web hosting

AtomBomb

The company I work for is looking for a new web host. Currently we pay a company (Kintera) who does our web design, hosting, provides us with a crappy web page editor and some other stuff. We pay them quite a bit each month, mostly (imo) for stuff we don't use or need. We're looking to have a company redesign our site, and we are in negotiations to do that. I'm thinking that once they build our site, we just need a place to host it, and some software to edit/create pages.

I've been looking around and I've found a couple hosts that seem promising, siteground and one.com. However, I want to make sure I'm looking for the right thing. I don't really think we need that much, but these services are significantly cheaper that what we have now. I don't think our requirements are that high. I'm guessing that we have less than 10gb of content (some of which is just picture storage that isn't accessible to the public), maybe 500 total pages, and traffic of maybe 40k hits per month. However, it's hard for me to believe that something we currently pay more than $1000/month for can be handled by a service that is less than $10/month. I just want some confirmation from people that know more than I do that I am indeed correct in my assumption that we are way overpaying for what we need.

Also, if anyone has other hosts that they recommend, or if you have any opinions on siteground or one.com I would like to hear them.

Thanks!

DrFrylock

40K hits really isn't a good estimate of how much bandwidth you're using, and most places charge by the GB. How much transfer (in GB per month) are you using?

For $1000 a month you may be paying for a hell of a service-level agreement. Most of these $10 a month hosting companies trade on their uptime but won't guarantee it - if somebody spills beer on the server and your site is out for two days, tough noogies. You'll get your $10 back if you're lucky, but certainly not lost costs. With a service-level agreement, you're guaranteed so much uptime, plus you probably have a support contract that says that you can call a person who will be there 24/7 or e-mail with a 1-4 hour response time or something like that. For a Real Business, those things are probably worth paying for.

Willscott

I've heard a lot of good thinks about media temple and their basic service is competitive with what you were listing, might be worth taking a look at: http://www.mediatemple.net/

I haven't had any experience with either siteground or one.com, but one.com seems focused on personal sites more than company sites.

AtomBomb

Thanks guys. I'll check out mediatemple as well.

I was a little low on the hits, it's closer to 80k. Unfortunately, our current host won't tell me how many gigs that is. I'm guessing that it is less than 100gb, but I can't know for sure. The packages I'm looking at allow between 750gb and 1000gb, so even if I'm off I think I'm within their range.

We do have a direct contact, but uptime isn't perfect even with that. They try to fix what's wrong, but we aren't compensated if they can't do it quickly. We were out for most of a day a few weeks ago, and this seems to happen 3 or 4 times a year. The site isn't mission-critical. We don't make money off of it, it's more informational. If we can get 99.9% uptime from someone like siteground I think that would be okay. I understand that there's a huge price difference between 99.9% (45 minutes a month) and 99.99% (5 minutes a month). Hopefully it's not out for large chunks of time, but an hour here and there won't kill us.

Anyone have recommendations for a host between these two price points? If I could get a more reliable host for more money I would certainly consider it.

Thanks for your help.

~edit~ Willscott, mediatemple is bad ass. Thanks for pointing me to it.

amateurhour

I've known some people that use speakeasy, and they seem to do like it. I think PvP uses them too, and they don't crash too often...