Agnivo Roy

If you’ve read my last posts, you’d already know I ventured into building web proxies last month observing they are quite hot at the moment. Web proxies simply allow cloaked anonymous browsing of almost any site, mainly the ones blocked by content filters or firewalls at ISPs, organizations and workplaces. After a bit of research and reading different webmaster forums for days, I concluded that for a running successful network of web proxies, I’d need a decent dedicated server with ample bandwidth; because proxy sites chew up too much server resources and bandwidth.

I’m a regular at Web Hosting Talk forums (better known as WHT among informed webmasters) and began my search for the right cheap dedicated server provider in the offers section. I planned to test the waters before committing to a large proxy network, hence my budget was low (<$50). Most webmasters should think…what the hell? A decent server for under $50? impossible…isn’t it? But yes, the word “decent” is relative and server specs. you need depends upon the application.

On June 27th, I found an offer from DedicatedBox.net which was too good to resist. They were also running a double RAM and 500GB extra bandwidth special…something which I really needed within my low budget. After searching for reviews, I found some good ones and no noticeable bad reviews or feedback about them. So here’s what I finally got :

• AMD Athlon XP 2000+
• 1GB of DDR RAM
• 120GB EIDE Hard Disk
• 1500GB of monthly bandwidth on 100Mbps port
• CentOS 4 OS, unmanaged
• Free Plesk 30 domains license

Price ? Will you believe it ? $45 per month only I’m glad that I noticed their special promotion before it expired.

Now comes the 1 month review of DedicatedBox.net :

Company : Owned by Liroy from Holland, this company isn’t too old or too new, but good enough reviews at WHT to persuade me to buy their service. They own their equipment and colocate at the Market Post Tower DC, San Jose, California.

Sales, Support & Billing : Sales section was friendly and answered my pre-sales questions well. They were a bit slow to reply to my queries though. I’ve tried different times to be sure as time zone difference between us is huge.

Support is also by email, picked up as tickets. Support is decent and acceptable but won’t touch any advanced config as the box is unmanaged. Time taken for reply and action is a bit high; something not acceptable to many. I caught Liroy on MSN and he helped me a lot to quickly get my server up after I screwed up the kernel due to an error on my part.

Recently they’ve upgraded to a billing manager from manual invoicing.

Server Performance : Nothing to complain of in terms of hardware as they have been adding many all-new rack servers of late. Server specifications were as promised and they’ll replace any failed hardware component totally free of cost. No complaints regarding uptime. Server is still running smooth and there were no outages except when I rebooted the box myself and messed up some things.

Network : Upstream bandwidth providers are NTT, Verio and Cogent (labeled as international network of CoreISP.nl corp.). Well, I know some people don’t like Cogent, but I tried in and out speed tests, pings at different times of the day from various locations and were quite acceptable. No network outage till date. Yes, the speeds are quite good in the USA and Europe (obvious) and I’d say they have above average network. I get around 300ms ping time from India; pretty good for a US server. They also give a link for monitoring traffic through MRTG.

Conclusion : They say “You get what you pay for” and “There’s nothing called free lunch”. The same is very true for web hosting. Considering their server specs. and other offerings, I think I got a really good deal at $45 a month for the box to host some php based proxies.

Support is a bit slow and so it should be at this price; but acceptable. The free plesk 30 domains license would cost $10+ elsewhere…now think Overall, a dedicated server company with decent support, good reputation, above average network, good hardware quality hardware and stable servers.

If you’re looking for cheap servers (Athlon, Celeron, P4) for backup or hosting a few high-traffic sites, their low end offerings are simply great. But yes, look for their specials at WHT forums and you might save some extra money…