Change of hosting (again)
It’s coming up now for a year that I’ve been with ServePath. They have been absolutely excellent in terms of both service and reliability. However they have not been so good on price. Here’s a comparison with the also excellent Liquid Web.
| Product | ServePath | Liquid Web |
|---|---|---|
| Dual Xeon | $280/month | $269/month |
| Clock speed | 2.0Ghz | 2.8GHz |
| RAM | 2GB | 2GB |
| Data Transfer | 2000GB | 2000GB |
| Unmetered 10Mbps | $400/month | $100/month |
| Unmetered 100Mbps | $1500/month | $2100/month |
| Harddrive | 2 x 250GB SATA | 2 x 120GB SATA |
| 100GB backup | $50/month | $25/month |
| Private network | $100 setup, $50/month | $50 setup, $5/month |
To match the ServePath 250GB drive would add $15 a month but I don’t think I need that.
The main thing driving this change is bandwidth, I’m going to be on about 50% of my allocation this month and it’s rocketing up. Over the past 7 days I’ve used an average of 0.95Mbps and with a peak at 2.95Mbps so I will need a 10Mbps circuit which should do me a while (and I wouldn’t mind sometimes slowing down slightly at peak times).
For the server above with 10Mbps unmetered I’m looking at $680/month from ServePath and $369/month from Liquid Web which I’m afraid just means a change.
In the future I will need a private network when I get the inevitable second server which is cheaper at Liquid Web but when I get to the stage of needing 100Mbps connection ServePath begins to look quite good again. However according to this page there is a limit of one 100Mbps connection per customer so I guess that in the longer term I would need to move on anyway, and the bigger the site is the more difficult it is to move.
Nothing is ever easy!
UPDATE:
After sleeping on this, I’ve just worked that a 10Mbps connection has a theoretical monthly limit of 3255GB per month. Obviously 100% loading would be nonsense, so assuming a 50% load then this would be 1600GB per month. My present bandwidth limit is 1500GB so in actual fact this maybe isn’t an upgrade at all!
A Intel Xeon Dual Core Conroe 3060 from The Planet, with 250GB SATA and 2500GB bandwidth would come in at $209/month which would be virtually doubling my actual traffic and pretty much doubling the processor power too. If I need extra bandwidth I can get another 1000GB for $175/month.