Advice on Web Hosting ...

vodkasoda

I am getting involved in the creation of an Internet version of a PBM game that I play and we obviously need to get ourselves a reliable server set up.

The bloke who runs the game started an Amazon Cloud account, as he was told it was very good quality, support & value. However, unless he did something drastically wrong, that’s not the case as he was being charged a fortune for it (over $400 for about 3 weeks) and we weren’t even using it :eek: !!! This is obviously way out of our price range & excessive in the extreme as far as I can see !!!

What we are looking for is a server that will host the game for the end user. They will do their input and at certain times of the day & night, batch processes will run to complete their "turns".

However, at the same time, myself, the boss & other people (programmers, testers, etc.) need to be able to access the same server to create the system, the database, the web pages (obviously !) and the game in general, as if we are just on a shared PC ... this obviously needs to be very secure and safe from access to anybody except us developers.

Can anybody suggest a decent priced company that can & will handle this kind of thing ?

I am a mainframe programmer by trade and know my way around PCs as well, but where my knowledge & expertise falls down is in Networking !!!

Any help appreciated, as ever ...

Tomtata

Where are the users located?

I can recommend Dediserve.ie - VPS's are excellent especially disk performance - Beware of others and be sure to get a test account to demo. Their Dedicated servers are good value.

Amazon EC2 is excellent but pricing can be a bit of a pain like you experienced/

RackSpace Cloud is also good.

fcrossen

I have used dediserve too - good bunch. Had one outage which was handled well by them. Also look at memset in the UK. Excellent rep. Be very careful choosing a VPS provider - there are many one man operations with a dedicated machine in a data centre reselling VPS accounts.

Sposs

Thanks for the feedback guys , drop me a PM if you want a test VPS to play around with , Amazon is a nice enterprise Alternative put it's hard to control pricing, a virtual machine at least gives you a predictable monthly price to work off.

Boskonay

I use dediserve too - bloody fast !