Hosted servers?

Soldato
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On the pale blue dot
Hi guys, I'm just looking for some general advice on where to start on this project!

The company I work for delivers various training courses. Once idea the training team have come up with is 'virtual training', whereby the delegates dial into a classroom session to interact with the trainer and use hosted resources to perform the exercises, via the wonders of virtualisation.

The problems I foresee are the capital cost of buying the servers themselves and upgrading our normal business internet connection to an enormously fat and reliable pipe to handle all the traffic.

The alternative, I guess, is a hosted server in a data centre. We'd want full access to the OS and for the servers to be only hosting our content.

How much, very roughly would you be looking to rent out resources such as this? Are there 'recommended' data centres to go looking into for this kind of thing for small/medium businesses?
 

daz

daz

Soldato
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Bucks
I think Melbourne have their own datacenter these days, don't they? We had a couple of offsite monitoring servers co-located with them and were very happy with the service and network uptime. :)

Never heard of Express Hosting. Make sure you do plenty of background research on whoever you choose - e.g. that they're a "real" business and not a hobby business. (Not making any insinuations about anyone mentioned here, just general advice when it comes to choosing a hosting provider!)
 
Soldato
OP
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On the pale blue dot
Cheers guys, the examples you've posted are a lot cheaper than I guessed.

I'll do some research and yup I'd agree daz this isn't something I'd jump into overnight. Our company has an excellent reputation as a training provider and I'd be ejected out of the door with my P45 stapled to my forehead if I signed us up to a hosting plan managed out of someone's bedroom!
 
Man of Honour
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Personally my only advice is stick to the big players, the managed hosting game is seriously competitive and the long term profitability of the sector is questionable for a lot of companies. In other words, some of the smaller players are going to get bought or go bust in the next few years.
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2003
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9,454
As this is a business critical application it may be worth having two slightly lower specced servers over one massive one (depending on your app). Coupled with a decent SLA you should hopefully never see much downtime.

Would your app run on cloud architecture such as vps.net? Never used the service but it could be interesting. :p

I had dedicated servers with www.2host.co.uk (for around 4 years IIRC) who were very good during the time I used them.
 
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