Member Avatar for Eric HRF

Well I decieded to quit renting an entire server (We have 4 websites on a dedicated server), to owning instead. So I bought a 1u Dell 1850 Rack Server, and am going to co-locate it at cihost.com. In a nutshell it's about 2" tall, 19" wide, and 30" deep. It has Dual 2.8 Ghz 64 bit Xeon processors, 800 mhz front side bus, 2 Gigs DDR2 400mhz RAM, 2 x 146 Gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives, RAID 1 SCSI, etc...Read the spec sheet below for more.

Running our few websites it will be like 747 hauling around 5 passengers...No load at all. And CI Host (The servers new home) has redundant Gigabit connections to the Internet. We will have a 100Mbit connection to the NOC. This 1u colocation with 1500 GB xfer a month is only $50.00!!! :)

[221-5193] 2.8GHz/1MB Cache, Xeon 800MHz Front Side Bus for PowerEdge 1850
[311-3579] 2.8GHz/1MB, Xeon, 800MHz FrontSide Bus 2nd processor for PowerEdge 1850
[311-3590] 2GB DDR2 400MHz (2X1GB) Single Ranked DIMMs
[310-5017] No Keyboard Option
[320-0058] No Monitor Option
[320-3866] Riser,ROMB,PCI-X,PE1850
[341-0853] 146GB,U320,SCSI,1IN 10K;PE1850
[463-7994] Embedded RAID - PERC4 EmbeddedIntegrated
[341-0838] No Floppy Drive
[420-4077] No Operating System, Microsoft
[310-0024] Mouse Option None
[430-8991] Dual On-Board NICS ONLY
[313-2424] 24X IDE CD-ROM
[313-2421] Bezel for PE1850
[310-5218] Electronic Documentation and OpenManage CD Kit, PE1850
[341-0859] 146GB,U320,SCSI,1IN 10K;PE1850
[341-0865] MR1, Drives attached to PERC4ei
[310-5669] Rack Chassis w/Versarail RoundHole-Universal for 3rd-party racks, PE1850
[310-5214] Non-Redundant Power Supply PE1850

Eric HRF

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Dani AI

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Practical checklist and tips for anyone moving a 1U rack server into colo — focused on making the box actually reliable in the real world. Given the concerns flagged by and about provider reliability, assume the colo can and will fail occasionally; design so you can recover fast.

Add reliable out‑of‑band access and power resilience. Fit an out‑of‑band management card or confirm remote KVM/serial-console and remote‑hands availability from the colo. If the unit or rack doesn’t give you redundant power feeds, arrange either a redundant PSU or redundant PDU feeds so a single power fault doesn’t kill the machine. Put a spare NIC or add a PCI card and use link bonding for simple network failover.

Automate monitoring and quick restores. Ship RAID/BBU and chassis alerts offsite, and forward syslog/alerts to a monitoring host (Nagios/Zabbix or hosted alerting). Test that vendor RAID messages reach your phone/email. Use offsite syncs and practice restores — a backup that hasn’t been tested is useless. Example rsync pattern (use with care — test before automating):

rsync -az --partial /var/www/ backup@backup.example.com:/backups/webroot/

Keep retention and --delete policies explicit so you don’t wipe the wrong data.

Keep firmware, drivers and your OS stack aligned. Update BIOS and RAID firmware during a maintenance window, verify kernel/driver compatibility, and run SMART / hardware checks where possible. Schedule a quarterly failover test (DNS, restore, and network tests) and log the results.

Good call by to separate primary and backup locations — splitting providers reduces single‑point risk. Prioritize out‑of‑band access, power/network redundancy, automated alerting, and tested restores; those four things cut most colo headaches.

Recommended Answers

All 13 Replies

Member Avatar for Dani

Sorry, but I used to be with CI Host, and I can tell you that their network is really bad. Continuous downtime. It's really terrible. :-/

Member Avatar for Eric HRF

Sorry, but I used to be with CI Host, and I can tell you that their network is really bad. Continuous downtime. It's really terrible. :-/

Was this recently? I hope things have gotten better :o Will you PM me some good alternatives please.

