Selecting a Server Management Company

[Hobbs]

I am considering to hire a professional server management company to free a hand and start persuing my long list of pending projects, I intend to particularly use them in security hardening and server optimization as well as monitoring, my choice will be based on professionalism, compitance and reasonble monthly rates.

Here is a list of the companies I am looking at right now:

ServerWizards
easyservermanagement
platinumservermanagement
rfxnetworks
geeks4help
got-management
touchsupport
totalserversolutions
actsupport
ncmanage

Any recomendations or warnings?

[edited by: Hobbs at 11:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2006]

[Hobbs]

Any one using such a service or one of those companies?

[The Contractor]

I have not used any of the above. I guess it depends on what you need and how much you want to spend.

I have a dedicated box I spec'ed out after being with the company for 1-1/2 years using reseller accounts and I have them fully manage it. It's certainly not cheap compared to something like ev1servers etcetera, but I know and trust their expertise/knowledge.

My advice would be to make sure that someone can be at the datacenter within say 15-30 minutes in case of hardware failure and also have spare parts or be able to restore to another server if the problem is serious. If they are remotely managing it - your costs and down time could go way up in the case of hardware failure.

[Hobbs]

Actually sorry for not motioning this earlier, this is not a hosting issue, I am very happy with my hosting company (ServInt), their service is almost fully managed, what I am looking for extra, is the double security (backup, monitoring, intrusion detection), plus other things that a hosting company wouldn't normally do like extra security hardening for example, configuring and customizing mod_evasive, firewall..)

One possibility is to go for a fully managed host but as I said I am happy with mine and even a fully managed hosting package will not offer anything close to the full list of what the above companies do.

I am looking to buy the extra peace of mind to be able to use this time to initiate additional projects.