21 replies to this topic

[market seeker]

You can get hosted by a budget host for little or nothing and with domain names for $7.-- you can get all you need pretty cheap. You could also look into being a hosting reseller.

Eg. You become a reseller and pay lets say $30/month.
If you know a couple people that want websites you can host say 3 additional sites for $10/month and break even. Free quality hosting.

Hope that helps.

they usually don't give you much for that price like say
500 email accounts
cgi full of scripts
shopping cart
php
sql data base
10 gigs of width or what ever you need for a small fee over 10
scgi
more stats then you will ever use telling you everything you could possibly want
a board just like this one and one other one
chat
sub domains

plus alot more
email me and I can tell you where to get it with a free domain name for $60 a year only folks on this forum I don't make anything just trying to give a little back.

if this gets deleted though ohwell.

[Mel]

Like most things you get what you pay for, and I have not found a decent hosting for less than 13.95 per month, but at that price level you can find solid hosting with good support and enough features for the average business with up to 100 employees with shopping carts stats etc.

As for all the other goodies I suspect that, while they are a great selling point, most of them go unused. Ever wonder how some companies offer 500 mb of disk space and yet host 500 companies on a server with only 60 mb of disk space?

[market seeker]

I don't understand what you are saying.
Do you think you can find a better package for 13.95 than what I just offered.

This package is not oversold, does not offer unlimited anything, has all the email support you would need 24hrs. a day.

a free domain name

for $60 a year which is $5.00 a month

You will not find a better deal anywhere. Now if you can legitimately argue that there is a flaw with what I'm saying, I am all ears.

If you want to pay $13.95 a month though, I'll take your money.

[Mel]

Hi Seeker, not trying to knock your offering, since I know nothing about you or your hosting.

What I am saying is that I have done webhosting myself, have used many different hosting companies and when I last changed Hosts (because they started out cheap with good features and then started charging more but offering less) I did a rather extensive search and finally settled on a company that offered what I needed (and more) for $13.95. True it offers only 100 email addresses (I have used only 8) but until my company exceeds that number of employees thats fine for me, the 200 MB of disk space is only half used although I set up mini reports sites for my customers and use another portion of it as a staging server, I have had 99.9999% uptime, and get personal support such as the head tech being paged if he is not at the office at 3 am, when I wanted a custom setup on the DNS that was done with no charge in a couple of hours etc etc etc. I also get toll free INTERNATIONAL phone support 24 hours a day and email support if its not urgent.

Most people don't need and don't use all the features that are advertised, and IMO its better to look for solid support and features you really need. For instance I don't need 500 emails and if I did would likely be running my own colocated server. What is really important IMO is things that you don't know about unless you ask a lot of questions like:

What is the percentage utilization of your internal network
What kind and how many direct backbone connections do you have
What kind of backup power supply system do you have
How many domains do you allow on a server
Do you have hot swap hard drives with online standby spare boxes
Do you do daily backups of all servers

and so on.

I have never found a host that offered all I really needed for less than that price.

[Ron Carnell]

Excellent questions to ask, Mel. Except maybe for the last one? I've personally had and seen too many bad experiences with backups made at a datacenter. Too often, they just don't seem to work when it actually comes time to do a restore. Bad time to find that out, too. Frankly, and obviously depending on your web site data, there is just no substitute for backing up your own data religiously. Disk-to-disk or server-to-server is easy to implement and, in my opinion, puts the responsibility where it belongs -- on you.

Another important question for most, I think, would be, "Who are your upstream providers?" A datacenter has to buy their bandwidth before they can sell it, and all of those pipes aren't necessarily created equal. I'm in the process of looking for a new DC right now, for two of my machines. When Dialtone was recently purchased by Interland, I started noticing slower connections and my traceroutes confirmed they had switched upstream providers. Cogent and Williams aren't "bad" in the sense they don't work, but there's a reason they're the least expensive national backbones available. In my case, I'm still paying for a premium network, but receiving about the cheapest available. By comparison, a traceroute to highrankings.com shows that our posts are all going across twtelecom, which is Time Warner's Tier2 network. A good network, certainly, but still not a Tier1 like Sprint, Quest, CW, or Global One.

Do you really need a Tier1 provider? When user experience is at risk, Tier 1 providers can help by Laura Wonnacott at InfoWorld

All of which is leading to a point, BTW. Anyone who offers 10 gig at five bucks a month and doesn't oversell their pipe is, at best, really suspicious.

[Mel]

Yes Ron I agree that the upstream providers are important, as are the way you are connected to them, IE via telco wiring or direct through a switch.

Also important is your arrangements with standby providers for alternate sources when and if needed, and running the protocols to automatically switch over.

There is no substitute for doing your own backups (I keep mine on a pair of removable hard drives, one kept at home and one in the safe) but its nice if you have a provider that will at least have a backup to get your site up and running when a hardrive crashes, and possibly before you have notification that your site has crashed (Why is it that all crashes occur at 2 am?)

[market seeker]

Q. What kind and how many direct backbone connections do you have

A. 7 gigabit links, multiple OC3 and DS3 links.

We allow 100 domains per server (head room for 500).

The hard drives are not hot swap - but the data is mirrored.

Daily backups are performed.

99.5% uptime
Dell Intel Dual XEON & Compaq P4 PROLIANT servers
1GB+ DDR ECC RAM
10K RPM SCSI Hard Drives
Every server is connected via a 100mpbs switched LAN
Housed in a secure data centre with multiple redundant Verio, Williams, Allegiance and Time Warner Gigabit links.

ofcourse this program isn't for the illiterate but we do offer 24/7 email support.
and help files.

I normally sell this package for alot more to my clients. I know of some hosting packages that don't come close to this one and sell for as much as $30 a month

Not only $5 a month but a free domain name. Only to those on this forum

by the month is 8 dollars through paypal

Thanks for asking