Web Hosting Suggestions

[Winnow]

My Powweb 1.5 year subscription is up in January and I'm looking around for alternatives or if I should renew. I don't do much except host files and keep telling myself I'm going to make a website but never do.

Anyways, I found one webhost called Bluehost and they have a pretty impressive offering for even less than Powweb:

Powweb = 20GB space and 400GB fxer month for 7.77/month

Bluehost = 50GB space and 999GB bandwidth a month for 6.95/month

some of the features:

50 Gigabyte Hosting Space (NEW!)
Host 6 Domains on 1 Account!!!
2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
999 GIGS of Transfer (NEW!)
SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
2000/2002/2003 Front Page Extensions
Free Domain Forever!
Free Site Builder (NEW)
24/7 Superb/Responsive Sales/Support

Multimedia features:

Supports Streaming Video
Supports Streaming Audio
Real Audio & Video Support
Flash Support
Macromedia Shockwave
MIDI File Support
Add Own MIME Types

full list:

holy crap.

http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html

I like the streaming audio and video capability. With 1TB/month bandwidth, I could stream some videos of interest temporarily that some might not want to download before watching, etc. It's just easier to stream stuff for people.

Anyone heard of them? It seems web hosting has come a long way in just a little over a year. It's dirt cheap for nice features. I'm curious about uptime and the size of their pipe, etc. It's no good if you can use 1TB a month but can only manage 50Kb/s.

Their demo login looks pretty functional:

http://www.bluehost.com/cgi-bin/cplogin ... rd=demo123

Bluehost was actually the first place I found looking today so I don't know what else is out there yet.

[Sargeras]

That looks tempting.

I just renewed sargeras.com, so I was tempted to get my own hosting (currently sharing space on a friend's box).

Here's another one I'm looking at: http://www.hostmonster.com/ (hosting features here)

The first thing I saw is Blue hosts up to 6 domains, whereas HM is unlimited.

[Winnow]

This is the kind of stuff I want to know before signing up with a Web hosting company:

We have an instantaneous bandwidth limit of 3 Mbit per account. We simply cannot allow people to spike 30-50 MBits or more at a time when we host 155,000 domains. If 20-30 sites of the 155,000 or so spikes to 50 Mbit at the same time (Not entirely unlikely with that many domains) it would literally eat up a gig of continuous bandwidth at that moment. Since a gig circuit is about $27,000 a month we aren't going to allow 50 people to make us buy a gig circuit. Especially not for $7-$8 a month. I think you will find VERY few companies that will allow 1000 simultaneous users at 24K each for anywhere around the shared hosting price. If they say you can use it then they are a) lying b) don't know what they are talking about. As soon as you try and pull 240 Mbit they will shut you down immediately. Most medium hosts and small hosts don't even have anywhere near 240 MBit TOTAL. We run ALL of Bluehost on less than 800 Mbits of bandwidth (That about 535 T1s of bandwidth).

So the very short answer is Bluehost is not for you and neither is ANY shared hosting platform. Even most dedicated hosts unless they are very expensive will cap you at 10Mbit concurrent usage.

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

Powweb has better speeds than that. I haven't tested them lately though. I'd prefer less total bandwidth in exchange for faster throughput.

[Winnow]

ok...obviously anything goes when it comes to the amount of server space and bandwidth:

150GB space
3 Terabytes/month Bandwidth
6.95/month

http://www.imhosted.com/

My guess is if you come anywhere near half of that amount they'd shut you down or cap you to 1kb/s.

I couldn't find a forum but here's some comments:

The server is always overloaded and very slow. Down time is very frequent, at least 3 - 4 times per week. Support is not helpful at all. Don't trust every words they said in the package, they just want to get you money and give you lousy service. They are dishonest, stay away from this unreliable host, or you will be regreted.

1. The phone numbers theypost for customer service are answering machines. In fact, all the numbers are. Their website is registered anonymously, they have no phone numbers where you can actually talk to a person, and what minimal costumer service does exist does so under anonymity. This is weird and makes the entire company suspect.

2. Their support ticket fix is ridiculously slow. Things that are easy to fix will be done quickly. If your problem requires expertise, don't expect a response for a long time.

3. Imhosted's uptime guarantee is a load of crap. My website doesn't work, but Inhosted says it does! Customer Service admits there is a problem, but I highly doubt that means I get a refund.

