How Much Do You Pay to Host Your Website? 748
DosGusanos asks: "I was curious how much people around the U.S. and around the world pay for hosting. Obviously size in cabinets/rack units/square feet, included features such as bandwidth, UPS/generator, management, etc. factor in. The configuration I am particularly interested in is three machines, one www, one search, and one database. The machines would be hooked up to a T1 and networked to one another over Ethernet. Anyone paying for colo or hosting in this same ballpark? How happy/upset are you with your provider?"
Re:AOL (Score:2, Interesting)
No wonder it's number one! *cringe*
We are currently paying the cost of a T1 in the bay area. I spend a very small amount of time actually managing the servers. Initial investment was the hardware (6 rackmount boxes, load balancing box, firewall, managed UPS, net hardware..blah blah).
Maybe Im just paranoid, but I wouldn't feel right hosting our websites on someone elses hardware. It would be like having sex in your parent's bed.
Perhaps we could save money on bandwidth by putting our hardware somewhere else, but I get the feeling that it would be a wash whether it is hosted on-site or at a colo facility.
ServerBeach (Score:5, Interesting)
I like them a lot. $100 / month for a dedicated server that's a 1ghz duron with 512 meg of ram and 60 gig hard drive. That's more than enough power for the sites I host. For $1000/month with them, I could get a site that can't be slashdotted.
The downside is support. They only have a mail ticketing system, and you're pretty much left to handle your own problems, but that's okay. I pretty much considered it a learning experience installing / configuring my own BIND, Apache, Mysql, and GD.
The best part of this is that they include 400gig/month in bandwidth to use. It would take some serious bandwidth to suck all that up. It's burstable too.
FYI they're based in Texas. If you're looking for discounted hosting, go for it!
Of course, don't cry to me if you run a commerce site with them. It's my belief that any site that's a breadwinner for a company should run at a place that has 24/7 support. A ticketing system is fine, just make sure there's always someone there to answer it.
Overall, I like them. Cheap enough to keep me happy, and it's my own machine with root so I can install/config and run whatever I want.
Work == lots of bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)
No - very very kindly.
Generally they'll have more bandwidth that they need. And if they've got a Packeteer or a FlowFusion, they can let you have the remainder of the bandwidth that they aren't using. The way I see it, is that any bits on an E1 that aren't being used is money being wasted.
Obviously, it goes without saying that spam, warez, and pr0n is a no-no.
But if they're cool, they may well let you sneak in a few boxes.
eryxma.com (Score:4, Interesting)
the service has been great. the ceo even gave me his AIM screenname. I recommend them highly.
Message Board costs (Score:5, Interesting)
We pay roughly 6,000 per year. This includes the software, the hardware, the bandwidth and the service. (This is through http://www.ezboard.com) We have been very happy with the service, receiving assistance from the company CEO when need be. Their software/hardware is also capable of handling very long threads, (our longest being over 12,000 posts and 130mb for the text only before becoming corrupted.)
I believe in using local people (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:"Free" hosting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Consequently I'm getting charged only $30...so it's a pretty good deal to run one domain on a P3 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD machine.
Re:I love my provider (Score:5, Interesting)
Speakeasy could only offer me sdsl at 128k - for $60/month... PacBell wanted $49 for 1.5/384 adsl.
I wrote them a bunch to find out the terms of my contract - and was told different things by different people. So I decided to leave.
Since I told speakeasy that I was going to leave they were trying to charge me $350 for terminating the contract. I told them no way I was going to pay that. I told them of all the conflicting info I got from all their service reps, and told them that since they couldnt even clearly show me the terms of my service, their claim that there was a termination fee of that size was BS. They said they'd have to bill me for it. I said go ahead and bill me - but there is no way in hell you're ever getting any money from me. I have a better service here - you cant/wont match it, and you want more money for me. We can go to court if you like - but I doubt you would win. They billed me once. I mailed them all the email correspndence I had with them - and they dropped it.
My small ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
$35/mo per machine + $50/mo per 3kB/sec (about 7.5 GB a month) So for $85/mo you can co-lo a server with me. I will say that most clients I have know me. Not too many people are willing to put a machine in someones basement.
