| My experience with dedicated servers dates back to | | | | employees) = $3008, that's a pretty big chunk of a |
| 2003 when I started working with USC at LA County | | | | hosting invoice. Unfortunately, some clients need a |
| Hospital. We decided to shell out for an offsite | | | | disaster to strike to before they see the value in |
| dedicated server because we had no control over the | | | | avoiding one. While we are on the topic of exchange, |
| network firewalls, switches, DNS Servers, or routers. | | | | Rackspace has an affordable product called |
| This was all managed by the hospital; we just had our | | | | Exchange hosting. This gives you the benefit of |
| little LAN on the inside. This made simple firewall | | | | Rackspace's infrastructure, the functionality your |
| adjustments a nightmare, as we had to coordinate and | | | | outlook junkies desire, without all of the exchange |
| justify all changes with LA County Hospital ITS. | | | | server mess. I've been using this solution with |
| After a week or two of research we decided to go | | | | UptonParkFinancial and they are very happy with it. |
| with Rackspace. At the time Rackspace was still a | | | | Back to dedicated servers, below Rackspace the |
| relatively new company, and the price seemed a bit | | | | "premium provider", comes all "midrange" providers. |
| steep. I had worked a NOC position at Tierzero in | | | | These providers are "unmanaged" by my standards, |
| 2002 so I had some familiarity with Datacenters/colos., | | | | have longer support times, less helpful staff, uglier/less |
| had a diagram of their datacenter and it was just such | | | | functional customer portals, less efficient datacenters, |
| a logical, detailed, and beautiful infrastructure. | | | | more downtime, etc. One example of a midrange |
| The cost was easily justified because what you are | | | | company is Hostway. If I search for "windows |
| getting is a "managed" dedicated server. This is very | | | | dedicated server" in google, it looks like about 6 of the |
| different from a run of the mill dedicated windows box | | | | results on the first page are midrange providers. You |
| and let me tell you why, Support. Rackspace has a | | | | can tell by their site design, terms of service, and price. |
| 24x7 support team and efficient ticketing system that | | | | Nearly all companies that are not named rackspace |
| often garnered responses within 10 minutes (from | | | | fall into my midrange category. I will only name |
| humans not auto-responders). Because we had | | | | hostway because that is the only company I have |
| mission critical web applications being served up on this | | | | personally used. |
| server, it was necessary to have a "Second line of | | | | Another option more recently became available, |
| defense" in the event of an emergency. I was still fairly | | | | servers in the cloud. We recently migrated all of a |
| new to IT, although I thought I knew it all at the time, my | | | | client's websites from a dedicated server to an |
| boss knew it was best if we had someone to call if | | | | Amazon EC2 Instance and to my surprise it was quite |
| something went wrong. | | | | painless. as you know is the biggest online retailer to |
| Generally speaking, if you can afford it, and if your | | | | date. They launched their Amazon Web Services |
| client (or employer) cannot afford downtime, it's good | | | | (AWS) product a few years ago and it now offers |
| to have as many people on your back as possible, just | | | | Windows Instances. This solution is definitely for the |
| in case something does go wrong. This is where you | | | | techie/sys admin type as you get no support what so |
| have to justify the cost for you situation. Can you | | | | ever out of the box, although they do offer support |
| afford downtime? Is this server for your personal blog, | | | | services via ticketing for an additional cost, IMO this will |
| for tinkering around & family photos, or is it for a | | | | still not be close to the service/support you are getting |
| mission critical application for your biggest client? | | | | with Rackspace. Here is the basic rundown. You login |
| Clients also appreciate the fact that you are being | | | | to AWS, choose a region: US-West, US-East, or |
| brutally honest. If they ask you to put Exchange, | | | | Europe, and select "Create new Instance", then you |
| Active Directory, A Fileserver, and SQL all on a 3 year | | | | choose from several prebuilt images they have |
| old server they have sitting in the closet. | | | | available. You can choose from many flavors of Linux, |
| Explain to them that if (when) Email goes down for 24 | | | | Windows Server 2008 with SQL Installed, IIS, 32bit or |
| hours, they could be losing potential or current clients. | | | | 64bit, 2GB of RAM or 4, etc. |
| You could also pitch this: say 50% of your sales | | | | I will be writing an article in the coming weeks on AWS |
| teams work is done using email. If you have 8 | | | | & EC2 Instances with some tutorials on setting |
| salesmen @ $45k/year or $23.50/hr, and email goes | | | | one up. |
| down for 2 days, that's (16 hours * $23.50) * (8 | | | | |