Webmasters who create sites that grow beyond the capabilities of a Shared host are often faced with the daunting task of choosing a dedicated hosting provider. I’ve been all across town; hosting with ev1servers (now ThePlanet), iWeb Technologies, Mediatemple, and more who I dare not name as their respective levels of service do not deserve the attention. The biggest problem I’ve run into with these companies is support. I remember an instance with iWeb where my server went down at 8pm, and since their high level technicians were off for the day I had to wait until 8am to get service. Now not every situation with the aforementioned dedicated companies was that extreme, but they have their issues.

Back in December of 07 one of my largest websites suffered a DDoS attack. My datacenter (iWeb) said the only solution would be to shut down my servers, null route the ips and wait it out. After a few sleepless nights I came across SoftLayer, read about their Cisco Guard DDoS protection system. I went into a chat with sales, explained my situation and they went over my logs with me, outlined what hardware I should order and how they intend on thwarting the attack.

They put me on the Cisco Guard, monitored the attack and noticed a pattern from the attacker - they were all on a rare useragent and from Asia. SoftLayer developed a solution for me that would block all traffic from Asia with the useragent, and the attack came to an immediate halt.

Moving to SoftLayer ended up being a great decision, I’ve been with them ever since and have ordered 8 servers there. Their support is scary-good, every time I’ve called them, day or night, they have answered within 1 ring. Every ticket I have posted have been acknowledged within 10 minutes and acted on shortly after.

The most interesting service they offer is $3 administrative tickets. They do standard support tickets, hardware failures, server outages, etc. for free, but they’ll also do practically ANY administrative work on your server for just $3 a pop. Need Apache/PHP installed? Done. Memcached? Done. JPG Delagates for ImageMagick? Done and done. This makes running a dedicated server as an amateur, or even an experienced professional who just doesn’t have time - easy as pie.

Their management portal is very slick, giving you so much control over your server that it’s hardly ever necessary to make a ticket asking for support. From rebooting your server to reloading the whole OS, it can all be done automatically with the push of a button.

I could gush all day about SoftLayer and how they’re on a whole different level than the competition - but I’d feel silly if I said any more here. I highly recommend them for a website (or group of websites) of any shape & size.

http://www.softlayer.com