I have a generator, 60 min of UPS for everything, and redundant T1. Not bad for a company called:
"2 Geeks and a Pipe"
I am curious how this price compares to what is avaiable out there? Comments?
Dreamhost (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think they offer co-location, but they do offer dedicated machines for managed or unmanaged co-hosting. If you're interested in signing up, click here [dreamhost.com].
ProHosters is amazing (Score:2, Interesting)
ProHosters [prohosters.com]
Reseller accounts! (Score:3, Interesting)
We get 1gb of disk, and 20gb transfer. This is the lowest option, you can get a lot more.
Checkit out.
www.wpidalamar.com - Personal web site
Our joint-venture: www.geek4.com - public web site, like slashdot, but anyone can post, and then people can subscribe to various authors to determine what news they get.
Re:I [dont'] love [speakeasy] (Score:2, Interesting)
All throughout, they kept the polite smiley attitude that everybody from Seattle seems to have, but nobody was actually willing to help me there. I would really recommend that folks stay away from all big ISPs, esp Speakeasy, and find local small-fry ISPs who actually want your business.
managed hosting--pogo linux (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm very happy with them, $149 a month for their hardware at their site (15 GB xfer/month). I've paid more to CoLo my own boxes.
You have root access on your box.
Had no service interruptions or power outages since I've been with them. I just checked my uptime and it was 292 days, I bounced it earlier this year after patching something.
Anyways, I'm not affiliated, etc, but I've been very happy with PogoLinux.
Not just what you pay its the peering,security and (Score:2, Interesting)
For UK/EU customers... (Score:2, Interesting)
£100 per month, plus £20 for every 30Gb of data transfer. That includes 1U space, power, remote console, etc and a 10Mbps connection.
Choosehosting [choosehosting.com] host all of our games server off QiX - fabulosuly low pings, great support, great speeds. They also offer central European hosting for European-centric customers.
Re:I paid $200 for a lifetime hosting.... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is probably why you are trolling for clients on Slashdot instead of getting them through search engine referrals and word-of-mouth advertising.
Re:Speakeasy.net Sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
If speakeasy.net is the cream of the crop, the others must shoot your dog or something. I honestly don't see how an ISP could be any worse.
Re:Flash is for... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe you should blame the designers and abusers of the technology and not the technology itself!
Re:how to buy a dedicated -- Answers Please! (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm in the market for a server, and these are much better questions thatn I could think of, but I'm not sure what the answers should be.
Re:"Free" hosting... (Score:1, Interesting)
For one thing, you're dependent on your residential power supply and
probably using a consumer UPS.
For another thing, the 768k SDSL is good, but is it as good as the
gig-E and the OC-48 that the ISP has?
How does your route for a consumer line compare to what you'd
have at a colo provider? (Might be better!)
I pay $110 a month for a full megabit ADSL from a local provider, 8 static IPs, no
unreasonable rules or policies, btw. All things considered, I greatly
prefer my website to be hosted on an ISP's virtual web farm. It's being
backed up, it's on a commercial power supply, it's altogether on a
much higher bandwith connection, and it's not taking up space in
my house, making noise, raising my electric and air conditioning bills.
There's another aspect also: If I run a commercial web service at home,
I might not be 100% legal for tax and business reasons. If something is
afoul with my web based business, and it's located at my house, the
IRS and the FBI could take my house when they come for my web server.
If it's at a service provider's site, all they can do is shut the box down, if
they can convince the service provider to do so.
Another thing about consumer broadband is that it's only as permanent
as your current housing, and you won't know whether you can get high-speed
dsl at your next place until you already live there. This to me is the biggest
problem with DSL. I want to be able to get a guaranteed binding agreement
from the telco that DSL will be available at a given address, BEFORE I've
even talked to the realtor, much less, closed on the house and installed a
phone line.
The telco's can't do this and won't even understand what you're asking for if you do.
Speakeasy can't do it either.
Even if the current resident has DSL, you can't get a guarantee that you
will be able to get it if they move out and you move in.
