navigate through before having any hope of talking to an actual person. It also doesn’t mean that messages are taken during non-business hours, but addressed during business hours. If you’re the owner of a business website, there are no such things as “business hours.”
The kind of support you should expect is from a real human who is either physically at the server farm or who can hook you up with someone who is. And it shouldn’t matter if you’re calling on a weekend or a holiday: somewhere on the planet, a person may be trying to get on your site and having difficulty, and that needs to be fixed no matter where they are and no matter what time it is. Downtime is money out of your pocket, and you need to work with your hosting provider to eliminate or nearly eliminate it.

Don’t be intimidated at the thought of choosing an Internet hosting provider. They all want your business, so you’re in a relative position of power. Just be aware of those that promise what sounds like too much (such as “unlimited” bandwidth), and steer clear of sites that have histories of poor service or support. That’s the great thing about the Internet: if enough people have trouble with any company, whether it’s a car rental company or an Internet hosting provider, they will talk and put the information out there, hopefully saving you some trouble, too.

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The system administrator starts by adding new servers that should be monitored to the application. Required information are a unique name, the server address and the monitoring type. Available monitoring types are TCP / IP, Ping or Services. Additional information might be required depending on the type selected. A TCP / IP monitoring for example requires a port that can be added in the same interface.

The events and notifications that can be configured are quite extensive. Events can be configured for positive and negative results. Positive results – meaning the remote server is up and running – are limited to playing a sound or running a command while negative results (server down) include the additional options to reboot the computer or start a service.

Three notification types are available. The administrator can be informed by email, message box or net message.

Specific parameters for every server can be configured in the Configuration View tab. It allows the user to change the monitoring interval, configure the connection timeout, set the mail server and enable the logging of events.

DreamSys Server Monitor can be used as a Internet or network monitoring software. It lacks some of the features of advanced monitoring applications that offer website or database monitoring but could be enough for administrators who do not need that functionality.

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FreeSSHd is a free SSH Server for the Windows operating system. Users can setup the SSH server on one computer system running the Windows operating system and use SSH compatible tools like Putty to connect to that remote computer system. The server can be setup with just a few mouse clicks. The administrator is only required to add users that are allowed to connect to the computer system in the SSH Server configuration.

Authorization can be NT authentication, passwords stored in SHA1 hashes or Public key driven. It is furthermore possible to allow shell, sftp and tunneling access individually. Having said that it should be obvious that FreeSSHd not only offers shell access to authorized users but also secure ftp and tunneling access.

Various options are available that define certain aspects of the SSH Server software. It is possible to add whitelist and blacklists of IP addresses that are allowed to connect to the server, enable event logging, set the secure FTP home path, select a specific allowed cipher, enable tunneling, telnet and check the access logs of the SSH server.

FreeSSHd is a comfortable SSH and SFTP server for the Windows operating system. Setup of the server should not pose to many difficulties even for inexperienced users. All in all a great software program that can be run manually or added to Windows services for extra comfort.

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Fing can be run with a single command from the command line or started in interactive mode which basically consists of a series of questions and simple answers provided by the user. The first question for example after starting the interactive mode is about the mode the software should run in. Options are discovery, scan or infos.

• Discovery: Will start the network discovery module. The user has to pick a network adapter and answer several additional questions. Fing will generate a network discovery report in the end.
• Scan: Provides the means to scan a remote host, will display ports, services and firewalls running on that server.
• Infos: Displays information about local and remote networks.

Fing offers a selection of output formats such as text, html or csv that can either be displayed directly in the console or saved in a file on the local computer system.

Verdict:

Fing is a fast network discovery tool for command line junkies. The export functionality and speed are excellent, a graphical user interface would be desirable nevertheless.

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IT Service View is probably the server monitoring software with the broadest range of monitoring possibilities. They range from monitoring websites to Linux and Windows Server 2003 / 2008 servers to Microsoft Exchange Servers to Oracle servers and log files. The server monitoring is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003. It will display a wizard after installation that is walking the user through the configuration of the program.

The less complex monitoring services take only a few seconds to setup. Setting up a website monitoring service in the software that monitored the Ghacks database did not take longer than a minute. It has to be noted that the script that checks the database is already installed on the Ghacks server, the implementation itself was straightforward.

Several parameters can be configured in the setup phase. It is for example possible to define a maximum response time, time out, expected http codes, error texts and text that the website has to contain.

The even responses are highly configurable as well. They are divided into the possible scenarios “no response”, “error”, “error text”, “text not found”, “time out” and “slow web page” when configuring the website monitoring service.

Each of these can launch a series of responses including sending emails, running local programs, shutting down or rebooting windows, managing a Windows service and launching a Windows process.

Some or all of these event responses are displayed whenever configuring a new monitoring service in the server monitoring software.

The monitoring software displays various statistics about each configured job including graphs, log entries and script outputs.

The server monitoring services can monitor key variables on the servers including free computer memory, cpu utilization, service and process statuses and free disk space. Some of the services require that a script is running on the server so that the information can be analyzed. A Linux server has to run the net-snmp suite for example for It Service View to receive the data.

IT Service View is a sophisticated server monitoring software for IT professionals and small businesses who want to monitor their websites and servers.

