Rackspace is a company - rack space is co-location, which is what I assume you are asking about. "Cloud hosting" is generally something completely different altogether.

As far as I know, Rackspace the company doesn't provide rack space, the co-location, in Australia, but I am not sure about that.

For colocation, I have never seen a "per gigabit" pricing scheme in Australia; everyone talks per megabit, because the costs range from like $50/megabit all the way up to $400/megabit. Gigabit, as you can see, gets expensive quickly.

What are your requirements, exactly?

Ah I see, makes sense.

It needs to be able to host some software that people can sign into, and also host various websites with which those people are associated. So the data transfer could go fairly high, but storage shouldn't be too much other than the pictures people might upload.

So exact requirements aren't known for now. I heard Amazon can do something like this in Australia (with a quick search it's Amazon S3?).

Hoping that all makes sense and the question was answered, still getting my head around this one!

Thanks for the replies. I've sent some emails out, just waiting on a response to see if we're looking at VPS as an option.

And if so, more than happy to hit up Mammoth Media for service!

Will bump/post in this thread once I have an answer.

Sounds good, trog.

Just received some more information. This is the request:

1. Data Center
2. Megabit Pricing
3. U Pricing

So I guess I need to change the topic to "Recommend Me: Data Center"

Not that I know the difference between a Data Center and somewhere that hosts VPS.

Sounds good, trog.

Just received some more information. This is the request:

1. Data Center
2. Megabit Pricing
3. U Pricing

So I guess I need to change the topic to "Recommend Me: Data Center"

Not that I know the difference between a Data Center and somewhere that hosts VPS.

If they are asking about price per megabit, data centres, and price per RU, then you will be best served by searching for places that offer co-location :)

As others have pointed out co-lo is old skool now though and its rarely worth the hassle!@#

Came in here expecting spoot, left disappointed.

Zakson, I do. Shoot me a PM if you want to chat

You could try iseek, we have 12 racks with them now, their eagle farm dc is tops

what is the australia only underscore all about and why not look at azure?

Personally, without even knowing the scenario and just basing on past experience, they only THINK they need dedicated server, and are just naive/scared about a shared vps scenario

Yeah, basically this. Unless your software is CPU bound you don't need dedicated. If you aren't planning to buy dual-processor, you don't need dedicated. If you aren't planning to spend $5,000 on the server ; you dont need dedicated.

Even if you are, I'd still tell you its likely to be a mistake; because now you're locked into one big server that *must not fail* or your entire service will go down. We run services like bigpondmovies.com across multiple VPS with 2-4GB of memory per VPS; this lets the load be spread across physical hosts while giving us redundancy.

Our VPS hardware has redundant disks, redundant NICs, and redundant power supplies plugged into separate power feeds. Its much less likely to fail than a "regular" server. Of course you can do this too, but its not cheap. Combine that with VPS on multiple hosts, and you can build a system thats much more reliable than you can do yourself without spending a LOT of money upfront.

^ Not really, if you were so inclined and already had hardware, you *could* get into it pretty cheap
If you had just spent X months building your you beaut software application or whatever, now you just need to move it into a DC

you're looking at

$1800-$3000/month for a decent datacenter with 15amps of power and a full rack
then you figure out how much bandwidth you need, say 20mbit to start with - that's another $1k a month

so you're looking at max $4k per month host upwards of 20 servers if you want to fully utilise the whole rack
that's a shit load of CPU time

On all things hosting, check out http://newrelic.com/ which is an awesome web server plugin that bridges the gap between server management & monitoring and application performance.

(it gives me wood).

One question though, a lot of people are recommending VPS, how much cheaper would it actually be?

It depends a bit on what timeframe you're looking at. If you buy hardware today and expect it to last you five years then you might come out ahead.

teq's numbers above are probably pretty accurate for hosting a full rack of gear (although I would say getting 20 servers in a 15 amp rack would prolly be a bit of a stretch?). Then you need to add your server costs on top of that.

With a VPS you can, right now, go to any random VPS hosting website (cough http://www.mammothvps.com.au/ ) and create a VPS. You can watch the operating system install, then 15-20 minutes later your VPS is online and ready to go, and it costs you like $40 (for a basic Windows server).

If you decide you need another server you can just repeat the process. It means you can scale up easily (if your application can scale horizontally, just adding new nodes will help absorb load).

On our platform you can, at any time, change your RAM/disk space allocation as well - e.g., if your shopping sites are struggling a bit with Xmas load with 2GB of RAM, you can just double your RAM (all it requires is a reboot) and hey presto, performance improvements.

edit: it should be noted that the entire AusGamers.com site now runs on Mammoth VPS; every aspect of it is now virtualised, including file serving, video streaming, database servers, front-end web servers, etc.

Ok we're going to submit a proposal over the next few days hoping to persuade to use a VPS instead of a Data Centre.

Thanks again for all the info & suggestions, has been a big help. Will let you know the verdict!

Just had a meetind and got some extra info, here's what the software is currently running on:

PowerVault MD3620f, 8Gb Fibre Channel, 24 Bay, 2 Controllers, Redundant Power Supply, Rackmount
341-4158
1
HD Multi-Select
331-3387
1
2x SFP, Fibre Channel 8, 8Gb
331-3387
1
2x SFP, Fibre Channel 8, 8Gb
318-1144
1
Bezel Assembly, MD3620f
330-6048
1
RackRails, RapidRails for Dell Rack
932-3317
1
Dell Hardware Limited Warranty Plus On Site Service Initial Year
936-4878
1
Dell Hardware Limited Warranty Plus On Site Service Extended Year
953-8702
1
ProSupport: Next Business Day Onsite Service After Problem Diagnosis, 2 Year Extended
953-8722
1
ProSupport: 7x24 HW / SW Tech Support and Assistance, 3 Year
956-9890
1
ProSupport: Next Business Day Onsite Service After Problem Diagnosis, Initial Year
989-3439
1
Thank you choosing Dell ProSupport. For tech support, visit http://support.dell.com/ProSupport or call 1-800-9
985-5398
1
Remote Implementation of a Dell PowerVault MD3xxx Subsystem (to schedule, email [email protected])
310-9965
1
Power Cord, NEMA 5-15P to C14,15 amp, wall plug, 6 feet / 2 meter
310-9965
1
Power Cord, NEMA 5-15P to C14,15 amp, wall plug, 6 feet / 2 meter
410-1074
1
No Additional Software
341-9998
5
Hard Drive Filler,Single Blank
342-2347
19
600Gb, SAS6Gb, 10K 2.5

Subtotal:
$18,938.64
Shipping & Handling:
$0.00
Tax:
$1,680.81
Environmental Disposal Fee:
$0.00
Total Price w/Discounts:
$20,619.45

So, while a lot of that is a foreign language to me and they won't mention what kind of processors are in there (some crazy amount of cores), I'm hoping it's enough information to help us get closer to a conclusion.

Would a VPS suffice? Apparently the software is CPU and RAM heavy, so personally I'm doubting the VPS route would be feasible, but I'm still too new to this to really know either way, hoping someone here knows!

There has been no mention of VM, so I think it's just really intense database processing.

That said, the Australian arm of the company won't need so much, so we're still looking into the possible solutions.

Yeh, if you actually do need a 24x bay drive filled with disks, a VPS might not be a great solution. Although that seems like a weird thing to need for something that is just running shopping carts (unless you are providing storage for all the customers assets etc, which is not an unreasonable thing to do).