http://server.lu/

[Rilly]

I'm into my second month with server.lu - i get better single threaded speeds to Canada from server.lu than OVH (and my customers get better speeds to USA with server.lu that OVH).. paying more obviously though but it is a more powerful box too. To be honest though - only reason i went here was because OVH wouldn't sell me a second box.. I'd love to save that extra 20 Euro a month

edit: its not a seedbox though - so can`t compare bandwidth totals -

[Vars]

I have to say I've been really pleased with server.lu so far. Average server setup time is about a day, which is acceptable. My main gripe is that sometimes you need to 'nudge' a ticket to get a response, but it seems as though critical tickets do get near-instant attention.

They just launched a new version of their control panel, which is a big improvement over the last one. It's much more usable and organized. It still needs some work (I've reported some issues via ticket), but it's overall much better.

They aren't OVH, or any other huge provider with tens of thousands of servers. They actually assemble the boxes by hand. So everyone complaining about setup fees, stop. They're actually being used for what they're meant for, unlike OVH which just has them for the profit (fully automated provisioning). This is all based on my assumptions, dwdm might be able to confirm some of them.

Speeds from server.lu to Canada and the US are much better than those from OVH. I'm able to constantly max my 1MB/s download, as are my customers. OVH may have 400Gbps but it's so laden with restrictions it's useless. server.lu on the other hand has usable bandwidth. If they're using QoS to prioritize traffic that's fine with me. There are people in this world that have better things to worry about than ratios, just be happy they allow it at all. All my boxes have been able to max the 100mbps.

I've been with PRQ, Leaseweb, OVH, SoftLayer, Carat Networks, and a whole lot more. These people are good, and I will continue to order servers from them in future.

[extr3m3]

Maybe just a question .. What are the speeds at ScT?

[redMonster]

Hey Vars, nice to see you here. Are you going to offer seedbox slots here also or you are here just for the discussion?

[dwdm]

Hi there.
It's been a while since I last wrote something here.

I would like to give a few comments on Vars post and say a few things in general.

There have been some interesting improvements lately in terms of control panel and this is still an ongoing process and customers are invited to give feedback since we actually are listening to our customers and their suggestions and critics.

I know that answering tickets is not that easy, but this has a reason, like a few other issues within our entity. We have a fetish to build all our things ourselves: Servers, Reboot devices, Cabling, Control Panel, Ticket System, Monitoring tools, the list is endless... What we don't do anymore is use Linux Routers for the core routing, since they are far out of the league, which is quite unfortunate, but a Server is not designed to handle a few million packets per second - we now build our network on Cisco 6500 routers, which I recently fell in love with :-)
The major problem we are currently facing at server.lu is the unexpected success of our product. Back in 2007, where we started this project our goal was to gain back customers who live in Luxembourg but rented their servers in Germany, France or in the US because there was no low cost solution available in Luxembourg at that time. This is mostly due to the fact that Luxembourg is a very expensive country to live in.
Over the last months we decided to expand our network POPs to major EU cities in order to do peerings with "the big ones" and get better IP Transit possibilities that would eventually bring a lot more bandwidth to our premises.

With all this happening we suddenly received more orders every day, but we only have staff of 10 people who need to manage all this work. We needed to reorganize ourselves several times and order new fiber faster than the providers could actually deliver and at this very moment there are people digging in the street next to our building to lay even more fiber into our building. More bandwidth for everyone - that's what we want, that's what we negotiate every day with our suppliers.

The biggest problem was and still is the supply chain. We build our servers ourselves. While this process only lasts about 15-20 minutes per server, we have problems with suppliers delivering on time. We order big quantities (200 server cases, 200 CPUs, ...) and it can happen that one item is not available and thus needs a few more days to be delivered. Pain in the a** if you have customers waiting for their orders to be provisionned. Our system IS fully automated, but if our inventory says "0 DS2000 available" it cannot release anything. 6 months ago we always had 5-10 spare servers of each type, which was good enough to make everyone happy. Now we fill one rack every 5 days, which forces us to plan differently.
In parallel to all this we are building a new colocation facility next to our business park with a size of ~ 1500 sqm per floor (2 floors) to guarantee continuous capacity for future customers. This should be ready by the end of July 2009, if nothing goes wrong.

