Small Hosting

I’m looking for 1U, possibly 2U, of hosting (initially; may well be more later) somewhere between Reading and Bristol. No huge bandwidth requirement, but I must be able to get physical access if needed, and of course good availability. — KeithEdmunds

UK Hosting

Things to consider about moving out of London:

• The datacentres outside London are more often based on one ISP’s transit, i.e. the same company that provides you IP transit also owns the facility and this is the only company you can use for IP transit. That means you can’t shop around for transit so you have to accept their prices (often not a big deal for low usage) and you have to put up with them even when their network goes to crap, whereas at a proper neutral colo facility you are free to shop around and so is your upstream.
• Many of the datacentres outside London are going to be just getting transit from the same people who are at the London datacentres so while it may be cheaper, it’s just adding one more set of middlemen and latency.
• If you manage the machine properly and buy decent hardware how often do you really need to visit it!? If you only need to visit it a couple of times a year then does it matter if the drive there is 2 hours or if it is 30 minutes?

Of course the cheapness can often be a really big factor, no doubt about that. — AndySmith

[[http://www.poundhost.com|PoundHost]]

I can recommend PoundHost very highly. I’ve been with them for a year and the service and value is excellent. They have a London datacentre and also the smaller but much more accessible (for me anyway) one in Maidenhead. Access is convenient and the staff are always very helpful, being on site, rather than located in some distant exotic call-centre.” — JamesMartin

[[http://www.dedipower.com/|Dedipower]]

Dedipower have a datacentre on the feeder road between the A33 & Berkeley Ave in Reading. No idea what they are like. — ChrisAitken

See [[DediPower Datacentre]]

Try http://www.datacentres.org.uk for more info. — AndySmith

[[http://www.newnet.co.uk|NewNet]]

I can’t say as I can recommend them as I have no personal experience, but I keep thinking of trying Newnet since they are just down the road from me in Fareham and that would mean very easy access to the box Last time I looked their prices were reasonably competitive, but not good enough when combined with my requirements to make me switch from a UML hosting setup with Bytemark, who are definitely good. Not sure as either of these help since Bytemark’s still run on a UML setup I think, you just get a whole one to yourself (which makes their admin job easier), and both fail on the criteria of location! Jump, who partner with Bytemark, fail on that too being Telehouse based, but they are another I was looking at when I abandoned DSVR for hosting. — PaulTansom

A project I’m involved in looked at Newnet to host a co-lo server we own. The place is magnificent. Connection is great, security is good, power looks reliable. Their quote was almost an order of magnitude higher than the supplier we’ve gone with, which means I’ve got to drive to Sheffield if it all goes belly-up — Vic

The company I work for are partnered with Newnet and I’d recommend them. Local company as you say, with a data centre in Fareham (Cams Hall Estate) and of course London. Always given us excellent service and we’ve been partnered with them for years. I’ve been to their offices and Server House in Fareham and was very impressed with the whole setup and the staff who run the internals of the network.

For example, a customers server fell over the other day so I raised a trouble ticket to power cycle the box. 1 minute later I had a reply saying it’d been done!

If you’re interested with using them for hosting they are more than happy to give you a guided tour around Server House as well. — DavidRamsden

[[http://www.jump.net.uk/|Jump]]

I use Jump and I’m pretty happy although there are no guarantees and you have to be willing to do a lot of stuff yourself, as there is no support department guiding you through every step. (I regard that as money saved) — AndySmith

[[http://www.everydns.net|EveryDNS]]

For backup DNS, I use everydns.net. I’m very happy with the service they’ve supplied to date – and it’s free to boot. — Vic

[[http://www.bytemark.co.uk/index.html|Bytemark]]

I asked Bytemark about a US location. Unfortunately they do not have one. — ChrisAitken

I recently started to rent a Debian Etch virtual server off Bytemark. They were very fast, friendly and helpful in getting things going. If you pay annually they cost under £15 per month (inc VAT) for the most basic UML server (Don’t forget to ask for your 10% discount if you are an open source developer). The server was well set up when I first logged in, and so far I’ve been very happy. — AdamTrickett

[[http://www.linode.com|Linode]]

Linode are offering 128Mb UMLs at $39.95/month (about £20). That’s less than Bytemark. Of course, Linode don’t have any free ATM… — ChrisAitken

US Hosting

[[http://www.quantact.com|Quantact]]

I use Quantact and I’m very happy with my Linux VPS. Quantact offers two lines of Virtual Private Servers, Xen and OpenVZ. Both offer full root access on your own VPS. The following Distros are available on all plans: Redhat 9, Fedora 2/3/4/5, Centos 4.3, Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 5.10, Ubuntu 6.06, Gentoo 2005 S1, Slackware 10.1.

The only downside is that I can only pay (manually) via PayPal as there is a problem with processing payments for non U.S. customers. That said I my plan costs £19 per month and I get 160MB RAM, 7.5GB disk and 160GB of bandwith. — MartinWimpress

DNS Hosting

• EveryDNS. Suggested by Vic.

• Xtreme. Suggested by PaulTansom.

• Zone Edit. Suggested by KenAdams.

• Xcalibre. Suggested by KeithEdmunds.

• Gradwell. Suggested by GrahamBleach.

• Verio. Suggested by SteveHill.

• Singlefin. Suggested by MartinWimpress.