4. Customer service is RUDE. After spending hours calling their numerous answering machines, filing tickets, and struggling to get help, I downloaded ICQ for their 24/7 live support. Only one person is online and he's a jackass. He told me 'five minutes' several hours ago and my site still doesn't work.

I'm going to offer 5 TB of space and ludicrous bandwidth so high it can't be posted on the net and set up shop based out of Barundi!

[Siji]

I've seen various numbers and such, but from my personal experience in the last two years I can only say great things about InMotion Hosting..

http://www.inmotionhosting.com

[murr]

http://www.dreamhost.com has always been great to me, and they have a ton of goodies like one click installs, will set up subversion/sql/whatever for you.

edit: their basic plan is $7.95/mo for 200gb storage / 2 TB bw, and unlike above company are insanely reliable.

should refer me if you go with them though! pretty plsz

[Mr Bacon]

http://www.surpasshosting.com

No, it doesn't offer terabytes of bandwidth, or 100's of gigs of space, but it is a reliable host.

P.S. no one's going to visit your sites anyway, so terabytes? wtf? come on.

Edit: it appears that they do offer 200 gigs of space and 2 tb's of bandwidth for their 6/mo deal. I guess they recently upgraded from 5g space /30g bandwidth.

[Hoarmurath]

If you're just looking for space, what about Amazon?

http://aws.amazon.com

Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

* Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
* Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
* Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
* Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
* Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Pricing

* Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
* $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

[Pherr the Dorf]

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.dspmain

It is reliable, fast, and offers a ton of stuff. I would never ever change to be honest, the reliabilty factor is far too high to worry about a couple bucks a month

[Winnow]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'm up in Vegas for Xmas. I'll check these out when I get home!

[Syenye]

i use dreamhost. there are a lot of coupons floating around the ruby on rails community; i got my first year of hosting for like $7.

[Fash]

I run webhosting and while I do not offer winnow's level of bandwidth requirement, I offer cheap custom solutions, solid reliability, and great support. Development and examples of such are also available.

Uptime 419 days 18 hours 27 minutes

web page in bad need of a re-do: http://nexornet.com

[Mr Bacon]

ouch, call to sign up? yucky.

[Boogahz]

web page in bad need of a re-do: http://nexornet.com

QFT!

[Winnow]

http://www.dreamhost.com has always been great to me, and they have a ton of goodies like one click installs, will set up subversion/sql/whatever for you.

edit: their basic plan is $7.95/mo for 200gb storage / 2 TB bw, and unlike above company are insanely reliable.

should refer me if you go with them though! pretty plsz

I decided to go with Dreamhost for a few reasons.

I can't refer you though because using a coupon code got me 97.00 off for the one year plan:



I found the discount code here:

http://dreamhost-promo-code.yellowgorilla.net/

Nice of them to point that out! I found it hard to pass up Dreamhost even if it ends up sucking at $22.40 for an entire year.

The basics look good:

# 200GB Disk Storage (Increases by 1GB/week)
# 2TB transfer bandwidth / month (Increases by 16GB/week)
# 1 Free Domain
# Up to 3000 pop/imap email accounts
# Shell and FTP access (up to 75 accounts)
# your own jabber chat server
# 1-click installs (Wordpress, phpBB, MediaWiki, Joomla, Gallery and more)
# ability to host unlimited domains and subdomains
# MySQL, php, cgi and all the usuals

and it appears to have streaming media so lets hope the servers can download faster than 10KB/sec and are up at least 80% of the time!

The huge discount for signing up, which makes it practically no risk to try for a year, and the fact that bluehost is located in Utah and forbids all porn made me go with Dreamhost. I have no plans for hosting porn (never have) but if I put up a picture or two at some point, I don't want to get shutdown.

Thanks for all the suggestions on this thread. I spent time researching them all.

[Siji]

Somehow, I have a feeling that you're not going to get 2TB of bandwidth for less than $2 a month. Not that that has anything to do with the provider your picked, I just agree with what was said above.

Guessing there's no print that says, "You will get 2TB all to yourself".

[Winnow]

Somehow, I have a feeling that you're not going to get 2TB of bandwidth for less than $2 a month. Not that that has anything to do with the provider your picked, I just agree with what was said above.

Guessing there's no print that says, "You will get 2TB all to yourself".

Yeah, that seems outrageous but it does have "Disk: 0% of 200.0 GB" and "Xfer: 0% of 2048 GB" on the control panel. The key is how fast it transfers. I'll be checking that out soon.

