Dedicated Servers

[philiporchard]

We have two dedicated servers with FH. Their top spec servers running Windows licences.

We need ot increase capacity but they aren't being overly helpful.

We need fast machines, lots of ram and lots of storage.

Thanks for help!

 

[RB5]

Have a look at OVH, does a lot of competitive server offers.

 

[Fred Steven]

OVH is good but find online.net better for support.

 

[Edwin]

What about Jolt?

I only use their reseller hosting, but it seems pretty good... and they have some meaty specs on the Dedicated Server front.
https://www.jolt.co.uk/dedicated-servers/

 

[redbird]

I have used https://www.easyspace.com and found them very helpful support wise, phone and live chat. Some of the pre built ones are very good value

 

[philiporchard]

Great. thanks for the info.
I've contacted both Jolt and OVH.

Here is current spec for both servers we currently have – although it doesn't mean an awful lot to me!

Server Model: DS1371
CPU Model: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660v2
Frequency: 2.2GHz
Threads: 40
Memory: 128GB
Hard Drives: 2 x 500GB SSD / 2 x 4TB SATA
Bandwidth: Unlimited
Network Speed: 100mbps / 1Gbps
Raid: Raid 1 Hardware
IP Addresses: Up to 16

Server Model: DS4-NVMe Gold
CPU Model: 2.6 Ghz (3.7 Ghz Turbo) Intel Xeon Gold 6126
Threads: 12 Cores, 24 Threads
Memory: 192GB
Hard Drives: 2 x 1TB NVMe
Bandwidth: Unlimited
Network Speed: Up to 500Mbps
Raid: Raid 1 Hardware
IP Addresses: Up to 16

 

[super-whois]

What are you using them for? Are they Gaming Servers or vm hosts?

 

[philiporchard]

We run our two edtech services on them: spag dot com and maths dot co uk

 

[super-whois]

We run our two edtech services on them: spag dot com and maths dot co uk

I think you should be able to run both of those sites with minimal resources. Are you sure you're not trying to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Resilience is an important consideration for such services, so you may want to look at cloud services, such as Azure App Service.

 

[rob]

Out of interest what is the indicator suggesting you need to increase resources?

 

[philiporchard]

Hi Rob

The DS1371 we first had back in 2016, and is more expensive than the newer servers from what I can tell. Possibly £440/month not including monthly Windows licence. So this server needs to be replaced.

THe DS4-NVMe Gold is good (one of FH top severs), but we could really do with a bit more storage on it.

So I was just asking around to get some ideas. Cheers!

 

[super-whois]

we could really do with a bit more storage on it.

What are you trying to store? Do you need to spring clean your data, and review your data retention policy, or are these backups that should be stored elsewhere? 1TB (with raid) is a fair bit of data.

Sorry for all the questions, but these help in giving you useful advice.

 

[Edwin]

This "Hard Drives: 2 x 1TB NVMe" suggests the machine is using fast SSD drives.

That's the problem: you could get a vast amount more storage on hard drives, but they're much slower access than SSDs.

Or, you can pay quite a substantial amount for large NVME SSD drives.

Maybe FH will be willing to buy and install larger drives than that, if you pay them the drive cost price plus a bit for their trouble?

Can't know for sure the drives below are compatible, but they're probably the sort of thing you'd need a pair of (identical pair is best for RAID 1)
https://www.cclonline.com/product/3...-2280-PCIe-Gen3-x4-NVMe-Internal-SSD/SSD1343/
https://www.cclonline.com/product/3...3-x4-NVMe-Internal-Solid-State-Drive/SSD1320/

So you're looking at £900-£1,100 total for the 2x 4TB NVME drives, plus whatever your hosting company would charge you to fit them and copy the data across.

You may have to haggle with them hard to let you get the drives as a one-time fee rather than see them add a ridiculous extra amount every month but they lease the drives to you.

If you go with my suggestion, that instantly nearly quadruples your storage space on the server.

Alternatively, get the hosting company to add a cheap and cheerful hard drive, and arrange to get stuff like the web server log files to be stored on there, saving the main SSD for your site's data.

 

[martin-s]

Might be worth looking at the RAID configuration if these servers are important too...