Buying Dedicated Server vs Rent??

[daniel]

Hi

I am now exploring the idea of a dedicated server via rackshack or one of the the other mentioned companies I found while search this forum. Before going foward what is involved in buying your own server outright and setting it up and what are some of the start up costs involved? If anyone could expand on this topic it would help me decide the best route to go.

Thanks -

[daniel]

That really did not answer my question?

[OFS]

Then you only have to worry about co-location fees.

Also you might have to pay for shipping fees to get your server to a good data center.

After that you only have to worry about renting rack space and paying for bandwidth.

-Shipping depends on if you are going to be paying local fees, or shipping out of the country. (I don't know your location, but you can find out the UPS or whatever shipping company you might use.)

-If the server breaks down you paid for it, you have to get it fixed, so make sure you have some insurance on the server, make sure all the paper work is in order. (EG. Your not getting an old server, or an illegal one.)

-Renting is good because, no shipping fees, the server breaks down and it's taken care of. Renting is month to month.

-Really with renting you are paying for one time monthyly cost, system admin if you don't do it yourself, and maybe a control panel.

-Buying the monthly rackspace rental and bandwidth, that's what you are looking at for both.

I hope that helped. Buying is cheaper in the long run if your server holds out, but a lot of people seem to be happy with renting.

Owning is a lot more work. There are lots of great articles on co-location, verses renting. Just do a quick google search.

[daniel]

Thanks OFS good points and much to consider. I will explore this further.

[OFS]

Let me know if you have any more questions.

[daniel]

Thanks Jh3 that make sense to me. I take it you had a bad experience with rackshack?

[.com.net.org]

buying means colocate.
rent dedicated server is renting it.

I prefer rent dedicated so, you can move easily when the host sucks. If you colocate, you must bring along your box.
Of course if you have large data or live near Data Center, colocate is not bad.

[derekraines]

Rackshack is great. The only downside to Hosting there is that you MUST know how to admin a server. You have to do all the upgrades and patches yourself. If you mess up your server, you have to fix it.

You can find a fully managed company like rackspace.com where they are there for you all the time and will lead you by the hand in everything you do on the server but they charge a lot more.

Or, you could pay a company that gets servers at places like rackshack and admins them for you. This gives you service that is in between rackshack and rackspace. You get lower prices but you still get a managed server. The company usually won't go so far as to support software you put on the server (I don't really know of any companies that do), but they will keep the server secure and up to date...so they'll basically make sure you stay online and are running properly.

So you can choose rackshack style hosting if you know a lot about linux, rackspace if you know nothing but want super high quality service, or find another company that will manage a colocated server - for that you can contact me if you need more info.

[Ciqala]

If you go the way of renting a dedicated server and you are not too confident about handling the admin then www.theboxnetwork.net are great.

they rent the server off of rackshack.net and then you lease it off of them but they add a firewall, packet filter and also handle all upgrades, patches and problems that crop up.

after a REALLY bad experience with my last host (sentris.com) these guys are great.

Ciq