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So I'm absolutely stumped about what to do. I have a very nice server I bought over a year ago colocated here in NYC at Peer1. They have been great. Zero problems. But this maybe goes to prove the saying "you get what you pay for" because they are at the expensive end of the cost spectrum for colocation (not way out of line or anything - just at the expensive end of the reasonable spectrum.)
My problem is that I have one project that needs more bandwidth. But it's a little bit of a sideline project, and I can't really dump tons more money into it. That pretty much rules out the easy option which would just be to buy more bandwidth from Peer1 (although that would be so easy I still do think about it.)
Another option would be to move to a facility with some economy bandwidth (really that pretty much means one thing - Cogent bandwidth.) Economy doesn't necessarily mean bad, but just toward the cheaper end of the spectrum. Maybe they oversell their capacity a bit, and/or maybe they don't respond quite as well to issues, and/or maybe latency can be a little high. On the other hand, prices can be significantly cheaper. Like starting at half as much. So in terms of bang for the buck it appears to me like it might be worth it. Of course you don't really know until you use it yourself. How much is a headache worth? How much is worrying about a headache worth?
Then there is the third option, which is to split the difference. I could move my bandwidth hungry project, along with some other hobby projects, to some place with cheaper Cogent bandwidth, and then keep my business customers at a higher quality location. To do that I could either buy another server (would be cheap since I wouldn't need much storage or really much horsepower considering how crazy powerful even entry level servers are today,) or I could even just get a dedicated server somewhere (which would mean some of the administration worries would be lifted from me and placed on the company I was buying from - maybe not a bad idea since I'm at best only a average unix admin.)
And Peer1 actually has another venture called ServerBeach that I could use. You pay monthly for your own server which they supply and initially configure (in a pretty minimal way.) Then I would get root access and could finish the setup however I wanted (i.e., they'd install CentOS 4.4 with all latest patches, along with Apache, PHP, and MySQL - but I'd have to set up mail servers and DNS if I didn't want to use theirs, and anything else I needed to customize - plus I'd be responsible to keep it up to date from there.) That's a pretty attractive solution. One great thing is that customers can log into a web based control panel (not on your server - on the main ServerBeach servers) and power cycle (reboot) your machine remotely. This would give me a lot of peace of mind. Especially now that I have been doing some traveling - it would be great to know I could (most likely) bring the machine back from any issues from anywhere in the world. And then on top of that, if there was some issue I couldn't solve, I could pay them to try to solve it. In my present situation I don't even have that option - I'm really on my own.
Does it sound like I've already made up my mind? Maybe I have. But it's still hard to pull the trigger. Do I really need two machines? This server has been up for over a year and hasn't really had any issues. Maybe I'm being too cautious? I could just move everything to the cheaper bandwidth, and it might well be fine. That would save me money, and the headache of having two machines. But then what if something did go wrong? And in any case, doing anything that involves leaving my present situation is going to be a hassle involving some downtime for the sites I already have up. So I definitely want to get it right the first time.
The only other option is the one I have been taking - keep thinking about it and putting off the decision. That's okay for a while, especially if you really are thinking about it and learning more, but I'm going to have to make up my mind soon. Tick tick tick....