Eric HRF

Member Avatar for jackoamerica

Well I decieded to quit renting an entire server (We have 4 websites on a dedicated server), to owning instead. So I bought a 1u Dell 1850 Rack Server, and am going to co-locate it at cihost.com. In a nutshell it's about 2" tall, 19" wide, and 30" deep. It has Dual 2.8 Ghz 64 bit Xeon processors, 800 mhz front side bus, 2 Gigs DDR2 400mhz RAM, 2 x 146 Gig 10,000 RPM SCSI drives, RAID 1 SCSI, etc...Read the spec sheet below for more.

Running our few websites it will be like 747 hauling around 5 passengers...No load at all. And CI Host (The servers new home) has redundant Gigabit connections to the Internet. We will have a 100Mbit connection to the NOC. This 1u colocation with 1500 GB xfer a month is only $50.00!!! :)

[221-5193] 2.8GHz/1MB Cache, Xeon 800MHz Front Side Bus for PowerEdge 1850
[311-3579] 2.8GHz/1MB, Xeon, 800MHz FrontSide Bus 2nd processor for PowerEdge 1850
[311-3590] 2GB DDR2 400MHz (2X1GB) Single Ranked DIMMs
[310-5017] No Keyboard Option
[320-0058] No Monitor Option
[320-3866] Riser,ROMB,PCI-X,PE1850
[341-0853] 146GB,U320,SCSI,1IN 10K;PE1850
[463-7994] Embedded RAID - PERC4 EmbeddedIntegrated
[341-0838] No Floppy Drive
[420-4077] No Operating System, Microsoft
[310-0024] Mouse Option None
[430-8991] Dual On-Board NICS ONLY
[313-2424] 24X IDE CD-ROM
[313-2421] Bezel for PE1850
[310-5218] Electronic Documentation and OpenManage CD Kit, PE1850
[341-0859] 146GB,U320,SCSI,1IN 10K;PE1850
[341-0865] MR1, Drives attached to PERC4ei
[310-5669] Rack Chassis w/Versarail RoundHole-Universal for 3rd-party racks, PE1850
[310-5214] Non-Redundant Power Supply PE1850

Eric HRF

lucky u, congrats!!!!

the administrator is very cute over here he he :lol:

Member Avatar for blud

Love the specs on the machine, as cscgal said though, I would actually stay away from CI-Host, I did host there one time, because, I'll try *anything* once, and it isn't going to happen again.

However for the amount of bandwidth your getting for the price, and that allow co-location, seems like a pretty good deal.

Member Avatar for jackoamerica

search Google for CI Host, u see a lot of problems, complaints.

Member Avatar for zeroth

the specs look great...

Member Avatar for Eric HRF

Hey Folk',

I was locked into 1 year with CI Host, because I signed up for a "Crazy Deal". Well, I'll get back to them later...

I chose Burstnet for the Dell. They treated me like I was first and only customer! They installed CentOS 3.4 with Cpanel, put the rails on, and hooked the NIC to the NOC. No sweat, that Dell runs like a clock, and damn it's FAST!

Anyways, I bought a smaller 1u AMD Athlon to go to CI Host. It's a backup for backups on the Dell.

Thank's for the heads up on CI Host everybody. Hopefully I'll have a good year...

Eric

Member Avatar for blud

Sweet, good choice!

Man I wish I had a dell, heh.

Member Avatar for Dani

The folks over at CI Host are really nice. Their network is the thing that absolutely sucks.

Member Avatar for movielad

Well, Dells are very nice, but I much prefer the power of the Opteron. The problem is that there are still too few dedicated server providers that supply them. The next desktop machine will be a dual core Athlon64 x2 too. ;)

M.

Member Avatar for Dani

I hate to bring up an old thread but Eric, I was just wondering how you made out with CI Host?

Member Avatar for blud

And while the old thread is active, how is the dell?

*I just got a new desktop myself*

Member Avatar for Eric HRF

I hate to bring up an old thread but Eric, I was just wondering how you made out with CI Host?

I have the the Dell at Burst NET, and we put a smaller AMD machine at CI Host. So far so good...We just use it for backups.

Eric

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