Dedicated hosting provider recommendations

[RobXB]

Hi,

Our small publishing company, based in London/New York, has decided to use Zimbra as our mail/collaboration system. We've got 60-75 users and quite a large percentage of these need mobile/web access. I'm the IT head with responsibility for the deployment.

Having had bad experiences in the past with hosting a mail server in-house (adsl bandwidth, connectivity issues etc.)we decided to look to purchase the Zimbra Network Edition and install it on a dedicated server hosted in a datacentre. Now when we were evaluating Zimbra I installed the open source edition on a Fedora 7 box in the office. The Fed box was one I had lying around that I'd been 'playing' with. The installation failed. When I installed Zimbra on a brand new clean installation it was perfect - so much so that we decided it was what we were looking for immediately.

My problem is in choosing a provider for the hosting. My guess is we want a clean box with no control panels or add-ons whatsoever to avoid the installation failure we saw in-house. Just root access and that's it. All the hosts I've looked at seem to pile on features I could do without.

Can anyone out there recommend a good provider for this kind of service? I'm not bothered about geographical location (unless they want to do lots of maintenance in UK or US working hours!).

Price 100 GBP pcm tops ($100 would be nice) and with about 2GB per mailbox.

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree altogether and shared or virtual hosting would be more appropriate for our requirements and price range. Please tell me if I've got it all wrong.

Thanks in advance

Rob

[RobXB]

Sorry, am I off topic with this? Should I post to a different Zimbra forum if I want a reply? Please let me know...

R

[ewilen]

I think perhaps the subject line you've chosen is misleading. When you say platform choice/dedicated server it sounds like you are about to ask for OS recommendations and whether it's advisable to dedicate a host exclusively to zimbra or if you can have other things running on it.

I'd try another thread asking for dedicated hosting provider recommendations or similar.

[RobXB]

Thanks. I'll do that

[Dirk]

Here is a list of authorised Zimbra resellers,
End user VAR partners for Zimbra open source messaging and collaboration software

I'd suggest looking at that and speaking with the sales department of a few of them.

[RobXB]

So given my requirements you would recommend a hosting 'package' (ie shared hosting) rather than us building a dedicated server in a datacentre?