Web-hosting question for innanet nerds
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
So I need to find a new hosting home for Soul Sides; it's been a great run over with Sandbox, who were incredibly gracious in hosting the site since its inception, but they're downsizing and given that my site drives a high % of their bandwidth, I need to find some place new. Not having really done this before, I'm wondering if any more experienced folk out there would have any basic tips on what I should be wary of or features I should look for? I can tell you that my site currently clocks in about 500-600 GB of bandwidth usage a month so obviously I'd want a plan with a higher ceiling to accommodate. Someone recently mentioned "grid hosting" to me but I have no idea what that is about and am slightly concerned that some grid hosting plans don't support Java (I don't use much scripting but I do have some). Anyways, insights quite welcome. Thanks!
Comments
Hard to say; I've never had to pay for it so I don't know what's realistic/reasonable.
Check Bluehost.com or Hostpapa.com if you want to go greener.
i think you could get a cheap hosting deal from anyone for the blog/db part but any media files (mpRAERZ, pictures, etc) could be hosted off of amazon on their host to order service
i think it saves money in the long run. You only pay for the bandwidth that is used. I'm pretty sure thats how it works. ^___^
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html
They're currently offering unlimited disk storage (+50 gb) and unlimited bandwidth. If you pay for a year upfront, it will cost you $9.95 -- pay for two years, then it becomes $8.95 per month, etc, etc. Also, there are 'customer codes' for new users that offer discounts.
They also have a ridiculous 'sale' that ends today --
Don't fall for Media Temple, they're super pricey. Go Daddy is okay, but they're web panel area for users is a nightmare.
In an economy like we have right now and for the foreseeable, bandwidth is not an issue, it will be unlimited and you will not pay more than $150 absolute max a year for hosting.
GoDaddy is definitely not the way to go, but I would tend to disagree about the true cost of hosting. Putting high traffic sites on shared hosting accounts is definitely not a good idea.
I looked at them but their "unlimited" bandwidth offer comes with several caveats. 500-600GB isn't out of this world big, but I'm worried it might be big enough for them to force me to a private server which will likely increase my costs.
And Amazon's costs are fairly high: over 100/mo based on their calculator.
http://www.rackspace.com
J/K. RackSpace may be overkill but 100% uptime is nice. Like anything else, you get what you pay for.
I have been through numerous hosts and there was never such a thing as "unlimited bandwidth". They say it. But they have many *'s next to it.
I have been with Sectorlink for around 3 years now and love them to death. They answer my tickets within 10 minutes and their support is not outsourced to Eastern Europe or India. USA!! USA!!
Works very well with one of my favorite online radio stations, StraightUp http://www.straightup.com.au/
Alas, they're not that inexpensive.
$3 a month for 30gb webspace with unlimited bandwith
i have had no problems with them
I also have a friend who runs a non-profit in Philadelphia go through the same problem w/ 3ix. Thing with him was that he was trying to solicit donations from large companies when it happened.
Although we obviously pull in a significantly lower amount of traffic than soul-sides it seems to hold up fine with the amount of files we load on there, is easy to use and costs 95 dollars a year which seems pretty reasonable (though obviously not as reasonable as it was six months ago).
Let me know if you want any other details.
Home 100 Home 500 Home 1000 Pro 1000 Pro 2000 Pro 3000
ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER
Annual fee
(inc vat)
??30 ??60 ??90 ??141 ??188 ??235
Web Space (MB)
100 500 1000 1000 2000 3000
Data Transfer (MB/month)
500 750 1000 2000 4000 6000
Mail Boxes 5 10 15 100 500 1000
MySQL Databases 1 2 3 5 10 20
Automated Backups weekly weekly weekly daily daily daily
Tech Support email email email tel. tel. tel.
Control Panel yes yes yes yes yes yes
Web File Manager yes yes yes yes yes yes
Secure Directories yes yes yes yes yes yes
Email auto responders 5 10 15 100 500 1000
Email forwarding yes yes yes yes yes yes
Email aliases yes yes yes yes yes yes
Spamfilter yes yes yes yes yes yes
Web statistics yes yes yes yes yes yes
Database Management yes yes yes yes yes yes
SSI yes yes yes yes yes yes
MySQL5 yes yes yes yes yes yes
PHP5 yes yes yes yes yes yes
CGI Bin yes yes yes yes yes yes
Annual Fee ??30 ??60 ??90 ??141 ??188 ??235
ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER ORDER
on Lunarpages