For these reasons, I find it much better to have the web services
colocated at the ISP's data center.
Re:Rackspace (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm glad you mentioned this. I've been using Verio for the last couple years. Everything has been really good, except for little skirmishs with the blacklists.
When I first signed up, just about two years ago, there were just a couple of the minor blacklists listing a netblock that had my IP number. The listings were for a spammer that Verio had kicked off months ago. I contacted the blacklist maintainers (only one of those lists was could be be called "maintained"). It's remarkably difficult to contact these people. Eventually the better list dropped the block, and that gave me enough leverage to convince the other two to do the same (the spammer had long since moved on for greener pastures).
But in the last year or so, there's been a whole new crop of spammer acusations. I can't verify them... it reads like a whole lot of conspiracy theory. But a couple weeks ago it even got posted as a slashdot story (so it must be true, right?)
I called Verio. Before the slashdot story, they would just deny everything. They didn't admit they were catering to any spammers, but they didn't flat out deny that no spammers were operating on their network.
Verio claims that their hosting business is very separate from their network provision services (T1, T3, OC-something lines.... more bandwidth than I can envision). So far, the more reputable blacklists haven't waged netblocks on Verio's hosting side, or at least the few IP numbers allocated to my little server.
So because of these escalating wars between the spammers and blacklists, if you intend to host a mail server, the ISPs record about hosting spammers should be your top concern. Saddly, there are a lot of mixed messages and it's hard to tell if any particular provider is any good. Two years ago, for example, Verio was listed at the top of SpamCop's page of providers with exemplary anti-abuse policies.
Recently I've been making some tenative plans for jumping ship from Verio. Other than this spammer/blacklist issue, and one little incident where they didn't notify me in advance of (supposedly) scheduled maintainance (they claim they did), the decicated hosting service from Verio has been great.
But hitting blacklists, even occasionally, is a real show-stopper. For my little site, we do a light amount of e-commerce. When a confirmation email to a customer bounces (they placed the order over the web), we look like a little fly-by-night company out to steal their credit card info. Of course, emails bounce for a variety of other reasons, so we've gotten into the practive of picking up the phone and calling them with the tracking number.
The sad news is that there doesn't seem to be any really good way of determining if a provider is hosting or provisioning bandwidth to spammers. Even if everything looks good in advance (as it did 2 years ago with Verio), things change.... and they change more rapidly that you'd want to move providers when everything else is running so smoothly.
I wish I could recommend Verio, as the service, performance and reliability has been excellent. But this spammer problem and the reaction from the blacklisting community is definately something you don't want to get caught in the middle of.
I'm taking Rackspace off my short list of "plan B" options if the Verio/blacklist situation gets worse. Rackspace was actually at the top of my list.
I just got an account there (Score:2, Interesting)
About uptime/downtime/tech support - for ten bucks, I'd say it's one of the best deals around. I used to host stuff on HostPro for more than twice that much money and had really crappy throughput and, frankly, an annoying web-admin interface. Tech support was also bare minimum.
So far, he.net has been responsive, has great throughput, and a great shell environment to do admin stuff from. My only real complaint is that vim was compiled april 2001, which broke on my .vimrc.
But, anyway, if it all turns to shit and I decide I don't like it, I can always go somewhere else -- there's no year or 6 month contract, and payments are made monthly.
_khl
Re:how to buy a dedicated (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously.
T1: A Slow Beast? (Score:3, Interesting)
While 1.5 Mbps is a substantial amount of bandwidth, DSL/cable modems are becoming increasingly common. I maintain a server hosted on a T1 that's mainly used for web browsing during the day, and when I do bandwidth-intensive file transfer from my cable modem, I'm able to come very close to filling the T1. While serving normal webpages does work flawlessly, I just wanted to point out that if you offer downloads -- or even just use lots of images/Flash -- your bandwidth will disappear surprisingly quickly. A single user with a cable modem can be eating up all your bandwidth. (Again, I'm not suggesting that a T1 is now worthless, just advising people -- if the T1 is shared with numerous other sites, if a single one is somewhat active, you may have precious little bandwidth.)