Dedicated Server Review

[Ae9803]

Hey Guys,

I hope I can post this here. I recently within the last 6 months purchased a dedicated server from, volumedrive.com. I am sure as you are all aware, there setup time is ridiculously long, it took actually 3 weeks of constant emailing them to get it setup. After alot of patience, needless to say, I was very impressed with the hardware. It was very fast at handling the traffic I had. After 6 months of periodic, down time due to something to do with there uplink, I declined to continue further with there service. I feel its pretty bad when you attempt to go to there site and its down as well as yours. Anyways, there control panel on there site, is horrible. There isnt much that you can do as far as setting up DNS, RDNS, etc. There ticket times are pretty quick, but they arent very informative as you would exspect. So anyways, after numerous problems with them and there "uplink" issue,(which I never got an explaination as to why there was always so much down time). I cancelled there service.

I am currently trying my luck with linode.com as I have heard alot of good things about them, so far I am extremely impressed.

Thanks for listening,

Jake

[IainRennie]

I really like hudsonvalleyhost.com, there prices are amazing.

[CherryGirl69]

I have a dedicated server at HostGator and have no problems, support is great

[Dmacleo]

using datashack for unmanaged dedicated.

[Ae9803]

Well,

I never really needed a dedicated server, the only reason why I got it was because of the price. But clearly, I did pay a price so to speak. I made a vps buy with linode, and it is amazing. so far.

[Tom Wright]

Unfortunately I purchased a VPS from volumedrive and after about 2 weeks of waiting for them to set it up I decided I'd ask for a refund and go else where. It turned out in their ToS they say that they do not give refunds so I never actually got the money back. So I ended up wasting my time and money.

[AlexJ]

I use Choopa for my US and Hetzner for my EU servers.

[Ae9803]

Unfortunately I purchased a VPS from volumedrive and after about 2 weeks of waiting for them to set it up I decided I'd ask for a refund and go else where. It turned out in their ToS they say that they do not give refunds so I never actually got the money back. So I ended up wasting my time and money.

Wow,

I just did that too, and they still havent responded to my emails, so I disputed it with paypal, guess I can kiss that money goodbye

[MGBrose]

Hey Guys,

I hope I can post this here. I recently within the last 6 months purchased a dedicated server from, volumedrive.com. I am sure as you are all aware, there setup time is ridiculously long, it took actually 3 weeks of constant emailing them to get it setup. After alot of patience, needless to say, I was very impressed with the hardware. It was very fast at handling the traffic I had. After 6 months of periodic, down time due to something to do with there uplink, I declined to continue further with there service. I feel its pretty bad when you attempt to go to there site and its down as well as yours. Anyways, there control panel on there site, is horrible. There isnt much that you can do as far as setting up DNS, RDNS, etc. There ticket times are pretty quick, but they arent very informative as you would exspect. So anyways, after numerous problems with them and there "uplink" issue,(which I never got an explaination as to why there was always so much down time). I cancelled there service.

I am currently trying my luck with linode.com as I have heard alot of good things about them, so far I am extremely impressed.

Thanks for listening,

Jake

We've been with volumedrive for about 1.5-2 years, we jumped ship to dacentec.com recently. For similar reasons, faecesty support, faecesty admin control panel, faecesty random outages(excuse my language but its 100% true).

We switched to datacentec because rent to own, for us means paying 50.00 a month a year from now once we own our rack. On Volumedrive for our similarly performing setup with intel E3's it was costing us around 120.00

So when my L5520 rack is paid off a year form now and if I don't have any hardware failures, I'll be paying less than some of you renting VM's :D.

