My first dedicated hosting experience was not cool. Here's some tips:
- Buy the cheapest option first to play around with it. I purchased what I thought I would need, raid1, 1gb ram, 160gb hard disk, 30gb FTP, Plesk (which I don't like), etc. Remember you can always upgrade if you find you are happy with them…
- Be Careful of Pre-Payment, when going in I thought I would be happy with the options, but low and behold I had to cancel, and to top it they slammed me with a 30day until cancel notice. So this means I had to shell out another 30 days of hosting I would never, ever use… Bogus!!!
- Stick with what you know… I should have stayed with WHM/Cpanel over PLESK.
- Don't recompile any software (configure/make/make install). The reason for me is PLESK, since it did not fully support PHP 5.1.6, when i did the recompile and install via Apache, PLESK started to blow chunks at some point in the future… Also, depending on who you go with they might install patches or updates that might not work with what you have modified…
- Be prepared to spend some time learning things… Pick up a cheap PC someplace then install the SAME distro you will be leasing and use this as your development / test box.