[NTLUG:Discuss] Web hosting.

[Stuart Johnston]

Chris Cox wrote:
> Stuart Johnston wrote:
>> On 10:52 pm 08/30/2006 steve <sjbaker1 at airmail.net> wrote:
>>> I've always hosted my personal web site on a PC at home - but
>>> I just volunteered to set up hosting for my local car club.
>>>
>>> Who are the "good guys" for web hosting these days?
>>>
>>> We need a mailing list (about 200 subscribers), a web site
>>> (maybe 50Gbytes of stuff) and I'd like to set up a Wiki
>>> and a Forum system.
>>>
>>> But since I'm running it - I need something Linux-based with
>>> whatever tools also Linux-based.  (Although FTP would do
>>> fine).
>>>
>>> Cost is also a concern.
>>>
>>> What recommendations do you guys have?
>>
>> dreamhost.com - they've had some power and network problems in their
>> datacenter recently but generally are pretty reliable.  And very
>> affordable.  Coupons are easily available that will get you the first year
>> for practically free.  They also have autoinstalls for things like wiki's
>> and forums.
> 
> I use dreamhost.com as well for housing stuff where I need near
> limitless bandwidth.  For $20/mo. or so you'll get 1.6TB (yes...TB)
> per month.  And you get 60GB of disk... yes... 60GB!  That's pretty
> good.  Obviously, like other cheap large providers, they allow
> anything that is allowe by U.S. law... which sadly means just
> about anything.
> 
> Disk space quota increases 500M/week.
> 
> Bandwidth grows 16GB/week (sheesh!!).
> 
> I think alot of the problems they had lately were due to a SAN
> unit... could be wrong.

The SAN was part of it.  You can read the whole story on the blog.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/

> 
> Say cjcox at acm.org referred you and I get some credits.... of
> course, you may want to find out Stuart's info and throw
> him the referral... if you choose dreamhost.com.

I actually don't have an account there myself.  I set one up for my mother recently but you can't do 
a referral and a coupon.  I'd suggest you save the money for yourself.  I used the code 'BEST' which 
gave me $22 for the first year.  There may be better codes out there.

> 
> 
> 
>>
>> If you need uber-reliable, I'd suggest pair.com.  Although they run a BSD,
>> it is generally close enough to Linux you shouldn't have much trouble.  You
>> get less per $1 though.
> 
> For ultra reliable, but expensive, I use futurequest.net.  Both
> dreamhost and futurequest use Linux.  However the futurequest folks
> are very saavy technically (though I do diagree with some of the
> ways they handle things).
> 
> Futurequest has pretty bad disk and bandwidth restrictions though...
> not unusual, but certainly places them into the expensive or just
> bad value category.  Fq doesn't allow "adult" hosting though, but
> they tend to overload their severs (IMHO).
> 
> Since dreamhost is a p___graphy haven, I link only the large high
> bandwidth items over there... and still use futurequest to house
> my main site.

They also have an interesting post about overselling and customer usage patterns:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/

(somebody over there spends way too much time finding silly photos for their blog posts)

> 
> To my knowledge there are no "moral" high bandwidth, high storage
> providers out there (that aren't incredibly expensive)... but feel
> free to post if you know of one.  I'd like to ditch FQ.... just
> not enough value there.
> 
> Love to get a good Linux VPS style solution...

Currently I have my stuff hosted at unixshell.com - Xen/Linux based virtual hosting.  They were 
great at first but then they got popular and couldn't handle the growth, among other problems.  They 
are not taking new accounts at this time.  Unfortunately, most other VPS hosts seem to have an 
unreasonably high cost per RAM.

It is hard to justify having a VPS.  I could do pretty everything I do now on DreamHost instead and 
save some money.  But, Ahh... The Power of Root.