Dedicated Hosting Providers

Find out which hosting provider you should select for your network with extensive profiles on them.

• Preface - What Is This Book About?
• Hetzner - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
• Bloom.Host - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
• PebbleHost - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
• OVH - ⭐⭐⭐
• ReliableSite - ⭐

Preface - What Is This Book About?

These pages should hopefully help pick out your next dedicated system from a hosting provider which has reliable hardware, reputable with systems not going offline every hour and intelligent support.

The providers we are going to be covering are due to our combined extensive years of experience with each one and even our personal experiences with using them as we might of rented from them in the past or currently using their platform.

We have categorized them into each provider with a brief explanation of their locations, their pros, cons, known issues and any other information which we deem to be known to the public.

Each book will have the company name and a suitable star rating on how we judge them as a provider, focusing on many key factors:

• How easy they are to communicate with, both as a consumer, but as us being system admins in support tickets, emails or over the phone. This includes the time it takes for them to reply, friendliness, competence and actually solving the issue.
• The reliability of their hardware and their uptime. Issues such as disk failures or RAM faults are common and won't be used against them unless they use really outdated or second hand hardware. This is more aimed towards the support from the said provider.
• The security and management of client data such as using 2FA for access to administrative interfaces including WHMCS or KVM portals, proper terms of service and privacy policy documents and not selling on customer data or doing concerning external activity.

Please do note that public reputation and how they are viewed a whole will not be taken into consideration as we need first hand experience to either communicating them as a customer or as the system admin for a client, such as yourself. This includes looking at their Trustpilot for example and going "Ah, they have 2 stars, so we should judge them two stars", this isn't right and we won't do that.

We are not bias and won't take bribes to increase someones rating, whether it be for your host or someone elses, and we do not have "opinions" towards one or the other as we want to be as genuine as possible.

Have a host to recommend that we haven't heard of yet or written on our pages? Reach out to management and we might add them later on.

Hetzner - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hetzner is a Dedicated Server, Cloud, Storage & Hosting provider based in Germany, Finland and have expanded their cloud systems to the USA. Many of us have used Hetzner in the past for dedicated servers (such as previously running Jasmeow.Systems operations!) or still using them for small projects, like storage boxes. These boxes are extremely cheap at around $15 for 5TB in either Germany or Finland, and can go up to 20TB. You have SFTP access, different protocol access such as SSH/SFTP, Samba and WebDav, and multi subuser management.

Jasmine has personally used Hetzner for over 5 years now with no issues whatsoever. Upgrading the RAM from 64GB to 128GB was quick and easy, their invoices are lenient with having the ability to ask for a bit of an extension if you are short on finance and their hardware just "works". If you have a fault, you give them the information such as a drive serial number, they fix/replace it, and you are good to go again. Storage boxes are awesome for quick storage solutions as well, and their cloud system is brilliant as you can literally fire up a VPS for temporary testing for a couple hours and be charged next to nothing with their pay as you go system, such as 0.15 Euro per hour/4.55 per month for their first 1vCPU, 2GB RAM and 20GB storage VPS.

Pros

• The support staff are by far fantastic, really friendly and know what they are doing. You give them an issue, and when you get the right person, it's brilliant. They take initiative and use common sense, thinking outside the box to solve your issue.
• Response times on tickets are near enough instant, being within 30 minutes to an hour, giving you peace of mind that you don't need to wait long if you are in an outage.
• The hardware is reliable, with minimal or no faults. You can either get a system from the dedicated server page or the auction which is cheaper but might be prone to more issues in the future, but this comes with a benefit of their support fixing it efficiently. They even have discounts really often with the AMD AX line having zero setup fees, great for a starting out network looking for a low cost, EU based, minimal issue hosting provider.

Cons

• You are not buying a managed system, so you are literally on your own when it comes to managing a Hetzner system. You will receive no support for installing OS's, managing your system or software and any faults it causes. Hardware is what they provide and nothing else, so if you are a competent system admin, you will get along just fine with Hetzner, no problems at all.

