How Very Tempting

I went over to 1&1 today to take care of some domain business (I've been using them for awhile, since their registration fee is just $6/year), and happened to look at their present deals for dedicated servers. Their deals are really getting sweet. For $89 you get a P4 2.4 GHz system (or better) with the ability to reimage the server if anything goes wrong, a serial console in case the network interface goes down, enough NAS backup space to backup the entire 80 gig hard disk, Plesk 7 Reloaded, an SSL cert and external firewall protection.

I'll tell you, it is tempting to contemplate moving over there from ServerMatrix/The Planet. I'm paying much more than that for a slower machine with fewer features. I'm not going to, because the Planet has serious support, provides some management services and a very clear way of specifying what to do in case of server failure. I also get RHEL out of the deal, which means the system has enterprise grade stable updates, rather than bleeding edge ones (1&1 uses Fedora Core 2).

I could lower my hosting prices if I went with this, and perhaps even turn a profit on hosting rather than breaking even, but it isn't worth it. When I had a shared hosting account, I opted for a more expensive provider that was better backed, and I hope to provide the same thing to my clients (and of course, myself). That's not to say I went with the most expensive provider, I've just always been suspicious of the deep-discounting hosts.

Still, if anyone signs up for a 1&1 server, I'd love to hear about your experiences.