Dedicated server or Reseller plan ?

[jcarney1987]

I think it's overrated and unnecessary, to be honest. Unless you have actual redundant servers with the clients' accounts, off-site nameservers aren't going to do you a bit of good. You're just wasting your money.

For example, let's say I host a server in Chicago, and have both nameservers in that datacenter as well. The only time something is going to go down is if there is a routing issue within the datacenter, the physical server itself is broken, or the entire datacenter (or parts of it) lose connectivity. If that happens, the hosting server is going to be inaccessible regardless. Doesn't matter where the nameservers are, the server is going to be unreachable.

If you have a redundant server somewhere with the clients' accounts (which unless you're running a tiny company, you aren't going to have), and can switch everything over using some failover method, really doesn't make a bit of difference.

Overrated and Unnecessary? I take it you have name servers in the same subnet. What happens when you have a server outage or even a data center outage? Lets say you have a very important client to keep online by now since you have a local outage he is missing his important email. Email servers are bouncing email because It can't find the server. Now your client just missed out on important email possible new customers, even lose paying customers. Think of the possibilities. What if the server came back up and it took a bit longer to sync up with ICANN roots. The server will be won't be reachable till after propagation again. How can you say Overrated and Unnecessary? Are you MAD? Even a small company can easily implement Failover DNS. This is one of the most important factors of hosting is maintaining DNS. Please never say overrated or unnecessary. Its setting bad examples. Even I offer my clients Offsite DNS for reseller plans. As long as the DNS is found the server will not have to propagate again and email will continue to try for upto 48 hours depending on mail server configurations.

[wswd]

Even I offer my clients Offsite DNS for reseller plans.

Yeah, I noticed. It's a great way to make an extra $3 a month huh? Why don't you just offer it for free, if it's so important. Doesn't cost you anything.

Email servers are bouncing email because It can't find the server. Now your client just missed out on important email

They're going to miss out on it anyway until the server comes back online. They aren't magically going to get the email. Personally, I'd much rather have the email bounce, so at least the sender knows that something is wrong, rather than have it sit there for 4 or 5 days without a reply. When it bounces, people might even actually go check the website, and see that it's down. Then they know there's a problem. If it's a server outage, the client isn't going to be getting the email anyway until everything is restored on a new server.

Me personally? We spread DNS servers around all over the place, but it really doesn't matter. If a server goes down and we can't bring it back up in 10-15 minutes, we've already started migrating clients to a temporary server in another datacenter. If a server outage or datacenter outage occurs, it's time to start moving clients immediately, not worrying about failover DNS.

[wswd]

Perhaps I should clarify a little bit further.

Been running a hosting company for 16 years, all on dedicated equipment. Never ran the host on a VPS or reseller account, or anything silly like that. In those 16 years, I have never had a server fail. Nope, not one. Sure, hard drives go bad. That's what RAID10 arrays are for. I've had memory sticks crap out. You replace them. Even had power supplies blow up (one, I was told by the datacenter folk, looked like a lightning storm inside the rack), but that's what redundant supplies are for. All the datacenters I deal with have around a 15 minute SLA on hardware replacement.

If a server was to completely blow up, I'd slap the drives in a brand new server, and off we go. Good as new. You're talking 15-30 minutes max. Then of course, you get into cloud hosting, where it doesn't matter in the slightest if a single server goes down. Doesn't affect the clients at all.

Secondly, how often do entire datacenters go offline? No doubt it happens in cheap datacenters, but when you use quality datacenters, it should never happen. Most have at least a half dozen different network/bandwidth providers, so if one of them (or even 5 of them) should go out, it doesn't matter. All have multiple forms of redundant power, etc. The only time you're going to get a datacenter outage is when something really, really bad happens, like a natural disaster. If an entire datacenter was to just fall off into the ocean, we could have our clients up and running on new servers in an alternate datacenter in a very short time.

That was actually a concern for us prior to Hurricane Irene last year, since we use Equinix New York for a handful of servers. We have a couple servers in the Softlayer DC center now as well, so that location is obviously a concern too. In our testing, we were able to restore user accounts, from our backups (which we take every hour) to new servers in other locations in just a matter of minutes.

Failover DNS is great for companies with absolutely no contingency plan for disaster recovery. In reality, there should never be a time where a server is inaccessible for more than 15-30 minutes, and the proverbial you know what should have to hit the fan to get to that point.

[CS Squad]

Well said.
This is the difference between someone who have "enough" experience with someone who have "some" experience.

Although it is important to have NS1 and NS2 on 2 different subnet, but it is also very clear that it will not do much for preventing "downtime" for the email service.
If the server that is hosting the website and its email service is down, having NS1 and NS2 on different is really do nothing good for this case.

@jcarney1987,
It seems like you are running NS1 on the server that is hosting the websites and email service, while only NS2 is hosted elsewhere.
But the correct practice to have redundant DNS would be NS1 and NS2 should be hosted separately, means "Server A" for NS1, "Server B" for NS2, and "Server C" for hosting the website and email service. etc...

[web3k]

But the correct practice to have redundant DNS would be NS1 and NS2 should be hosted separately, means "Server A" for NS1, "Server B" for NS2, and "Server C" for hosting the website and email service. etc...

Taking that even further, best practice to is host name servers (ns1/ns2) not only on separate servers, but on different AS networks and different locations. This ensures that a name server will be available even in a drastic situation such as a data centre losing power, not just something as small as a hardware fault.

For those really concerned about redundancy, distribution is one in many factors that should be considered

[ServerDeals]

This would all depend on how motivated you are to work hard. Reseller offers the biggest advantage of a small company to start and move up to getting they're own servers. Its the most cost efficient if you are just looking into this, but have other obligations. When we started, we got our own servers. I was in college and worked. I found myself answering chats and email in class and at work. I barely slept, but it all worked out in the end . So the choice solely relies on your ability to generate new leads and get your own resellers eventually if you go the dedicated route. Hopefully this helps you with your decision.

[hostspage]

In my opinion firstly you should go with reseller Plan.