After nearly 20 years of hosting one or more servers of one kind or another in my home, I'm moving my servers to ServerBeach. Many of you know that I have a pretty extensive network setup here, with a professional grade firewall, standby power generation, line stabilized UPS units, and almost 5000 feet of CAT 5e cable drops. So why would I switch?

Its reliability and cost. Its going to cost me less than half what I currently pay for my dedicated net connection with hosting privileges to house the servers out there. On top of that, I don't have to purchase or maintain the hardware. Better still, the servers will live in a secure, stable, monitored environment with multiple redundancies on both power and internet connectivity. All that, and I'll have single digit latencies to nearly anywhere, and transfer rates that are not to be believed.

I ordered the first of the two servers today (I'll add the second one once I have the first up and stable). Its an Athlon 2600 processor with a pair of good drives, running Fedora Core 3 linux. I'm a fair to middle linux guy-- experienced but not completely comfortable. It took about 30 minutes to get used to the setup, learn their nifty web based admin tool (and use ssh as well, which I'll usually do), and lock the machine down tight. That includes shutting down unwanted processes (like sendmail) and using IPCHAINS to protect the machine.

I made a mistake with IPCHAINS and locked myself off the box, so I clicked the option on the "My ServerBeach" page for "Rapid Rescue" and a minute later used SSH to log into a "safe mode" of some kind where the machine was booted on another partition. I mounted the primary drive, edited the firewall config and booted and all was good. Sweet.

I'm very impressed with this service, price, and speed. All that said, they have a good referral program, so if you do sign up, get with me and we can both save some pretty good bucks. http://www.serverbeach.com/catalog/index.php?REF=8399GY7UFD