We struggled with this several months ago.
While price was important... reliability and support were more important. I've got a full time job and need to do my site stuff in the wee hours of the morning and on weekedns. I need support when I need it... and having a dedicated server isn't as "dummy proof" as shared hosting.... this I have learned.
We settled on
RackSpace and I would highly recommend them to anyone.
I am on our site ALL the time..... like almost 24x7... between the other admin and I we are almost always on...refreshing every minute on the who's online page if not reading/posting. The site has never been down... except for a 20 minute scheduled maintenance thing where they upgraded their power backup systems at their facilities and had to reboot everyone. We knew about it ahead of time...and it was a short outage.
When we switched our members commented on how much faster the site seemed. We were no longer "sharing" with a server or database. It just zipped along.
They claim they have "fanatical" support, and they DO. You can call them up at 3 am on a Sunday evening....and usually in 2 or 3 rings... you can speak to someone. Yes... a LIVE person... no touchtone maze!
And they aren't just "dummy" people answering the phone... they can answer the questions and do tech stuff.
I've never really had a "service" issue... other than there were things I didn't know how to do. Like I needed to adjust the filesize in the php.ini and didn't know how. I opened a trouble ticket... and within like 5 mintues there was a response that my request was transfered to "Support Team B" (which is my team). Then like 15 minutes later (20 minutes total) I got a reply that the change was made. Simple. That was it.
If I get confused as to how to set up a domain or something... they have walked me through how to do things on the phone.... and/or have walked me through where to find the step by step instructions.
So I can't speak well enough of their 24x7 Fanatical Customer Service. They mean it. I'd bet the farm on their support in a heart beat.
They probably won't be the "cheapest" source out there. But then with cheap you never know if you've got some kid in his basement hosting your site. LOL
For us a decent dedicated server started at around $200/mo. We have added some extras to it very recently.
You can visit their site and build a server and get a price. Ours came with Unix (you can choose OS) and MySQL, Apache etc.. installed. I've only installed stuff for threads and photopost and neomail and myphpadmin which were no big deal. Everything else was there.. ready to use from a great "Webmin" interface that lets you do everything.
They offer "burstable bandwidth" which was important to us. Sometimes we get mentioned in an article or on TV or Radio and the traffic goes 20 fold in like a day... they can handle the extra bandwidth. They also have a 2 hour hardware replacement guarantee.... so if anything "breaks" they will be able to get us running fast.
Check them out. As I said... probably not the cheapest. But you wouldn't be disappointed. Their number is 1-800-961-2888... check it out... a HUMAN will answer!
Good Luck with your search!