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A recent discussion over at the Donation Coder forum touched that subject. A user noticed that he was able to restore data from a dedicated server that was rented by someone else before. This can have some serious implications. Dedicated servers can hold all kinds of sensible data including user accounts, passwords, business databases, email addresses, personal information, photos, media and documents. Many of these can still be restored if the hard drives are not wiped correctly which obviously can be very problematic not only from a business point of view but also from a private view depending on the kind of data that has been stored on the hard drives of the dedicated server.

There are two possibilities to ensure that no third party will have access to the data stored on the server drives. Option A would be to purchase the hard drive from the web hosting company. Most will not have problems selling hard drives to their customers for a premium. This is actually a good option for most companies as it would mean that they will have physical access to the hard drive that has been in their dedicated server.

The second option is to wipe the hard drive of the dedicated server securely before the contract ends. The possible solutions are limited as the server has to be running to be able to remotely access it. One way to wipe a specific hard drive or partition of a dedicated server is to issue the following command:

shred -f -z -v -u /dev/sda

This will wipe /dev/sda, you might need to change that. The process will take some time obviously. The parameters mean the following:

• -f: force, changes permission levels to allow writing if necessary
• -z: zeroes, will overwrite the entire disk with zeroes in the end
• -v: verbose, display the progress
• -u: remove, truncates and remove file after overwriting

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• What you Really Need to Know about Choosing a Web Host (10)

The first step in finding a good dedicated server provider is to make a list. What exactly do you need? Do you want to run a Windows or Linux dedicated server? How much hard drive space and computer memory should the server have? What about the processor, how much bandwidth should be included, what networking interface should the server use? A few factors cannot be fully answered at this time but some can. If you plan to migrate a website you know the requirements of that website. You also know if it is a high traffic site or uses lots of system resources like computer memory, hard drive or processor at the old site.

Dedicated servers are usually a good choice if the current hosting situation, may it be a VPS or shared hosting account, limits the growth of the site or the user experience. Requirements like computer memory or cpu are harder to judge. High traffic sites benefit from lots of computer memory and a fast cpu but there is also chance for an overkill. Running a blog with 100 visitors a day does not justify a high end dedicated server with 16 Gigabytes of RAM and Intel Dual Harpertown processors. A very populated forum on the other hand would benefit highly from that setup.

The most important process in the selection of a dedicated server is the choice of the hosting provider. Quality and services differ widely and extensive research is suggested before making the selection. It is not enough to compare hardware and prices alone, other factors are of even bigger importance. What good is a dedicated server that is unreachable for most of the day because of overselling or poor infrastructure?

You can try and find an answer on so called hosting review websites but they usually are more interested in sending you to those dedicated server hosters that give them the biggest cut if you decide to order a server there. The best way to research potential dedicated server hosting companies is to search and post in webmaster forums. Not everything is golden and shiny in there and there have been cases that hosting companies have posted on such forums praising their own services but it usually results in a handful of dedicated server providers that are recommended.

Some webmaster forums where you can find such help and information are:

• Digitalpoint
• Web Hosting Talk
• Webmaster World

You can start by searching for general terms. These forums on the other hand can deliver great results for specific hosting companies as well. Once you got your list of suggested dedicated server providers you should perform a search on the Internet. Suggested search terms are “name of company” problems, “name of company” reviews and so on. This will give you more insight if the provider is as good as it should be.

Comparing Dedicated Servers

It is now time to compare the dedicated servers and services offered by the hosting providers that are still on the list. Prices range widely from about $100 to $600 and more depending on the setup and provider. Many providers do offer customization of the server hardware and software. It is possible to add additional computer memory, a better processor, increase free traffic limits or use a better connection to the Internet.

Ghacks for example has been running fine on a Debian 4 dedicated server with an AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core processor and 4 Gigabytes of computer memory. The hardware requirements do however largely depend on the site that has to be hosted there. One interesting option if you are unsure about the requirements would be to contact the hosting providers asking for their assistance. The email should include questions about:

• Suggestions on needed hardware
• If hardware upgrades are available after setup and the costs of those
• If special bargains are available. Bargains are usually servers that use slightly older hardware but it could also be new servers that they want to sell as soon as possible)

It is also a good idea to ask the same question in webmaster forums or other places with proficient users who can give you a good answer. Compare the results to get a better idea of what server you might need.

Many factors are important when comparing dedicated servers, some are:

• Raw hardware meaning cpu, ram, hard drive capacities
• Software that is included (e.g. Cpanel, firewalls)
• Services that are included (e.g. assistance in server migration)
• The connection speed of the server (usually 10 or 100 Mbit)
• The included traffic limit of the server (how many Gigabytes can be transferred without additional costs)
• Usage restrictions (which sites are not allowed)
• Contract period
• Server uptime
• Managed or not. Knowing Linux in and out is not the only skill needed to administrate a dedicated server but it is one of the most important ones. A managed server on the other hand usually comes with a web interface like Cpanel that takes lots of the burden away from the user.

Dedicated Server Providers

My research has revealed a few companies that get recommended more often than others, they are:

• The Planet
• Rackspace
• Hetzner (not managed but great prices, located in Germany)
• Wiredtree

Yes there are more out there but those four are definitely among the top. The most important step is research. You need to find a totally reliable dedicated server provider that is offering great network uptimes, hardware and services for a good price.

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