Is there better servers than LiquidWeb?

I run about 6 websites. 2 are combos between a forum and a blog. One blog is parked on a single domain, and the forum section is on a separate single domain. The rest are forums.

I am looking for a server with at least comparable, or better than these specs. Preferably in United States. I want my server to be somewhere away from cities like California, New York, etc. I understand it's a specific criteria, but I am preparing ahead of any disasters.

This is also a managed server.

16 GB RAM

• 8 vCPU
• 200 GB SSD Disk Space
• 10 TB Bandwidth

This server is a "Cloud Dedicated" instance. I understand the language is a bit odd... but it is LiquidWeb's naming convention for a hybrid cloud server with dedicated instance... whatever that means...?

This is from my cPanel.

The rest is handled by bandwidth, which by the end of the month hits about 90GB. Right now it's August 22, 2022 - bandwidth is 116.4 GB (accrued over the course of the month, beginning of August it was 15GB already). That's why the harddrive is large. To hold the users.

LiquidWeb is currently charging me in fluctuations, for example...

1) February 6, 2022: $252.38
2) March 5, 2022: $246.89
3) May 4, 2022: $251.50
4) June 3, 2022: $283.32
5) July 3, 2022: $285.01
6) August 3, 2022: $290.61

Here is a typical server charge:

• SS.VM: Server Total
  $0.00
• Bandwidth: 5 TB Monthly Transfer
  $0.00
• Public IP Addresses: 1 Additional Public IPs
  $2.00
• Server Type: CentOS 7 64-bit with cPanel Fully-managed
  $25.00
• Backup Plan: As-you-go Backups
  $0.00
• Backup Days: 7 Retention Days
  $0.00
• cPanel License Tier: Plus 50
  $5.00
• Server Type: 'Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v5 @ 3.40GHz', 3600MHz, 4 Core, Sockets: 1
  $159.00

I'm not worried about $159 for server, but it's the backups that are killing me, as you can see the results above. Now, I don't mind paying for backups, my issue is it's fluctuating, and not fixed rate.

Agent 7 said:

I'm not worried about $159 for server, but it's the backups that are killing me, as you can see the results above. Now, I don't mind paying for backups, my issue is it's fluctuating, and not fixed rate.

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I'm a bit confused because when I look at the figures that you posted above I see $0.00 for Backup Plan and $0.00 for Backup Days.

Or is your point that those numbers are the standard charges and the rest of the monthly spend ($60-$100) is going for backups?

Color me confused as well. What exactly are those billable fluctuations? I'm assuming backups.

SenseiSteve said:

Color me confused as well. What exactly are those billable fluctuations? I'm assuming backups.

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Yup...

S4 Hosting said:

I'm a bit confused because when I look at the figures that you posted above I see $0.00 for Backup Plan and $0.00 for Backup Days.

Or is your point that those numbers are the standard charges and the rest of the monthly spend ($60-$100) is going for backups?

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Yeah, that's how I originally get charged, when I purchased the actual server. But once I'm an actual customer, I don't know if I ordered the backups, or they attached it later. I don't remember, but the system is currently a "bill-by-hour" backup system. Here's the second charge, for each month. Like I said, it fluctuates based on the size of the backups...
Compare March...
Backup Storage: 310498.540 GB Hours
$55.89
To April...
Backup Storage: 345830.193 GB Hours
$62.25
To August's billable hours...
Backup Storage: 363538.792 GB Hours
$83.61
Now, check it out. Those hours look similar. Just an added GB if you look at the second series of numbers. 31 vs 34 vs 36. They jacked up the prices in April (e-mail message embedded below), but the thing is, that number kept going up. It should stay the same after... May. It should have been stablized, but instead, the price kept going up.

Thank you for being a Liquid Web customer!

We are reaching out to you regarding your Cloud Backup services through Liquid Web.

Like many businesses today, our operating costs have increased. While we have worked to manage costs and minimize impacts on our customers, we are announcing an incremental price increase on our Cloud Backup product.

Effective April 29th, 2022, we will be changing the pricing structure for our Pay-As-You-Go and Quota-Based Cloud Backups. Monthly storage pricing for Cloud and Cloud Dedicated Backups will increase by 4 cents per GB ($0.04/GB).

We appreciate your business. If you would like more information on how to manage your backups, you can read more about using Cloud Backups to manage your Liquid Web backups here:
[Link]

If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at 1-800-580-4985 or reply to this email.

If you still need help, simply reply to this email, or view/update your ticket at [Link].

Please take a moment to let us know how we are doing. It is important for us to hear about your experience with this Support interaction.
[Link]

[ref:_00D30pmDy._5003a1Dt3Wh:ref]

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I'm not familiar with Liquid Web's backup plans, pricing or billing policies, so tricky to give a real opinion.

I'd guess though that maybe the backup retention period is quite long and so every month you are just accumulating more and more data in backups. Maybe it would be an option to reduce that period, keeping backups for less time in that plan and then moving older backups to some cheaper object storage somewhere else (which is never a bad idea anyway).