There's a "Throttling" option where Dreamhost will shutdown and switch your webpage to a minimal message if you get close to the 2TB/month limit. I guess people hit that limit as I see messages in the forums about it. Seems like a buttload of data considering it took me more than a year to download even 1TB from giganews while grabbing monster xbox/xbox360/pc images along with a mass of mp3s, movies, etc, not to mention pron. I don't think it will be possible for me to use more than the ~68GB/day necessary to hit 2TB in a month's time. When I posted that Family Guy movie on VV, I barely hit 10GB in a single day and that was a lot with a 140mb file.

I like the control panel so far. It's been a breeze to setup the basics.

Just tested uploads/downloads using a 45mb file:

Upload: 135KB/s (that maxed out my upload cap from Cox)
Download: 840KB/s (45mb file downloaded in 57 seconds)

A+ rating for that test. I'll have to try it again during business hours. If I can get 5-8 Mbps transfer speeds for 22.00/year and 200GB storage, this Dreamhost can't be all bad.

[Sargeras]

Quicktime Streaming
All DreamHost plans now include unlimited Quicktime Streams! We use Apple's open source "Darwin" streaming media server to allow you to stream audio and/or video content from your web site. In order to prepare the media to be streamed (i.e. begin play while the file continues to download) you must "hint" the file. It's a bit of a complicated process, but we outline it and have plenty of help in our wiki. To set up Quicktime Streaming you have to use our web panel and create a special sub-domain where all your streamed media will come from.

RealAudio and Video
All DreamHost plans include support for "http-streaming" real audio and video. This basically means you can link to .rm files and they will stream to customers who have RealPlayer installed on their computer. It's not quite that simple, but it is pretty close. If you don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of Quicktime Streaming this is a pretty easy way to still over streaming media from your web site. You will of course need to encode your stuff as real media first before you can do this... so you should probably read more about it at our wiki!

The only thing stopping me (from signing up with Dreamhost) is I see no option for avi, wmv, or flv streaming.

[Winnow]

Quicktime Streaming
All DreamHost plans now include unlimited Quicktime Streams! We use Apple's open source "Darwin" streaming media server to allow you to stream audio and/or video content from your web site. In order to prepare the media to be streamed (i.e. begin play while the file continues to download) you must "hint" the file. It's a bit of a complicated process, but we outline it and have plenty of help in our wiki. To set up Quicktime Streaming you have to use our web panel and create a special sub-domain where all your streamed media will come from.

RealAudio and Video
All DreamHost plans include support for "http-streaming" real audio and video. This basically means you can link to .rm files and they will stream to customers who have RealPlayer installed on their computer. It's not quite that simple, but it is pretty close. If you don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of Quicktime Streaming this is a pretty easy way to still over streaming media from your web site. You will of course need to encode your stuff as real media first before you can do this... so you should probably read more about it at our wiki!

The only thing stopping me (from signing up with Dreamhost) is I see no option for avi, wmv, or flv streaming.

There is flv streaming. I haven't messed around with streaming yet and know next to nothing about it but here's the part of the control panel that deals with it:



Edit: oops, had to recrop the image to remove personal infoz

Edit 2: I completed download test #2 during the business day and still got 800+KB/s (45mb file took 58 seconds instead of 57 during off hours) On a single pipe, that's very good.

[Sargeras]

The flash availability is comforting, and the fact that they'll encode the movie file into its own integrated swf player is pretty sweet. I was also looking for something along the lines of MMS and RTSP protocol. But honestly, if they support flash intergration then that would keep me happy.

Thanks Winnow!

[Moonwynd]

I did a search for "hosting" on VV since I was looking for info - now I am resurrecting this thread!

I signed up last week with http://www.lunarpages.com

I did a lot of research online - reading reviews and such. I went with the Basic Hosting Plan for for $7.95/month.

http://pluto3.lunarpages.com/basic-hosting/

If you pay for a year in advance you get some good stuff:

[*]Free Domain Name For Life - no charge on renewing your domain as long as you are hosting with them.
[*]$700 of CoffeeCup software - http://www.lunarpages.com/free-web-design-software.php

My storage is 350 GB with 3500 GB/Month. They have award winning support 24/7/365 via telephone/e-mail/online help desk.

I had to send an e-mail and waive the 30 day money back guarantee in order to download the free CoffeeCup software and give it try. I already have HomeSite, Flash, DreamWeaver, FireWorks, FreeHand and the like - but CoffeeCup does have some nice stuff.

