Indian servers webhosting Datacenter Costs you an arm and a leg.
Hostcats.com, Being a hosting company targeting Indian clients and having an Indian client base of 95%, I’ve always wanted to host a few servers in an Indian powered data center. Currently all our servers are hosted in US Data center(DC) and works out well. We frequently have clients specifically asking for Indian servers with Indian IP addresses.
Having heard earlier that hosting in Indian data centers is pretty expensive and non reliable unless your admins literally set the base in there, I never considered the thought of settling for Indian servers. With frequent “sales request” for Indian hosting including vps and dedicated servers, I took a plunge of trying Indian Data centers. I googled and found a few who topped the list and a few of them were netmagicsolutions.com, Ctrls.in, relianceidc.com being a division of Reliance Communications.
I zeroed in on Ctrsl.in who are self proclaimed first tier IV data center in Hyderabad and Netmagic – India’s only truly carrier-neutral data center. I Had a hectic time finding the server configurations, pricing on their respective websites. Their websites are loaded with information as how well they are funded with investor’s money, Case studies, The dozens of services they offer but nowhere the pricing required for a quick decision. Heck, Being able to find the pricing easily on Data centers like Softlayer.com, Theplanet.com etc, it looked like finding a needle in a haystack on indian powered data centers. Having lost the patience, I had to fill in their contact us page to get someone call me. It seemed to me that their target clients were the MNC’s and nothing relevant for an SMB.
I did receive a call from their Head office collecting our office address same day and had their Sales head from Bangalore call up a day later. We setup an appropriate time to meet and I was pretty excited that things would work out. The Sales Head Finally turned up and we started well with my requirements. Things started getting nasty with the offers they had up their sleeves. We were discussing about servers where the basic pricing would be 500$ setup fees, 400$ recurring monthly, 50 gb bandwidth monthly for a 2 gb Ram, 2 *160 GB HD powered server. I was shocked to find that the bandwidth would be 50 GB monthly for a dedicated server and quickly analyzed that it wouldn’t even allow me to host a decent number of clients unless they all hosted hobby sites onto a Indian DC powered server.
I quickly shortened my discussion with the sales head and started understanding the differences between a US DC and an Indian DC. I do not deny the fact that Bandwidth is oversold with Servers in USA but 50 gb bandwidth provided on indian servers would not even support a couple bollywood centric websites in India. Either i overprice the hosting packages for indian Powered Servers or balance the pricing with US powered servers. Its a difficult task for a company owner to decide bearing in mind explaining our clients the differences. We always try to keep the choice simple and not make it complicated for our potential clients.