Many people compare us with OVH. I'm not sure if I am happy about this or not. While it is true that there are similarities, we do not know how their workflow is. All we do with them is peering on DE-CIX, LINX and AMS-IX. We have a different bandwidth approach for our customers, but I think they buy bandwidth the same way we do and that's a lot. They seem to advertise a few 100 GIGs, which is fine. We don't use that much, but what does this number mean anyway? They have some 40.000 servers, we only have about 2.000 with an increase of +- 10 per day.

What I am trying to express is this:

- we are working hard to provide a state of the art service
- while we do that, we improve ourselves every day
- we try to sell affordable servers to everyone and we don't want to introduce limitations
- we are open for new things and if someone has a feature in mind, we should talk about it

To end this, I want to add a little salt to this:

We don't like to talk about discounts over and over again. The prices on our website are generally NON NEGOTIABLE unless you have a certain volume with us, which will then be discussed case by case. We have costs and financial risks to take when we buy hardware that may or may not get paid long term. We have a lot of staff on our payroll and alltogether our prices are FAIR and JUSTIFIED. There are cheaper providers out there and I won't judge them, because I am sure that some are good and some are bad.

server.lu is NOT a company. The company is named "root eSolutions" and it operates the backbone. Server.lu is a product of root eSolutions, just like Big Mac is a product of McDonald's :-) The company exists since 2002, is profitable and tax paying.

Now I'm tired...

[Vars]

Building stuff yourself is good, that way if something goes wrong you aren't frantically searching for a manual

By fully automated I meant OVH has boxes set up and waiting on racks and they just start an operating system install when you place your order. The 49€ set up fee is pure profit in that case. You're actually using the money to pay someone to assemble the box, not to stuff your pockets.

Comparing you to OVH is an insult. Personally, I don't like them. They're a big, faceless company whose customer support fails at the most basic levels. The operating system templates they preload on their servers are full of backdoors and monitoring software. I'm clueless as to how they amassed 40 000 servers.

I don't see anything wrong with the price of your servers. 49€ per month really isn't that much for a server that uses quality hardware. Please don't offer 20€ crap boxes, it would only degrade your service IMHO. Since you are actually assembling the boxes, it'd be nice if you could offer options on the order form to order extra ram or upgrade hard disks for a cost. I've got a few more ideas in mind I'll share with you via ticket.

Glad to hear you're profitable, that's always a good thing, especially in today's economy Best of luck in the future.

[dwdm]

I don't think they put setup fees into their pocket (OVH).
They also have costs and someone needs to assemble their servers as well. If they don't do it, someone else does and most likely not for free

I think a small setup fee shouldn't hurt anyone who has real intentions of using a server more than just for one month. We know it would be cooler to have no setup fees at all, but given all these little hidden things we have to pay (but no one wants to see), it seems fair after all.

Folks, don't be mad at us if we don't answer queries like "I want a server, can you please waive the setup for me, because I am a very nice person" anymore. The answer is NO for many reasons (read above).

[Burnsy]

Wow, I bought a server from you guys yesterday. I did, however, make the mistake of thinking you offerred the same server release times as OVH/Kimsufi who I have used in the past and didn't realise you actually built the server by yourself from scratch. I really don't mind waiting a little while if this is the case.

One question though... if it takes you a few days to build and release my server, will I still be billed monthly from my original invoice date (and be paying for the days I haven't been able to use it), or will i be billed monthly from the date the server was released to me?

Cheers

[BethCooper]

From the date you receive the login details

[Burnsy]

From the date you receive the login details

Thanks for the reply

But which login details? I already have my Customer Panel login details? Are you referring to those? Or to my server login details?

Just to clarify..... Thanks again