If anyone is interested in some good hosting...check these guys out.

Here is a coupon code if you are interested: The coupon code is: “28add1month” - $28 Off plus a Free month!

[cid]

Any new thought on web hosts?

[Sargeras]

I signed up with DreamHost because of this thread, and overall I'm pretty happy, but I have two beefs:

1. (It's just my preference) No cPanel. I used it for years and I loved it sooo much for admin/options.

2. Their mail spam filter is bad. There's ways to adjust your inbox filter but it's too confusing.

[Winnow]

1. (It's just my preference) No cPanel. I used it for years and I loved it sooo much for admin/options.

Their Dreamhost Control Panel is a little goofy but it provides all the info you need and it's easy to get Webstats once you've set up the password.

Here's the most popular searches in the past week on my comics art site from the webstats provided by Dreamhost:



Seems DC characters and comics are more popular searches than Marvel recently!

The stats are extensive and detailed. One of the more useful things is finding the most hits on a particular jpeg image and where it's being linked from. I've found a few blogs that have linked images from my site. I didn't know who "Benita Winckler" was until seeing her name pop up on popular searches. Turns out she's a pretty good artist:

http://miyagu.cgsociety.org/gallery/

[Leonaerd]

Here's the most popular searches in the past week on my comics art site from the webstats provided by Dreamhost:

urlzors?

[Winnow]

Here's the most popular searches in the past week on my comics art site from the webstats provided by Dreamhost:

urlzors?

The little globe icon below my name.

[Boogahz]

Here's the most popular searches in the past week on my comics art site from the webstats provided by Dreamhost:

urlzors?

The little globe icon below my name.

No globe here

[Aslanna]

I see one.

[Winnow]

should be located to the right of the PM icon

[Boogahz]

Nope. not there with subsilver2 for me

Could just post the link though...or search through the comics forum to find it

removed free advertising for winnow

[Winnow]

Nope. not there with subsilver2 for me

Ah that could be why. I'm using Prosilver.

Old school peeps are missing out on stuff!

I don't like to advertise the site.

Google and MSN have already indexed it so it's just a matter of time before it's overrun or I have to make it private/password.



Although, I only use 20GB/month bandwidth and am allowed 2,500GB/month so I'm not even using 1% yet.

[Boogahz]

Is everything still going smoothly with this host Winnow? Thinking of getting something set up, and looking for a good one. I checked it out and that promo-code still appears to be valid.

[Aardor]

Is everything still going smoothly with this host Winnow? Thinking of getting something set up, and looking for a good one. I checked it out and that promo-code still appears to be valid.

I've used dreamhost about as long as winnow, and I think it's great. Hope the promo code will still apply when I have to renew in a few months!

[Winnow]

Is everything still going smoothly with this host Winnow? Thinking of getting something set up, and looking for a good one. I checked it out and that promo-code still appears to be valid.

Yeah, it's been great. I can't remember having any downtime at all.

Downloading and uploading has been speedy.

I received an email from Dreamhost informing me that they were moving the cluster I'm on on Nov 30th and that there would be 8 hours of downtime. That's plenty of warning for me.

My site does around 20GB of traffic which isn't much. Every once in awhile someone will leech the entire site (which I purposely made easy to do) and that uses several GB of bandwidth but I don't thik I've ever broken 2% usage for HD space or bandwidth. According to my control panel, I'm allowed 5 Terabytes of bandwidth per month now so 20GB < 5000 GB. I'm using 6.4 GB of the 253GB I'm allowed.

Not bad for $21.00 the first year. I created my Dreamhost account 12/27/2007 so in a month or so I'll be paying 119.00 for another year. well worth it IMO. $10/month. Everything worked great this past year. Their control panel has all the stuff you would typically want.

Can' go wrong for $21.00 to try it out for a year. Has better uptime than VeeshanVault!

You can check the speed here:

http://stuff.thathappened.com/

Here's the Gamerz movie:

http://stuff.thathappened.com/albums/up ... Gamerz.zip

That I highly recommended to anyone that's played pen and paper RPG games in the past on this thread:

http://www.veeshanvault.org/forums/view ... 11&t=19999

It's 700mb, I just tried downloading it and got 20+Mbps burst and then it settled down into my max 12.5Mbps download speed. I always get max upload as well.