Current Server

(1X) Quad Core E3-1230 (4 logical cores, 8 hyperthread cores)

16gb Ram

2 X 1 TB harddrives

1GBPS port

Rent

New Server:

(2x) Quad Core L5520 (8 logical cores, 16 hyperthreaded cores)

36gb Ram

2 x 128gb Crucial M4 SSD Hard Drives (Mirrored in raid1)

1 x 1TB Storage disk (for backups)

1GBPS port

12 Month Rent to Own

Also VolumeDrives network Speeds is garbage, heres a benchmark I ran last week comparing the two hosts while I still own both servers. VD is wayyyyy oversold hence the horrible speeds on a "1GBPS port"

Dacentec results:
-bash-3.2# sh ./bench.sh
CPU model : Intel® Xeon® CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz
Number of cores : 14
CPU frequency : 2266.818 MHz
Total amount of ram : 8175 MB
Total amount of swap : 4095 MB
System uptime : 2:39,
Download speed from CacheFly: 16.0MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 50.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 18.1MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 6.75MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, NL: 13.3MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 5.66MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 5.19MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 5.38MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 17.7MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 42.4MB/s
I/O speed : 106 MB/s
(2 x 128gb softraid 1 SSD's Mdadm)


VolumeDrive Results:
-bash-3.2# sh ./bench.sh
CPU model : Intel® Xeon® CPU E31230 @ 3.20GHz
Number of cores : 8
CPU frequency : 3192.860 MHz
Total amount of ram : 5109 MB
Total amount of swap : 2559 MB
System uptime : 19:30,
Download speed from CacheFly: 9.23MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 2.26MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 2.74MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 2.16MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, NL: 2.35MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 1.83MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 1.63MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 2.26MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 1.89MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 7.66MB/s
I/O speed : 64.1 MB/s (2 x 1Tb Softraid 1 Hard disks Mdadm)

more related info in my dacentec mini review that compares volumdrive/dacentec (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1260093)

To run this script on your server you can get it here:

wget http://freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh

sh ./bench.sh

(ignore iospeeds for my result I was doing some softraid rebuilding while I did this testing).

Remember when your rent/lease a server you are renting the network, so always check speeds, always check traceroutes. Any server host that is primarily cogent could mean trouble especially if you don't shape your dns routing through something like cloudflare. Cogent only networks have a ton of hops and sometimes poor speed for, dacentec is a 60-40 split, and has a really solid network for what you pay.

Unfortunately I purchased a VPS from volumedrive and after about 2 weeks of waiting for them to set it up I decided I'd ask for a refund and go else where. It turned out in their ToS they say that they do not give refunds so I never actually got the money back. So I ended up wasting my time and money.

Dispute via paypal, youll get your money back. Even if you lose the money volumedrive isn't worth the hassle of having as a host. We get lots of random downtime with them, which is why we switched.

As for the other hosts:

I have no direct experience with datashack or linode, but people seem to say they are decent. Also rackspace is great, but current "cloud pricing" is ridiculous when compared to budget dedi's. Also hostgator is also good for VM's, but ridiculously overpriced (partially because they are managed servers), I do have a client running on a small vm though on hostgator and they are very reliable/have great support.

Hope this helps!

[Tom Wright]

Wow,

I just did that too, and they still havent responded to my emails, so I disputed it with paypal, guess I can kiss that money goodbye

The funny thing is their e-mail response time is so long yet when I disputed the paypal payment they replied to that within a day stating their no refunds policy.

[Ae9803]

Thanks for the reply on this! I just went over there and checked out dacentec, which for that dedicated server, thats a steal. But I might stick with VM hosting, because my site is no where near that busy enough to need 36gigs of ram, haha.

[MGBrose]

Thanks for the reply on this! I just went over there and checked out dacentec, which for that dedicated server, thats a steal. But I might stick with VM hosting, because my site is no where near that busy enough to need 36gigs of ram, haha.

Ours isn't either lol, We use about 3-4gb of our 36gb currently. This is actually one of the most expensive servers they offer, they usually have cheaper ones available, but availability seems to change almost daily. Their support is fantastic though, I have yet to receive a support response that took longer than 10mins or so max.

[Rhett]

Hello, we use this forum for help with server administration peer to peer, however we don't allow hosting reviews etc since we are also a hosting provider.

There are many good sites out there for these items however, webhosttalking being one of many.

Thank you