Known Issues

• Their KVM system is unfortunately really bad. You have to request for one as it's not like OVH where you can instantly get access to the system via IPMI, you have to make a ticket. Additionally, sometimes it doesn't even work as no video output displays, but after discussing in a ticket, the KVM only becomes accessible after a system restart as it attaches to the system that way. Massively unfortunate if your system is kernel hardlocking or frozen.
• We are aware of an issue with their custom firmware breaking network traffic sometimes on specific systems where your players will have high ping or get disconnected repeatedly for a long while until they are able to finally join. Been around for a good 2 years now sadly, bit of a drawback. Jasmine has a Reddit article open and people have recommended solutions since. Hetzner did initially state it's not their issue but we found it was on their end.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/vwe2ou/network_issues_minecraft_network_kernel_fixes/ 

Bloom.Host - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bloom.Host is based in Ashburn, Virginia and has locations all around the world for game hosting. For dedicated servers, they manage on premise systems based in this location and LA, California. They provide support via tickets online and in their Discord which is the much more preferred method. Their hardware works well and none of our clients have had uptime issues. 

Pros

• Whenever there is a major fault with the system, they will personally setup a replica system and once you've moved the data over, they remove the old system from your account. They have spares on hand to instantly get you back into production and they don't faff around like other providers giving excuses wasting more time. This is the biggest pro by far and has earned them the extra star. 
• They are the cheapest on the market in terms of reliability and performance for both of their locations. They definitely could charge more on their hardware which is an extreme benefit for you as the end customer.
• You can ask them to internally link the servers for a private networking configuration when purchasing two or more dedicated servers.
  

Known Issues

• Unless we've been unlucky with some of our clients, hardware faults a little more common than we'd like from a provider like OVH. This isn't their fault as it's been RAM faults, CPU faults or some weird networking issue we've come across twice, just keep this in mind.
• Their firewall is a tad aggressive towards downloading files and will grind them to a halt due to their Anti-DDoS protection systems and to whitelist the address the data is coming from, a support ticket is needing to be opened.

PebbleHost - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Directed by the brilliant chap Daniel Jackson, PebbleHost has been the main go to hosting provider for the UK, based in Coventry, servicing Minecraft, game servers in general and dedicated servers. Being based in the UK means it's central to most of the world and means your players won't have much issue with ping connections, averaging out reasonably well.

Jasmeow.Systems, it's many operations and Jasmine's personal systems are hosted by PebbleHost using a dedicated system. We have had our system since April, being a reliable place to manage our infrastructure.

Pros

• The Minecraft hosting is decent for the initial start up of your server while you evaluate your choices on which dedicated system you are going to purchase from a provider.
• Their support is extremely willing to help and friendly for all of their services, knowing how hard it is to run your server for the first time and can help out when you need it most.
• They provide software support, within reason, for your server, such as plugins or solving lag spikes. Alternatively, they support installing Pterodactyl on your dedicated system for example.

Cons

• Due to it being a shared host, you will have performance hits with managing a large server on their shared MC hosting once you go above 50 players, so be reasonable and work out when you want to switch.
• Pricing for the dedicated serves can be expensive and what they actually offer in terms of hardware. Unfortunately, this is mostly due to our 20% Value Added Tax in the UK and how they get up-sold to you as a customer.

OVH - ⭐⭐⭐

OVH, or "Online Virtual Hosting" has multiple locations in the US, EU and AS of the world, including Canada, London, France, Germany, Asia and Singapore. Their hardware is reliable and their up time is fantastic. Prices do get pretty expensive dependent on which system you require and the feature set it needs, but they are the most reputable and easiest to work with.

Pros

• Support staff are competent and they understand that you are frustrated with the issue. They have phone contact also if you would like to call them up and speak with their team.
• You can use their vSwitch/vRack system to connect systems together if they are compatible with private bandwidth to save a bunch of headache with internal networking on large scale MC networks and businesses.

Cons

• Support sometimes can take hours or even days to respond but this is counteracted by informing them that you know your stuff and you aren't incompetent.
• Sometimes you need to repeat yourself to the support staff or get them to complete a task repeatedly until the data center technicians finally clock on and realize "Ah, this is an actual problem causing downtime, let's actually do it or find an alternative solution."

Known Issues

• There is a motherboard BIOS update still plagues their systems to this day the screenshot below was from May 23 but happened again in August 23 with a different client. A faulty update in their BIOS's basically causes systems to just randomly switch off with no RAM, CPU or disk faults, it's just sporadically random. Seems to not happen on the F10 update of their boards, but it's possible that it can happen on this version too.

