We use Softlayer and Liquidweb for all of our production servers. None of them is really a budget server provider. Softlayer does sell some budget servers which are not at all good for production servers planned for web hosting services due to their inability to upgrade in future (Like xpress servers). Moreover the price isn’t really right for the same set of hardwares with some other budget provider. We have been using budget servers for our backup servers which usually can hold tons of TBs of data.
We are currently using 3 different budget providers namely, limestonenetworks, honelive & dediserv.eu. They are pretty cheap and I am amazed with their network and hardware performance. Limestonenetwork is probably a little priced than the others, but it definitely has the best uptime till far. Since last 3 months, Softlayer network uptime has been draining. They are continously running network maintenances and I just hope that would solve the poor performance as earliest possible. I have seen 100% uptime with Softlayer for long, that is probably why, I still have the confidence on them.
We have nearly 2TB backup in our limestonenetwork backup server. The biggest backup server we are currently using is from Honelive. It seems a pretty nice company who owns their own hardwares. This box is located at New Jersey. I had been able to get a custom deal of 4TB storage at a dirty cheap rate. This server is honestly performing so well. I can remember my first day with a 2TB harddrive when Softlayer first released them. It was an absolute nightmare. I had to change that hard drive twice before being able to get a neat one (and many fsck). Eventually I had it removed a couple of months back as it was of no need. We had then shifted our other backup server to Honelive. I am not absolutely sure about the support of Honelive, as they don’t have a seperate helpdesk for support. They mostly answer to questions using emails. I haven’t raised any ticket although since I have bought the server. This is eventually a backup server, and I don’t mind slow response time for the price we are paying to Honelive. I expect a better hardware and network uptime rather than support performance for a backup server. We are mostly using LSN for Dallas based servers & HL for Seattle, Washington & partial Dallas based servers.
The last budget provider I have using is a European hosting company. It is a Poland based company called “dediserv.eu”. They seem to have colocated rackspace with EvoSwitch (Holland) & Equinix (Germany). They might not have absolute stunning network uptime like limestonenetwork but their service & price is pretty awesome. The only problem I had with them was recently about a fan issue. It did cause a good sum of downtime, but it was fixed after all at the end. I have been using EvoSwitch DC, but due to a recent issue they offered me a upgraded hardware at the same price in Equinix DC. I have never used German server before (Tried OVH, but not Equinix), till far it is doing pretty good. I am using this server for both backup purposes and some websites. It is cost effective and European 🙂
We still have a small UK based VPS for our VPN (Virtual Private Network) services. We use this network for security purposes of our internal tunnel. This VPS is purchased from ThrustVPS. They seem to have a lots of complaints but yet, their prices are unbeatable. I didn’t expect a perfect uptime when I had chosen that small box, but it is still doing pretty good job and I do not really have a lot of complaints against them considering they are a budget vps hosting provider.
Here are the links of the providers: