Salient Soft

See this post of mine on PCG technical about what I am after, with links to a number of  hosters of interest.

More recently Rapidswitch were recommended, also on PCG. They are Maidenhead based, on the cordwallis estate. They offer dedicated servers starting at £45 pm – a better option than a virtualised one. Iomart Hosting are their parent company who also host under their own name.

Here is a copy of my PCG post, the link needs a login or it won’t show:-

I’m also looking for Java hosting. I’ll need to host Glassfish V3 and MySQL (might get away with just Tomcat and MySQL at a pinch, but Glassfish preferred).
I’ve seen companies such as this JSPZone and [DE]Systems Engineering who offer this starting at roughly £25-£30pm, but not sure they are any good. 2020media might be a possible but they are Tomcat only hosting. JSPZone is also hosted in NZ which is perhaps not the most net bandwidth friendly solution for a uk project.
I would prefer having a VPS running Ubuntu or similar that I could install what I like on – quite often I’ll need to install a particular patch release of some or other component in the software stack, and want complete freedom to be able to do this, along with the ability to bounce it all at will. I can also freely add anything else I fancy. Whilst this means more work in terms of building the server image etc. and maintaining it, I feel the extra freedom would be worth it. I’m assuming I’ve understood VPS hosting correctly here and that I can run whatever I like that runs on the target Linux version – please correct me if any caveats here!
For a VPS solution, I’ve seen companies such as Switchlink, UKHost4U and BOD Host offer this for a tad more (of order £35pm) but I have no idea if they are any good.
As well as particular hosting recommendations, I would be very interested if the panel experts know of a good review site that could help. I saw WebHostingStuff here, but was somewhat dismayed to see that 2 of the companies that our good friend Openstrike was rather less than complimentary about actually got reasonable reviews here and here. Obviously I am only interested in review sites whose opinion is, well, worth taking notice of.
I do get the feeling that finding a good hosting provider is about as easy as finding a good plumber or roofer
I won’t need this for a while yet, just planning ideas well ahead of time. Until I am a lot further down the road I won’t have any figures for bandwidth and space requirements. I presume I can move up from VPS hosting to dedicated server hosting, and also presume that a cloud solution like Amazon EC2 would allow me scaling on demand if I need it (albeit at a premium price). Again, any comments welcomed.
TIA
Steve

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Update 24/3/2011 09:08

The event log reported an error on boot today (after a very slow boot with a long blank screen), seemingly for SATA 3 again (unless I am still confused about how the port mapping works)!

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This is very strange as SATA 3 is no longer connected, so it appeared to be winging about an unused port. It is possible that Windows interrogated the port on boot and got an error even though nothing was connected, but it is still a bit weird. No immediate action has been taken – will monitor over the next few weeks.

The next step would probably be to add a new PCI express SATA controller and disable all the onboard SATA completely. This Startech controller offers 4 internal and 2 external ports, and needs a pci express X4 slot. It would therefore fit in the spare pci express X16 slot in my P6T, as pci express cards with less lanes can fit happily in a larger slot and use it partially. At the time of writing it is available from Lambdatek for around £66 inc VAT. It appears to get very mixed reviews, although my experience with startech has been good. A search did not reveal any other obvious cadidates for a reasonable price – just some higher end raid ones which also seem to have fans so hot and noisy as well as pricey!

Update 7/2/2011 12:54

I examined the event log again over the last few weeks and new errors were present for SATA 3:-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This appears to be a new problem affecting the Samsung 1TB data drive. The drive has therefore been moved to SATA 6 and will be monitored over the next month.
It is still not clear whether these issues are due to one or more faulty cables or to faulty ports on the motherboard. The next test will probably be to swap the cables for new ones and monitor again, as this is much easier and cheaper than a full motherboard swap. Given that a single cause is more likely than multiple independant failures (unless a whole batch of cables were faulty or of poor design), a fault on the motherboard looks most likely for all the issues.
As multiple disks have now been affected (The Vertex and one of the Samsungs), at least it does not appear to be a fault with a particular device.

Update 7/11/2010 8:33

I examined the event log and the drive error has not occurred since before moving the cable to port SATA 5 (last occurrence of error was 2/11/2010 at 9:51)
Therefore my conclusion is that either port SATA 1 on the motherboard is faulty, or there was a poor connection, or a faulty cable issue which has been rectified when the cable was moved.

I may try some further tests – perhaps moving back to port SATA 1 with a new cable to further narrow down the issue.
I will check again in a couple of weeks for any errors and perhaps try a further test then.

The good news is that the evidence does not point to a faulty OCZ Vertex drive.

I have had occasional drive errors logged, as follows :-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

It appears that this error relates to SATA 1, the OCZ Vertex, although the mapping between the event and the actual disk is hard to establish. There are Microsoft posts on how to do this here and here, however they do not use the same disk/port designation as above so they are not all that helpful.

The problem could be the drive, the motherboard controller, or the cable. To start to diagnose it, as at 12 noon on 2/11/2010 I have moved the OCZ Vertex onto Port SATA 5 with the same cable. I will monitor the issue and try further diagnosis over the next few days/weeks and post the outcomes here.

IF I do have to replace the existing OCZ Vertex (should be under warranty though…) there is now a Vertex 2 which is faster, and also a Vertex 2e which reduces the overprovisioning in the SSD. This overprovisioning is the area used for read-modify-writes/block cleaning where a block is swapped for one in the overprovisioning area. It is also used for wear levelling and bad block replacement. See here and here for for a discussion by AnandTech on this. See here for a  review of the Vertex 2e and comparisons with the Vertex 2.

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