Dedicated Servers

I’ve start making a Dedicated Servers research, looking for good prices and interesting service.

The first I knew about was ServerMatrix. They have a nice site, the company is big (a subsidiary of The Planet) and the service seems fine. They even publish a live cam picture of their data center. Quite impressive.

The problem is their prices were raised lately. There was a no-setup promotional fee for one of the server options, and that is gone. Also, I believe they removed the cheapest server option. Finally, even the setup fee is now USD199.00. AFAIR, it used to be USD149.

Then I’ve found HiVelocity. I believe it was in either a google banner, or a simple google search link. As I was looking for a cheap server, the one that fit was 2.0 GHz Celeron with 1000gb metered bandwidth.

What impressed me was their very good use of PHP Live. I’ve talked to a sales person there, Drew Adams, who was a very competent guy at his job. It’s obvious that sales team is very important, but I’m very impressed with the quality of sales department in the US.

ServerMatrix, whose PHP Live didn’t work for me when I tried, was very fast in the mail pre-sales support. Superb Servers also uses PHP Live - through what I was told that they asked 10% over payments using PayPal. That was bad.

Now what was new to me, was that PHP Live allows the sales guys to ACTIVELY talk to the visitor. That was a nice experience with HiVelocity. After you called them for the first sales support, the next time you enter their site, if they want so, they will THEMSELVES start a new conversation (like “Hey, any other doubts?”). That can bother some people, but I wasn’t bothered. That is technologically simple, but commercially amazing!

Let’s get back to the subject. Superb Servers, another service I’ve found, is ok. One thing that I didn’t like, and you will probably agree, is that their site is VERY ugly hehe. After 5 minutes there, I thought, “argh, let me out!!”.

Finally, some other competitive guys are EZZi.net. They have a nice looking site, and good prices. One very important note is that you should really pay attention is that in their entry level service, the cheapest one, remote reboots are not included. I don’t know what would happen in case I need a reboot (getting locked outside when setting up the firewall or changing the SSH daemon). That is very strange. You have to pay for extra reboots.

The coolest thing about EZZi.net is that they have ALIEN MODELS posing for their site pictures.

Isn’t the girl from the right’s very BIG? They should hire a new Photoshop guy…