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I have this kind of a situation where I have a server located in North of America, however, a majority of my clients are from Europe. So, I found a few companies which provide servers which are located in Eastern Europe. The companies are: BalticServers and Hetzner. Some people I've talked promised me that it would solve my ping problems. In this case I will have to migrate my project to another server.

Currently I have a server which has 2 CPU's and 2 SSD's running on Ubuntu 14.04. The system of my project calculates a lot of information and provides results to end user.

Thus, I don't really want to hire any system administrator and BalticServers promises a free migration with an extra charge of server maintenance. As far as I understand it is a great deal, however, Hetzner offers a better price and I am not quite sure if I should choose a cheaper solution and find a system administrator or just pay a little bit more and leave things to BalticServers?

Do you have any suggestions regarding this matter?

EEAA
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Min
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  • Hetzner are well priced so long as you have someone on hand who knows what they're doing and who can fix most issues themselves. Hetzner OOB access is limited too. – user9517 Jul 21 '15 at 07:51
  • @Iain Hetzner give you access to the iDRAC but only on their higher end stuff. The lower end servers have little or no OOB access. – Michael Hampton Jul 21 '15 at 15:49
  • @MichaelHampton The Hetzner website claims that they have a limited number of physical kvm switches per DC that can be attached, that's why I thought it worth mentioning. – user9517 Jul 21 '15 at 17:05
  • @Iain OOB access at Hetzner might be limited, but what they do have have worked fine for my needs. Through their web interface you can schedule a rescue image to be netbooted next time the machine reboots. Through the same web interface you can trigger a reset of the server. As far as I can tell that web interface does have access to hardware which can trigger the reset line on each physical machine. – kasperd Jul 21 '15 at 20:49
  • @kasperd it's entirely fine for my needs too but like I said with Hetzner you need to know what you're doing. If something goes wrong the rescue system isn't the friendliest of places to be especially if you're not a confident sysadmin. – user9517 Jul 21 '15 at 21:23
  • @Iain True. You do indeed know what you are doing in order to make use of the rescue system. – kasperd Jul 21 '15 at 21:40

2 Answers2

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A lot depends on your actual usage, application stack and architecture, which makes answering your question almost as much a matter of opinion as technical fact.

Geographical distance matters in latency, so moving your server closer to your principal users makes some sense, although in many use-cases employing a CDN might effectively achieve the same result, without moving your server and improves latency for almost all of your users.

As a professional I'm all for people hiring a professional sysadmin, rather then enthousiasts setting up their systems and then not maintaining them.

A hosting provider offering managed services and including the migration as an incentive for signing a long term contract (rather a monthly subscription you can terminate any time) might be a very cost-effective method to access professional sysadmin services.
But read the fine-print, they may only do the routine stuff, such migrating a LAMP stack, continuos maintenance in the form of rolling out upgrades and security patches within the same major release, reboots etc. But are monitoring (and acting on alerts), back-up and restore, performance tuning part of their offering too, or potential extra's?

Since remote server administration is possible from nearly anywhere on the globe, the alternative is to go for cheaper hosting (that only provides hardware support and network connectivity) and hiring your own part-time professional sysadmin. That allows you to hire somebody within your own time-zone, who speaks the same language and who is independent and not bound to the service offering of a single provider.

HBruijn
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  • Yes, I completely agree with you. I'm trying to save as much money as I can and hiring a new employee is just not that I afford at the moment. As long as they prepare me a server with an exact LAMP configuration I'll be fine with that. My developer team works with Laravel. They need an environment to set it up and we are ready to deploy it. If we purchase a server from BalticServers, they will maintain my server by making it updated for a small amount of price instead of hiring a sysadmin. I'm not sure if I need a sysadmin for a longer time than only for migration and basic implementations... – Min Jul 21 '15 at 10:53
  • Anyhow, have you ever heard about BalticServers? Their data center is located in Eastern Europe. I would be pleased if you could share with me some of the data centers you trust and know from Eastern Europe or close to Russia? Thanks in advance. – Min Jul 21 '15 at 10:53
  • I have never heard of BalticServer, but there must many more service providers I don't know, than I do know. A managed server is a good method to get access to skills you yourself don't have. – HBruijn Jul 21 '15 at 15:02
  • @Min Anywhere in Europe will have good latency to Russia and eastern European states. You only really need to move into the same country if you are serving online games (and even then maybe not). As for hiring a sysadmin, that's certainly not enough work for a full time position! An hour a month would be typical. You can find someone who already does this sort of thing, such as a managed service provider. – Michael Hampton Jul 21 '15 at 15:55
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I have been a Hetzner customer for close to three years. In most areas I have been satisfied with the service I have been getting. I have tried a few other providers, but so far I haven't found another where I felt I was getting better service.

I am not relying on Hetzner for system administration. I do remote administration of the servers myself. So I am only in contact with their support when there is either a hardware problem needing hands on the hardware or there is any issue with the network.

Availability on physical servers from Hetzner is better than the availability of their VPS solution.

kasperd
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