Goodbye colocation
We (SuperMotors) are nearing the end of our 2-year co-location agreement with ipHouse. Their service has been great, and it was nice to have our servers for SuperMotors located within walking distance of my old job in downtown Minneapolis. However, I’ve sinced relocated to North Carolina, so dealing with broken hardware or a misbehaving server is a little hard when the server is now an 18-hour drive (or 3-hour flight) away.

We have the wrong billing model
Additionally, we are realizing that the 95th-percentile billing model is very, very wrong for our type of traffic and our type of online business. Total data transferred is by far the better of the two from a cost and performance standpoint. We are billed on 95th percentile based on ipHouse’s billing model, not because they are evil in any way. We do not fault them at all for their billing methodology — you will find a mix of billing models with many hosting companies.

Searching for managed hosting
But, all is not lost. We are nearing the end of our contract (3/1/07) at the time of this writing, so I am doing my due-diligence in finding a reliable managed hosting provider for us. While we have some decent hardware that we will really have no use for after we switch from colocation to managed hosting, in the long run, and managed solution is better for us anyway. With me living on the east coast, Kirk and Elliot back in the midwest, it makes it hard to manage our own servers. Plus, Greensboro, NC isn’t really a hotbed of technology, so colocation options are few and far between…and a little on the pricey side. Neighboring cities such as Raleigh and Charlotte have viable options, but again, the convenience aspect is not there as those are both 60-minute and 90-minute drives, respectively. Not the type of response time to a server problem that we want to deal with. Nor is it convenient to drive that far if there’s a hardware problem.

So, managed hosting enters the picture. Wow, what a decision to make. We are essentially entrusting our entire business into the reliablity of another company. Previously, we at least owned our own equipment and could at any time take said equipment and put it somewhere else. Granted, we were in a 2-year contract with ipHouse, but it was always a nice safeguard to be able to just pull your equipment and essentially your data away from one place and put it at another place.

The Players
In my quest, I have found 3 managed hosting providers that I would consider trustworthy and reliable for the size of our online business. In no particular order, they are:

1. Rackspace
2. INetU
3. PEER 1

My delimma is a little more complex in that I’m used to managing our own servers and hardware, so it’s difficult giving up this level of control. Fortunately all 3 providers above provide full root access to the server. However, being the FreeBSD guy that I am, only INetU offers FreeBSD hosting among the 3. Rackspace and Peer 1 both offer Windows Server (heh) and Red Hat Linux Enterprise.

FreeBSD guy scared of Red Hat Linux Enterprise (yes, I’m not afraid to admit it)
Knowing very little about Red Hat Linux Enterprise is a concern to me. I’ve had experience working with it at Levolor as we have a load balanced and fully managed environment at Rackspace for Levolor.com. The support has been phenomenal, to say the least. INetU is significantly more expensive, but offers FreeBSD. Peer 1 I have no experience with, but has the best pricing, by leaps and bounds.

Decision to be made by 12/31/06
I will continue to post my findings as I work with sales reps from all three companies and compare pricing, services, and good ol’ fashioned “gut feel” as I work with each company. In the end, we will be comitting to a 1 or 2-year contract with whatever company we work with. As of this writing, Peer 1 is the most attractive deal, Rackspace a close second, and INetU a distant third. My decisions could easily be swayed in the next month as we aim to lock into a contract between the 12/31/06 and 1/31/07 timeframe.