Ask HN: Managed bare-metal hosting recommendation | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Managed bare-metal hosting recommendation

10 pointskarterk11 comments

Looking for recommendations for bare-metal hosting providers in the USA. We're currently on the EC2, but the cost is becoming prohibitive and we're also not really using any of the benefits of cloud (elasticity etc.). We're not ready to buy/manage own hardware yet.

Who would you recommend?

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If you were UK I'd plug Bytemark - they provide bare-metal servers where they look after the hardware, you look after the OS/software (https://www.bytemark.co.uk/hosting/dedicated/)

I've been a customer of Bytemark for 10+ years now with different products over time, and I'm continually impressed with the service (and what they give back to the community) time after time

I currently have 6 bare-metal boxes on SoftLayer and 4 managed boxes with Rackspace. I think both are great but both have their pros and cons. You're mainly looking at a cost vs support trade-off.

COST

My 6 SoftLayer servers cost half of my 4 RS servers. So SoftLayer wins on cost. Also, Rackspace prefers contracts so keep that in mind. Don't be afraid to negotiate with them either.

SUPPORT

Rackspace on the other hand, excels with regards to support. You can call Rackspace at any time if you have an issue. They also seem to be more proactive with monitoring and preventative stuff (they will call you and say "Hey, this thing was failing so I fixed it"), whereas SoftLayer's monitoring is robotic and they don't do anything unless you file a ticket. RS also provides managed backup and it's been great for us (keep in mind we do traditional hosting, not a multi-tenant app).

I've only had one major incident with SoftLayer (swapping out a RAID controller went bad and resulted in 6ish hours of downtime). No major incidents with Rackspace. So, Rackspace wins on support.

OTHER

Both have multiple data centers and performance seems great (though I don't have actual benchmarks to prove that). Most of our servers are in Dallas.

One thing I like about SoftLayer is you can get things up faster. A new server is setup real quick (within hour(s)) whereas Rackspace can take a couple days.

SWAG

I have 2 Rackspace t-shirts and 2 SoftLayer t-shirts. So, that's a toss up :)

I track a bunch of data on many of the providers mentioned here if you're still unsure.

http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare

There's data on LiquidWeb, SoftLayer, RackSpace, Linode and many more.

I've been using a dedicated server from liquidweb for about 3 years to serve several high traffic Web sites at work. The only problems I've ever had with it are ones I've caused. You can pretty much get any level of 'managed' that you want, which is nice. They are not a 'cheap' host though. My server is about $230 a month. But it's worth every penny, and more.

I have had great experience with LiquidWeb. They offer fully managed dedicated / cloud / vps servers. They will even manage all software stack for you. They will even do things like "install Nginx with php-fpm and optimize mysql". If there is any problem, they will usually fix it before you notice it.

They usually post specials on WebHostingTalk deals forum.

Softlayer.

http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers

They are the most used hosting service behind EC2/PaaS/Linode for startups.

It's not managed, but neither was EC2. You order servers, they build and put them online, then you are given the IP and root password and the rest is up to you.

Do you want your own rented hardware and not just virtual machines?

I'd recommend looking into data-centres then.

I'm not sure what you mean by "managed" though. "Managed" (to me) normally means that they take care of the SysAdmin stuff for you.

As far as up-time and making sure the hardware works, that should be included in your rental price.

Rackspace OnMetal? http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/ I remember reading some not-so-nice things about Rackspace downtime recently though.

HN runs on SoftLayer and I've been happy with them so far.

EC2 becomes more competitive when you do reserved instances. You're mostly paying for redundancy, which is something you lose with bare metal servers.

I would recommend checking out the marketplace section of WebHostingTalk [1]. You can find good deals and user reviews.

[1] www.webhostingtalk.com

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