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Site hosting?
Mike Danger
"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered User regular
"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered User regular
What do people use for web site hosting? I was kind of thinking about making a personal or family site in the future and was just curious as to what the going rates are, different services, that kind of thing. (I'm not planning on doing it any time soon, I was just thinking how cool it would be to surprise my parents on Christmas with john@smith.com, and then have a place to post photographs, plan family gatherings, that sort of thing.)
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I think it's $119/year for 392gb but it increases +2 gb/week so it's not really an accurate number for what you'd get as a new customer cause i've had it since 2005. We can host unlimited domains on this account and have 7758gb of data transfer per month (also increasing by 40gb/week).
It's got unlimited email, databases, one click installs etc etc.
edit: Just read this on their main page.
$4.95 a month if you sign up now (normally $6.95). Unlimited space and bandwidth plus a lot of features that I'm sure you'll probably never even use for a personal site for family pictures. It's owned by the same person who runs http://www.bluehost.com/ and runs out of the same data-centers and computers.
Unlimited space and bandwidth alone should pop the price way above that amount.
You're both right, sort of, it is too good to be true, and the price is suspiciously low.
Unlimited space and bandwidth are an absolute myth. The way these discount hosting services work is they take one server and load it up with as many websites as possible. The big guys (such as Dreamhost, Bluehost, Lypha, et al) tend to "oversell" -- that is, promise the same amount of space on a server to the same people -- by as much as thousands of percentage points.
Here's a practical example: FakeHost has one server with a 250 gig hard drive. Their hosting package includes 2.5 gigs of space, so logically, they can host 100 people, right? Well, yes, they could, but they could make a lot more money if they hosted 1,000 people. New servers cost a lot of money, though, so why not just sell the same hard drive space to ten people and hope nobody actually uses all of it? Or hell, if we're already betting that most people won't use all the space we're selling them, why don't we offer all 250 gigs to everybody who signs up?
The problem is, what happens when somebody starts using all of the resources they've paid for?
There are three basic metrics used to measure how hard you are on a server:
- The amount of storage space your site uses
- The bandwidth (or transfer) that your site uses
- The amount of CPU overhead your site uses
And the third one is the important one. See, whether you're serving up HTML pages, images, or running scripts of some kind, you're using the server's CPU to process whatever is being served up. And all of those fancy scripts that come with your hosting package -- the blog, the forum, all of those goodies? Those all use a TON of CPU overhead. And as soon as they decide you're using the arbitrary amount that they decide is "too much", you have to either buy an upgraded hosting package, pay a penalty fee, or have your account frozen.Even if your site is small and humble and doesn't use much in the way of server overhead, keep in mind that you're still sharing one computer with as many as 2,400 other people (I've seriously seen servers that overloaded). It only takes one of them getting a traffic spike (say an entry in their little blog makes Digg, Fark, Slashdot, or hell, if Gabe or Tycho mentions them) to completely wreck every other site on the server. Or maybe somebody's misconfigured Perl script crashes the server. Or maybe some script kiddie gets ahold of an admin password and trashes every site on the machine. It happens all the time. My girlfriend uses DreamHost (as nothing she hosts is vitally important), and her site blips out of existence for minutes or even hours at a time on and off all day.
tl;dr: You get what you pay for.
As someone who was once intimately involved in website programming/hosting I can vouch for everything wasted pixels says. 100% accurate.
That price is good for uploading family photos and things.
It seems that the registration of the domain name is handled by a separate entity, though. What's a good domain name registrar?
Otherwise, GoDaddy is fine if you decide to go elsewhere.