You can check from your location to see if you get good speeds.

[Fash]

my server has been online for 2 years and a couple weeks without reboot or any downtime.

[Boogahz]

Anyone else get hit by Dreamhost's nifty little billing error today?

[Winnow]

Anyone else get hit by Dreamhost's nifty little billing error today?

I'm fine. I received an email detailing what I'll be charged over the next year but nothing was taken out of my account and the email was accurate.

[Boogahz]

Anyone else get hit by Dreamhost's nifty little billing error today?

I'm fine. I received an email detailing what I'll be charged over the next year but nothing was taken out of my account and the email was accurate.

Lucky! The email I received, and my bank account, shows that they took out enough to equal two years of service, even though my first year was already paid for in-full.

[Winnow]

Lucky! The email I received, and my bank account, shows that they took out enough to equal two years of service, even though my first year was already paid for in-full.

Part of my email:

today's date: 2008-12-28
amount due now: $0.00
current balance: $0.00 (including charges not due until 2009-01-27)

Looks like they screwed up the billing date. It shows "12-28-2008" as today's date.

I'd be pissed if I was charged though so I can't recommend Dreamhost any longer although I'll continue to use them!

[Boogahz]

This is the latest update.

Billing Issues

We are currently aware of some billing inaccuracies which we will be resolving later today. All of these issues will be resolved, and any billing errors corrected. We sincerely apologize for any hassle this has created.

- UPDATE Tue Jan 15 04:13:17 PST 2008 -

The problem has been found and corrected. We are currently going through all erroneously charged accounts and refunding money. Stay tuned for further updates.

- UPDATE Tue Jan 15 07:25:16 PST 2008 -

Scripts are still running to correct the original problem. Last night, this guy ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007. Unfortunately, the biller was ran for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.

There is currently no ETA on when the “fix it” script will finish, but this post will not be resolved until it is. The script will reverse all erroneous charges and notify you via e-mail of the transaction reversal. If you receive an all clear e-mail, and are still having any problems with your account and/or charges, please contact support immediately.

Once again, we are all *extremely* sorry for the mishap. Thank you for your continued patience while we clean up our mess.

[Winnow]

"Extremely sorry" doesn't cut it for those that might be using debit accounts or had bills screwed up.

This is a major screwup and they should compensate those affected with a free month or something. Scary that some dude can just put in a wrong date and screw the entire client list for Dreamhost.

[Boogahz]

Last night, this guy ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007.

This part bothers me a lot. How did they have "stragglers" from 2007? Does this mean that people with automatic payments enabled will never know when they will be processed?

[Winnow]

This message is on the front page of my Ameritrade Account:

Some account balances are currently being displayed incorrectly. If you are trying to place a trade online and believe that your balance is inaccurate, please contact one of our brokers to help place your trade. We are working on a resolution and apologize for the inconvenience.

Don't like seeing that!

[Aslanna]

This message is on the front page of my Ameritrade Account:

Some account balances are currently being displayed incorrectly. If you are trying to place a trade online and believe that your balance is inaccurate, please contact one of our brokers to help place your trade. We are working on a resolution and apologize for the inconvenience.

Don't like seeing that!

I'm sure they are extremely sorry!

[Winnow]

Some comments on digg about the Dreamhost situation:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Dreamhost_mis ... iple_years

Ameritrade is usually pretty good. I did deposit some money yesterday in my account that showed up this morning but is gone now. It looks like they just wiped out transactions that happened overnight and are reapplying them.

If I wanted to make a trade with the money I just deposited last night, I couldn't though so that sucks.


The market's crashing as usual so it's only helping me by not letting me buy more shares!

[Aardor]

Wow, that's awful. Really glad i decided to cancel my Dreamhost account last week, because it was a useless expense.

[Fash]

I've never erroneously billed anyone!

new uptime: 805 days, 13:30, 0 users, load average: 0.06, 0.06, 0.03

[Boogahz]

I've never erroneously billed anyone!

new uptime: 805 days, 13:30, 0 users, load average: 0.06, 0.06, 0.03

?

lol

[Fash]

0 users logged in (via SSH). normally it would say 1 user if I executed the uptime command via SSH, but I did it via web.

There are ~20 sites hosted on my server, but for security purposes, no one gets SSH access but me.

[Boogahz]

I have to laugh at all of the people saying that an extra hundred dollars shouldn't matter to people...seeing that the current total that they charged is over $7.5 million.