Positive experience with Dacentec

I purchased one of their RTO options which was delivered within 24 hours of payment being made.

 

Sales and support were very helpful throughout with ticket response times at all hours of the day measured in minutes rather than hours.

 

The control panel they offer is a Hostbill + Noc-PS setup, which works well although some of the options available are not clear; however I get the feeling if I opened a ticket for clarification they would be more than happy to assist.

 

They attached a KVM (Lantronix) within 30 minutes of a request being put in and even offered to create a bootable USD drive of the OS free of charge as I was having issues loading it via remote media.

 

I had an issue with networking. I didn't really have time to fully diagnose if the issue was Dacentecs fault or my own. I believe it to be arp related however couldn't pin down the exact reason. Dacentec did offer to look into the issue (log into the server etc). By this time I had decided to just cancel the server.

 

After looking over the terms a few days later I noticed they offer a refund period, although I was just outside of this. I put in a request if I could maybe receive a pro-rata refund as credit for the time remaining on the server. Dacentec instead issued a full refund.

 

The only comment I'd made on the RTO options is the upgrades can work out quite pricey over the period of the rental. The virtualisation node with 24GB of RAM is $300 more expensive over the rental period than the same non-virt node with same specs, but only 16GB of RAM. So you are paying $300 for 8Gb of RAM. It's often better to simply take the base spec and then upgrade it yourself at the end of the RTO.

 

Overall it was a very good experience and I may consider them for some testbed projects in the future.

I have rented a server with them since September last year and I have been loving it. For a while I thought that the network issues they had were there issues, but it is actually the Broadcom NIC itself. You need to disabled large checksum offloading in the driver and the packet loss stops. I'm going to try disabling all offloading soon. I found this out from this site here: http://monolight.cc/2011/08/flow-control-flaw-in-broadcom-bcm5709-nics-and-bcm56xxx-switches/

It's been about three days since I found this out and I have not had a random network issue since. I found this out by using a KVM on the server for three days straight every time the network died, and they did not charge me a cent for using the KVM.

I also love their support, they usually always respond in less than half an hour. The only negative things I can say about them is that outbound port 25 is blocked by default, which confused me because I just expect email to work right away. I'm loving them and use the server for almost everything.

Their gear is quirky as others have pointed out...  Unsure if they've finally documented all this stuff and made available for new customers (doubt they have).

In past with a HP model there debugged SATA issues which kept disk speeds low... Post-fix, much better.

Their provisioning system is great.

The offers are less compelling though than they were a year or more ago.  Aged gear.

Fine place for non-high visibility projects, backups, etc.   Selling stuff off their gear, like VPS, blah.

I love my Dacentec server. $50/month for dual Xeons, 16GB of RAM, 4x15k SAS drives with HW RAID10 can't be beat. I use my server on a daily basis and it's always up when I need it.

Oh, and the /64 of native IPv6 is the cherry on top (single-homed HE, but better than a tunnel or nothing).

Uptime Stats

KuJoe said:

I love my Dacentec server. $50/month for dual Xeons, 16GB of RAM, 4x15k SAS drives with HW RAID10 can't be beat. I use my server on a daily basis and it's always up when I need it.

Oh, and the /64 of native IPv6 is the cherry on top (single-homed HE, but better than a tunnel or nothing).

Uptime Stats


2013-08 - 100%
2013-09 - 99.762%
2013-10 - 99.823%
2013-11 - 100%
2013-12 - 99.809%
2014-01 - 100%
2014-02 - 99.993%
2014-03 - 99.964%
2014-04 - 100%
249 Day Average - 99.92%

Click to expand...

Might be wrong but I think you can get a /48.

mcmyhost said:

Might be wrong but I think you can get a /48.

Click to expand...

Oops! You're correct. I just checked the ticket again and they did give me a /48. Good catch.

We have a project to turn up IPv6 with our other peers and providers.

We also have wiki.dacentec.com where we are trying to share best practices and info about our stuff. We have been posting bounties for documentation on things people ask about frequently and we are awarding hosting credit to people who share knowledge that helps others. Contact support if you want write access.

Thanks for all the kind words, the criticisms, and of course the business.

dacentec said:

We have a project to turn up IPv6 with our other peers and providers.

We also have wiki.dacentec.com where we are trying to share best practices and info about our stuff. We have been posting bounties for documentation on things people ask about frequently and we are awarding hosting credit to people who share knowledge that helps others. Contact support if you want write access.

Thanks for all the kind words, the criticisms, and of course the business.

Click to expand...

I love you in a platonic way. (Totally not creepy at all)

Adding on to what's already been said.  I've finished an RTO on my gear there and later moved out of there entirely (everything used was mostly for my own private uses).  

I loved it.  Unfortunately me moving halfway across the world didn't really do any good in terms of network, so I sold that server and moved out, but I'd be happy to return if needed.

Now the auto-provisioning system I have a love-hate relationship with.  It seems to be finicky at times.  Also I had hardware raid in place but it seems the OS Reinstall system would only install it on a single hard drive (basically screws up with the booting process and messing up with the raid and whatnot.  Just a bit funky here and there really).  Basically, I'd need a KVMoIP hooked up to fix and reinstall the OS (unfortunately would be informed to use the auto-provisioning system everytime, but hey it's there for convenience).  

But besides for the provisioning system that I think just didn't like my "situation", everything else was pretty good.  

Yeah it's a great location Mr. Pie for a personal or project box.. Not that the place isn't enterprise ready.  I just wouldn't run a VPS company on rented old gen gear.

Colo?  Perhaps I would, but I don't put colo on the US bookends.

Been hoping that Dacentec's parent / owner would expand the Dacentec model to their other datacenter locations.  Would be an industry disrupter.   Just saying.