Top Dedicated and Cloud hosting providers to look into

Personally I have dedicated servers in the following Data centers.

https://www.limestonenetworks.com/ One of my favorite for all the services they provide. More important if you have more than one dedicated server.

http://joesdatacenter.com/ I only have one server here, but the prices are awesome. Especially if you are just hosting simple web servers.

https://www.hivelocity.net/ not currently hosting here, but have in the past and quite liked them.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Jonathan! I will look at their offerings.

Do you, or anyone know of any good resources also that can help inform what the best fit is for our needs and growing needs? Seems like each provider has an edge this way or that way, whether it be bandwidth, or storage, or software addons like image backups etc.

Ideally, I'd like to find something to run staging setups of wordpress (possibly up to 10 or more), a few live wordpress sites, plus the ability to load other software like joomla (if needed). It should be fast enough to handle up to 100 concurrent users and be able to easily ship CDN and email service as needed. (we work with some festivals that gets a week long traffic spike, but generally dormant the rest of the year)

Shared hosting does all of the above, but the limit is a) no dedicated IP and b) hard to push 100 concurrent users.

To me, it sounds like cloud or virtual would be what I am needing, but I'd like to get others thoughts?

Also, I am wondering how to determine what specs one needs for a server setup? How much memory is required? Bandwidth? processing power?

Joes has a sandybridge with these specs:

core 2
8GB of DDR3 RAM
500GB Hard Drive
10TB of Bandwidth
5 included IP’s

Sounds excellent at the $68 price point (the 4 core is only $84/month. So how do other providers like a small orange offer a hybrid dedicated server with these specs:

4 dedicated cores
6 GB RAM
450 GB Disk
2 FREE IPs
2.5 TB bandwidth

for $150 a month?

Am I missing something or is there really no standard pricing when it comes to hosting?

No simple answer, but Joe's is just a smoking deal. The hardware is not the most current and they don't offer some of the other bells and whistles, but if you don't need that, it's perfect.

they are also month to month, which means you can try and then cancel if it's not what you need.

I always get DirectAdmin as my control panel, which I have loved, which I believe Joe's throws in for free too. Others don't do that.

You probably don't want a dedicated server when a hard drive dies you are screwed for a few hours. Cloud servers are much less hassle both for recoverability as well as expandability. This way you won't over spend of buying more than you need.