Server buying experience
My recent server buying experience has been interesting. I contacted a local company, ServerWare, seeing that they had some interesting servers – 4 disks, in a 1U configuration? Mmrm. To my dismay, they were trying very hard to not sell me parts, but complete systems, with prices that were about 30% greater than what I could get at Dell. The clincher, was when I was told that server SATA2 disks are different from desktop SATA2 disks, and there was no way I was going to get these disks so cheaply. Ahem, on Saturday, I took a trip to Low Yat, and picked up a couple of 500GB SATA2 disks, remember?
So, it was down to calling Dell. Found my regular sales consultant whom I dealt with about a year ago, got the quote brought down from what the website said (I love how you can haggle with Dell, to get a bargain). Demanded a quick delivery (Friday, they tell me). With a nice 3-year next-day-on-site warranty. For 30% less than ServerWare. Without the hassles of being treated like an idiot.
On IRC, I mentioned that I was going to blog-mouth ServerWare. Consider this, just that. Its interesting to note that on the LUV lists, there is also chat about getting a 1U server. A lot of recommendations for Sun and Dell hardware. Apparently, Sun can provide even cheaper hardware than Dell! HP is also in the mix. No mention of off-the-shelf local companies in Melbourne though.
Friday, can’t come any sooner. Already booked a slot to be in the data center on Saturday morning, I’m hoping all services are up and running by then. And in future, I’ve got to think about backups – any recommendations for Xen instance hosting that is affordable? Purely for emergency use…
Technorati Tags: crass commercialism, serverware, dell, 1u
I’ve had nothing but excellent experiences from Linode.com. They’re still only in beta with the Xen hosting, because there’s still some problems with Xen in untrusted environments (I/O in a DomU can bring the dom0 down).
But I love Linode. The service gets better and better, the staff are extremely clueful and helpful, and they keep giving us more for the same money.
I used slicehost for over 9 months. Excellent services so far. Linode also got good initial review from hostingfu.com for the new Xen hosting.
[…] talks about server downtime, and I can attest to that (hogwarts is just above gambit). The Dell arrived on Friday, popped Centos 5.1 on it, realised that if you ticked “Virtualization”, you […]
you know any good independent server distributors around?
@Danny: Nope, you might consider CZone, but it might take 2 weeks to get the chassis.
@kamal, @Simon: Thanks! I’ll look at Linode/Slicehost for small slices