hey, i was wondering what you guys think of the best or best valued dedicated/VPS avalible? i really need help on deciding a new host as the current one i am is really....crap.. loosing like 50 bucks everytime it's down. The website i own uses around 8g per day and requires just under 15g of space. it would be good if it has cpanel aswell. hope to get opinions from you guys!! thanks
depending on how resource-intensive your site is, I would probably say that a VPS might not cut it for you. Now, depending on your server admin skills as to whether you should choose a self-managed, semi-managed or fully managed solution.
I've had great experiences with powervps.com in the past. Very responsive support and a good network.
I've used linode.com a while back, they're good but rather expensive for a good amount of RAM. For dedicated servers I've had a box from layeredtech.com for over a year now, the service has been good, and due to a deal at the time it is only working out to $55-65 a month. If you're using a lot of bandwidth, it might work out in your favour to split your content into two, host large files and images on a seperate "static" hosting account, and dynamic content on another server. This means you don't have to worry about finding one hosting service that gives good execution speeds *and* doesn't charge a huge amount for bandwidth. If you're technically minded, plugging into the amazon s3 system might be an idea.
I've used Pair(.com) for 8 years now, both for my sites and sites I designed for others. They're a steel fortress. No downtime, amazing software installed (FreeBSD platform), no cpanel but a great control panel of their own development. Their high-volume packages are great for image serving, they give you cheap bandwidth, and the dedicated servers are software-laden and support just about any kind of development you can imagine. I managed to compile stuff there easier than on my own computer. Best of all, they're tech gurus, not business types, they update the OS whenever it's needed, with minimum downtime, if at all, and you'll have the latest versions of Perl and PHP, along with legacy versions of your choosing. The hardware is top-notch two, on all layers. Check out their site, it'll tell you everything you need to know. I do some weird stuff with my accounts, and they've yet to let me down. Unless I need ASP, I don't bother looking at other hosts.