Dedicated Servers with Unlimited Bandwidth

#1

I have been using dedicated servers for several years, since leaving DreamHost’s shared environment.

I’m curious about the options you offer and had questions:

  1. What sort of 4-core processor are you offering?

  2. Can you upgrade to 6GB or 8GB RAM?

  3. What about a RAID drive?

  4. And cPanel or Plesk.

Please provide as much information as you can about this offering.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
www.theparacast.com

#2

We’re currently working on some additional documentation for our Dedicated Servers; here’s some basics though:

  1. Primarily AMD Opterons, 2.2 GHz minimum. Exact hardware details may depend on which dedicated plan you choose and/or what hardware we have available.

2/3. Not at the present time, but dedicated hosting plans with “beefier” hardware will almost certainly become available in the future. I don’t know whether there are any plans to offer piecemeal upgrades, though.

  1. cPanel will not currently install on our dedicated servers, as it doesn’t support Debian Linux. Plesk may work, but you’re completely on your own if you install it. Please note that all dedicated servers are managed by the DreamHost Panel, so you don’t need to install your own control panel unless you specifically need one.
#3

I can probably survive the lack of cPanel, but I’m quite interested in RAID systems and maybe more RAM. It would seem sensible to offer at least one or two upgrade options of that sort. Otherwise, even your best configuration seems a bit lightweight for us, since we have lots of download traffic on our sites, and we want the fastest network and drive performance possible.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
www.theparacast.com

#4

Hi Gene,

This is Brent from Marketing. I’m looking at adding a couple more configurations in the future. One bundle will target database users who need fast I/O and the other will target users who need a high-performance web server to accommodate a large volume of traffic.

What kind of RAID storage architecture were you looking for? Are you interested in RAID-1 software or do you need the performance of RAID-5 hardware? Would you be running a local database on the dedicated server?

I’m also looking into a high-performance configuration. It sounds like you would like to see 8GB of RAM. What kind of processor requirements do you have?

Thanks for your input. I appreciate it.

Regards,

Brent

#5

Hi,

My dedicated server setups now are rather more complicated in several ways.

  1. I run my own email and databases via cPanel (or, in our second server, Plesk). While external email isn’t an issue (although our spam management is good), I’m comfortable with our own MySQL setup. We can easily upgrade Apache, MySQL, PHP and their associated modules on both. In other words, total control, for better or worse.

  2. As to more advanced configurations, we currently use RAID hardware on one box, software on the other. They both have 16GB RAM and 1.5TB of storage. One has twin Intel Xeon E5520 processors, the other an AMD Phenom X6 Hexa Core.

I grant that the CPUs and RAM are probably more powerful than we need, and they might be accommodated by the traditional desktop CPUs from AMD or Intel. The RAM limits are never approached.

I’m attracted to your setups because of low cost and the lack of bandwidth limitations. If you can provide a high-performance configuration with RAID and system configuration flexibility, I’m going to be very, very interested in the possibilities.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
www.theparacast.com

#6

Gene,

I appreciate your feedback. It was very helpful. I expect that we will offer two or three additional high-performance bundles at competitive prices in the near future.

Please follow us on Twitter so that you’ll be one of the first to know about the new configurations.

http://twitter.com/dreamhost

Thank you for your interest in our Dedicated product line.

Best regards,

Brent Scotten
Product Marketing Manager (Hosting)
New Dream Network, LLC dba. DreamHost
http://www.DreamHost.com

#7

Thank you. Do you have a possible timeframe for this?

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
www.theparacast.com

#8

Hi Gene,

I don’t have a firm release date yet, but I would guess sometime in early Q3 2011.

Regards,

Brent

#9

Two questions for the public and the DH crew:

  1. What’s the port speed of these dedicated servers? That would impact the maximum achievable bandwidth.

  2. Can you use your own server-based email server, or must you stick with the ones you set up for everyone?

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
http://www.theparacast.com

#10

Hello Gene,

  1. The max port speed on the Dedicated Servers is 100Mbps.

  2. The email server will be based on DreamHost’s system. There are no current plans to allow a third-party email system.

Regards,

Brent

#11

So we depend on your separate mail servers for that?

Just checking.

I suppose we could also set up a business email package with any provider, but if your spam/anti-virus protection is good, no problem.

For everyone else’s benefit, 100Mbps means a potential bandwidth of over 33TB. That’s if you kept the ports at 100% day and night, which I don’t imagine is gonna happen to more than one or two customers.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
http://www.theparacast.com

#12

Yes. You would depend on our separate email servers.

One possibility is to route your domain through Gmail and utilize their spam filtering technology. We offer this option through our email system.

Brent

#13

I can get a business email package from GoDaddy, Rackspace, 1and1. They’re cheap enough. I’m not enamored of Gmail, unless you buy the Pro Google Apps, which is more costly than one of those cheap email packages.

But let’s see how yours does first.

Peace,
Gene Steinberg
co-host/The Paracast
http://www.theparacast.com

#14