Servers.com review | TechRadar
Servers.com is a relatively new hosting provider, having only been founded in 2014 by a group of hosting industry veterans. However, with over 1,000 customers (most of whom are businesses of good standing) and 18 data centers worldwide, it has risen in popularity over the years.
The provider might not have a long list of products, unlike the competition, but it’s a top choice if you’re looking for dedicated servers with cloud benefits. It offers hybrid cloud-ready hosting solutions as well as computing, storage, and networking services to businesses of all sizes.
In this Servers.com review, I’ll take a deeper look into the service’s products, ease of use, performance, and customer support, as well as how it stacks up against the top dogs in the industry.
Plans and pricing
Dedicated server hosting, unlike shared hosting, is a single-user environment where the user does not need to share the server’s resources. You can add as many websites as you want to your server and you will have root access to the physical server’s resources, including CPU, RAM, storage, operating system, and bandwidth.
Servers.com offers high-performance dedicated servers with the flexibility of the cloud. There’s a nifty Filter section where you can select from the many locations on offer (North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe), up to 24 drives and 1536 GB of RAM, and the currency of your choice.
The cheapest server “Dell R220″ with Intel Xeon E3-1231v3, 2 drives, 32 GB of RAM, and 4 network adaptors is priced at a reasonable $104.90 a month. You also get disk management capabilities, various server management interfaces, 24/7 dedicated customer support, and direct access to your server via an out-of-band (OOB) management system.
Next up are Servers.com’s dedicated cloud servers, which start at $4.97 per month for 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, and 30 GB of SSD storage. You can go up to 64 GB of RAM, 16 vCPU, and 640 GB of SSD storage, which will then cost you $639.95 per month. With these cloud servers, you get 100% SSD storage, automatic backup for added redundancy, 40 GB of bandwidth, and OpenStack API support.
In addition to load balancing services and two types of private cloud, Servers.com also offers reliable cloud storage with support for backup tools such as Veeam, Duplicity, and Cloudberry. Plans start at $71.68 per month for 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of traffic usage. There’s also a firewall service, starting at $49.70 per month for 1 instance and 1 TB of traffic usage, that will block all unwanted traffic and prevent data leaks. It’s well worth noting that prices differ slightly depending on the location you choose.
Ease of use
Creating an account with Servers.com is a pretty straightforward process. Go to its Customer Portal and hit Join. Next, enter your email address, carefully read and agree to its Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, and then press Join again.
Once you verify your email address—which you will have to do within 24 hours—create a strong password and press Proceed. The last step is to enter the necessary information regarding your account, such as account type, currency, full name, billing address, etc. Once done, click Save to create your account.
Servers.com’s main dashboard, or the control panel, has a clean design, and all of the options (servers, firewalls, SSL certificates, account settings, etc.) are neatly arranged on the left-hand side menu. You can also configure anything you like from the control panel, including VMs, dedicated servers, and firewall, as well as perform DNS health checks in real time.
In addition to automated daily backups, which you don’t have to worry about first-hand, you also get a handful of nifty add-ons, such as servers troubleshooting tools and server health checks.
Plus, as a cloud provider, auto-scaling is one of the key benefits of Servers.com, and it doesn’t disappoint when it comes to that. Scaling up or down happens on the fly, and you can automate the deployment and management of your VMS.
Speed and experience
Servers.com has a redundant network, i.e., all its servers (which are nicely spread across the USA, Netherlands, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Hong Kong) are connected to three different networks: the Internet, Servers.com’s free GPN (Global Private Network), and an out-of-band management network.
Furthermore, its free global private network is protected on both logical and physical levels, so you can rest assured that you will enjoy fast and safe data transfers. What’s more, GPN gives you the option to organize the interaction of your servers without having to use VPNs or any additional tunneling.
Although we don’t have exact uptime numbers, Servers.com posts and continually updates the round-trip times to and from every single one of its servers.
Support
Servers.com has a comprehensive knowledge base with detailed and easy-to-understand guides on just about everything from how to set up an account to managing the service on Linux (or Windows) to details about its various products and services, including how they work.
For instance, under “Windows administration,” there are quick guides on how you can protect your account from brute-force lockout, connect to a Windows server, and provide Servers.com’s tech support team with network diagnostic results. Even better, there’s also a nifty search bar on the first page of the knowledge base, so you can quickly find what you need help with.
If the knowledge base isn’t able to provide you with what you’re looking for, you also have the option to reach out to Servers.com’s agents via online chat, email (support@servers.com), or by creating a ticket. In my limited experience with the platform, I found the agents to be super helpful and quick with their responses—so much so that the absence of telephone support is barely an inconvenience.
The competition
InMotion Hosting currently sits at the top of our best dedicated server hosting guide, thanks to class-leading security—free SSL certificates, a custom firewall, DDoS protection, auto-updates, and heavily guarded data centers. Plus, all of these come included with the plan you choose, unlike with Servers.com, where services like firewall and load balancing cost extra.
However, InMotion dedicated hosting plans are only available for Linux, meaning Windows users will be better off with Servers.com. Very large-scale businesses will also like Servers.com better; where InMotion Hosting caps out at 512 GB of RAM (nothing to sniff at, by the way), Servers.com can go as high as 1.5 TB of RAM.
ScalaHosting, the best cloud hosting provider right now, is also a noteworthy Servers.com alternative. It offers a geo-redundant network, lots of customization options, a custom control panel, and anytime unconditional money-back guarantee. However, Servers.com is slightly better since it offers true auto-scaling, which ScalaHosting does not.
Final verdict
To conclude, Servers.com is a well-rounded option for medium- to large-scale businesses looking for dedicated or cloud servers with auto-scaling and geo-redundancy. The provider has a global private network that spans across three continents, ensuring reliability and good performance.
Servers.com is also easy to use and fairly priced, and its 24/7 customer support (as well as an in-depth knowledge base) will help you out on the fly and ensure a smooth experience. There are lots of plans to choose from, which can be confusing, but a 10-day money-back guarantee means that you can try Servers.com out without risking a single penny.
Source: www.techradar.com