ReliableSite - ⭐

ReliableSite is a dedicated service provider in three main locations, Miami, New York City Metro and Los Angeles. Sadly, their nickname has become UnreliableSite due to how they are, so read on to find out more... typical how their name contradicts them.

At this point, I don't really know what to say about ReliableSite. Unfortunately due to the way they operate, they outsource their ticketing department like Discord Trust & Safety, only having a handful of competent technicians on hand inside their data centers. For your own peace of mind, please don't purchase from RS. The amount of issues that stem from them puts ReliableSite as the least recommended host beyond any other. 

If you have an issue, good luck getting it solved. Basically, you go in blind, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a reliable system with no issues, never needing to talk to their support. The other times is when you get a unreliable system (ha!) and you have to spend many days working with them.

You take the chance. We will help you if you buy it, but please take into consideration our warnings first to save on time and stress later on.

Pros

• The hardware that is sold is decent and works operationally well with minimal or no faults.
• Their pricing is much lower than others which can be good for networks starting out.
• You get to speak to Ram K sometimes, basically Ram Killer. What a fantastic guys name.

Cons

• You have to repeat many statements and even bring it down to the basics so that they understand what you mean when even someone with no networking knowledge will understand.
• Unfortunately due to their outsourcing of their IT team, the support team mostly don't understand your request until it gets passed onto someone more knowledgeable.
  
• They seem to not be able to plug in RAM properly and spend days trying to understand that it's not inserted properly, apparently unable to run free -h to check the RAM amount.
• RS only provide private bandwidth using hardware switches and it's on request to merge two of your systems together. Sometimes this isn't possible due to how their racking works but if you ask them nicely and repeatedly, you sometimes get a positive result, such as one of our clients chaining over 8 systems together in a private VLAN.
•  There are many more cons which haven't been written as we don't have full examples of them happening or they are to expensive to explain without having context. In other words, keep away!

Known Issues

• If you are really unlucky, you will end up with a system where you will get to around 20 players or so and they will all be kicked off randomly, and it will repeat every 30-60 minutes. This is caused by the actual whole dedicated system loosing network connectivity for about a minute, shown by the Pterodactyl panel for instance not even loading and timing out. This is shown in MTR reports but it seems they completely ignore the diagnosis it's their network. See a picture here. Obviously there are large spikes... it's an MC network when it's SOTW...🤦
• If you order a system which is of a different specification than the one you wanted, but it turns out it's a higher cost as one of your other systems which is significantly better, the support team can't do anything about it and you have to cancel the system you are on and order another one. Their automation system makes it so you can't just "upgrade" to the same specifications for a less cost. Read the ticket transcript here.
• They repeatedly break their payments site with CloudFlare... 🤣 Not even joking you, this happens like every week for a couple hours, it's honestly amusing at this point. Was grabbing a ticket example for the known issue above and I get this... what perfect timing!

     

Clients Comments

As an example of how much headache the team at RS have caused me and my clients, I asked three of my clients who previously used ReliableSite before switching to OVH about their experiences. 

IGNGf9, one of the main owners running MineFruit, ran into an issue with their network back in July 2022 where they had to deal with 3 days downtime with data corruption on their MC worlds due to a faulty RAM installation after upgrading to 96GB of RAM from 64GB, causing segmentation faults and additional data loss. This resulted in Jasmine writing a 10 page complaint document detailing their absolute incompetence. They finally concluded their investigation and provided 1 month free services to the MineFruit management team. Have a read of their complaint document here.

HVP, owner of HoodMC, had the issue explained in the known issues section where his system had network connectivity problems, causing players to drop and loose connection. After a couple months, we brought up the discussion over ReliableSite and their systems with Steven from TCP Shield and he stated the below:

Jack, the previous owner of PvPLab, which had a player base of over 600 concurrent, had repeated issues of their networking, billing plans not being customizable due to their automation and their internal network configuration. They even unplugged the wrong system for 45 minutes while they were adjusting the managed private network switch and blamed it on a faulty cable, which isn't possible as network cables have clips on them so they don't fall out of the port. This all happened in May/June 2023 and nothing has changed since the incidents of MineFruit. 

These client statements were not forced or bribed. They've experienced the pain we went through when managing their systems. They are now on OVH with no issues whatsoever. Their statements have zero lies as we've cross checked and confirmed their legitimacy from their tickets.