deskthority

I'll be cancelling my dedicated server in Texas in the next month, and move my business to Europe, for obvious reasons. This means a new host for deskthority.

I'm eyeballing some candidates, for example this one (Performance+ package):
https://www.widexs.nl/hostingoplossinge ... ted-server

But it has been a while since I shopped for dedicated server hosting. If any of you has any good tips or experiences, please let me know. I might also contact some of you and ask you to do a traceroute to a potential new host. One of the original reasons for me to have my server in Texas is that in the Internet world, the USA is more central, i.e. if you live in Australia or Asia, connectivity to Europe might be slower. This is probably not a real problem in current days and more a problem of yesteryear, but I still like to check before we move.

Initially, I'm looking for a hosting solution in either the Netherlands or Germany. In England they now detain partners of journalists by order of the US, and then claim that was ok, so they are out as no longer a free country. But I'm open to suggestions. Note that I don't expect to escape the spying eye of our deranged governments, but I do want to escape the most dangerous ones.

I have a couple of servers on leaseweb, if you don't need support/assistance it's quite good. Very fast on EU and US, not quite sure about the rest of the world.

Nice. They are cheap.

if you need to make some tests just let me know

They hosted MegaUpload, they must have had quite some bandwidth ...

I'm not sure if it is an advertisement if your provider aims at bandwidth gobblers. Also:

Alex de Joode, LeaseWeb's Senior Regulatory Counsel, wrote, When MegaUpload was taken offline, 60 servers owned by MegaUpload were directly confiscated by the FIOD [The Dutch anti-fraud and privacy government agency] and transported to the US."

Ive asked a buddy of mine for input, he might have some ideas.


edit: he suggested the following: https://www.ovh.de/

I have a server at Hetzner. They were recommended as one of the most reliable hosters in Germany by a couple of guys in our hackerspace.

Hetzner seems to have some great hardware and bandwidth.

Just out of curiosity, how big are the data files of deskthority?

I know www.domaindiscount24.com for some time and can't complain. But I don't know if their capabilities match the needs of DT.

About 3GB of files (wiki included, backups excluded), and 1GB of database files (mostly our piwik stats as we don't use google analytics or something). So in total very little compared to hd sizes.

I always said we need more photos for the wiki!

I host my domain-names at leaseweb. Very cheap, but support could be a problem.

My main web server and two minecraft servers is at fxw.nl : I can certainly vouch for the quality of their problem solving department : just excellent, nice easy going people even taking the time to explain stuff to a server admin noob like me.

Recently got a dirt cheap dedicated file server from ovh.nl but they are a subsidiary of ovh France , so that's where the server is at. The server isn't delivered yet, so I don't know anything about the quality .

I currently have my eye on this one:
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produk ... er/ex40ssd

Any comments? It seems like a really good deal for what you get. SSD + really good bandwidth + 32GB RAM (WTF, we could run our db from cache).

I might equip it with FreeBSD as I have always done until now, or maybe I'll be more lazy and get CentOS + Plesk or CPanel.

webwit wrote:I currently have my eye on this one:
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produk ... er/ex40ssd

Any comments? It seems like a really good deal for what you get. SSD + really good bandwidth + 32GB RAM (WTF).

I might equip it with FreeBSD as I have always done until now, or maybe I'll be more lazy and get CentOS + Plesk or CPanel.

That really looks good.....! Plus the cancellation period is very nice...

Only silly line is "Network Availability min. 99%"
99% is 3,65 days downtime per year, which is a lot.

Every extra 9 after the decimal costs 10x as much.

Well, that's only because they don't want to guarantee uptime, so they can't get sued if something happens. Hetzner has a great customer support from what I experienced and heard from others. I've read one report of somebody who had a mainboard failure on his root server. Between the creation of the support ticket and the replacement of the motherboard were about 30 minutes.

webwit wrote:Note that I don't expect to escape the spying eye of our deranged governments, but I do want to escape the most dangerous ones.

Waitaminute … it sounds like, under the keyboard-loving façade, you're a very naughty, and potentially very dangerous duck!

What are we letting ourselves in for here? ;)

Clearly getting to the bottom of the Alps vortex is some kind of potentially terrorist act or insights which can otherwise be used against the state. They are watching you, Daniel.

There may be a difference between 99,9 and 99.99%, most hosting providers choose 99,9% but In my experience of the ISPs I worked for that number is kind of arbitrary (nice number). But when the shit really hits the fan you can't guarantee that anyway. Like a MS cloud service. Maybe hetzner is just realistic, and covering their ass in case of such an outage, I don't know. SLAs are useless anyway in our use case. If you're lucky, in case of outage, you get some of your monthly fee back, after spending more money in man hours applying for that. What it boils down to is performance reputation.

Any good options in France? I believe the US has access to all Internet traffic in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, but the French might be more resistant. Might. (Orange S.A. is evil.)The French made their own nukes, think the whole of Europe should speak French, and that France is the center of the civilized world. My apologies for the cliches, but in this time, they may speak in their favour.

France is a defacto police state.


What about Switzerland?

Hehehe In France we have several options that are quite good :

OVH : UK site https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml/ FR site : http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/

Free (online.net) : http://www.online.net/fr + http://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie for dedicated servers.

Those are the cheapest / best offers you can find easily. I manage quite a few websites, 3 on those 2 providers, so if you need more help, PM me!

webwit wrote:But when the shit really hits the fan you can't guarantee that anyway.

We had UKFast actually delete one of our virtual servers by mistake, just the other week. Just poof, no more server. That server is now on our own platform. Screw UKFast.

Hmmm my brother moved to Switzerland. Runs an online shop and hardly pays any taxes. Bastard. I like Switzerland. However I mentioned the countries earlier because of their more central point in Internet routing.

And France may be whatever, but I don't think they are mirroring the Dutch/UK transatlantic lines or AMS-IX/DE-CIX like the US does. To name just one example. Although I may be utterly wrong.

Regarding France: I have two servers at online.net, and am quite happy with them.
Write me a PM if you want to do some testing.

PS: Please keep up the good work and stay with FreeBSD
PPS: Kudos for your concerns about state surveillance and privacy (Piwik)

if you are switching to an eu hoster, you could start accepting euro donations

I've heard good things about hetzner