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However, if you pay $1 per GByte, then you are already paying more than most hosts charge. You can go to Dreamhost and pay only $10 a month for 500 TB of transfer. Sure, you would probably never be able to use it, based on the speed the servers send pages at, but at least you have a little room. You could easily serve up 10 GB of traffic to make up for the $10 a month you don't have to pay extra for the space you use. I mean, you could probably pay less if you had a really low traffic site on NearlyFreeSpeech, but you could easily spend a lot more, if for some reason, your site got a lot of visits.

Basically someone put future dates in the billing system, making it believe we were in a future date, and resulting in ridiculous bills being sent out to every customer for a total of $7,500,000 in the short period of time the program run.

More info on the dreamhost page: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
And explanation of what happened by the guy who did it on its blog: http://blog.dreamhost.com/

The trouble is that RoR does have some serious issues - for example, it's apparently impossible to deploy in a shared-hosting environment.. Supposedly, the solution is for Dreamhost to "Wipe the wah-wah tears off [their] chin" and realise that the RoR community just don't care about shared hosting.

• It's cheap. ($129... and I'm sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)
• It's power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there's even a hand-crank charger!)
• It's a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they'll become confident and "fluent" in the use of technology, and future "real" computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)
• It's got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)
• It's rugged. (Nintendo's been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)
• It's powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)
• It's small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)
• It's forward-compatible. (Nintendo's portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they're selling in a decade.)
• Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that's "fun to use?" You want a teaching tool that's "collaborative" You've hit "the jackpot.")
• It's a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)
• It's already used for education. (Millions use their DS to learn a language, develop logic skills, practice cooking, learn math, read books, research, and browse the web every day!)

One Nintendo DS Per Child!
... The Nintendo DS is literally perfect for [the OLPC project's] needs:

• It's cheap. ($129... and I'm sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)
  
• It's power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there's even a hand-crank charger!)
  
• It's a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they'll become confident and "fluent" in the use of technology, and future "real" computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)
  
• It's got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)
  
• It's rugged. (Nintendo's been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)
  
• It's powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)
  
• It's small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)
  
• It's forward-compatible. (Nintendo's portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they're selling in a decade.)
  
• Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that's "fun to use?" You want a teaching tool that's "collaborative" You've hit "the jackpot.")
  
• It's a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)
  
• It's already used for education.

I hear dreamhost is hiring though

Hah! I clicked the link. http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html "All this for just $5.95/month! (paid 10 years in advance)"

Anyone who pays for web hosting 10 years in advance deserves what they get.

On that note, I'm off to sign a 25 year adjustable-rate loan for my shiny new Chevy HHR...

I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally. Remember that I've studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I'm old, and I don't give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine. You don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.

Over and over again I'd run into these morons who would offer me tiny jobs, no jobs, insult my intelligence, treat me like all I can do is code, and when I didn't fit that mold or wanted to charge them for the privilege they'd cheat me or laugh at me.

Google was a total riot. They offered me a job twice. I went with it, and they never responded. Probably because the job they were offering me--someone who's been coding for 21 years, 15 professionally--was as a junior system administrator. What the hell does a junior sysadmin do at google? That's probably like mopping the floor at a glory hole in Queens. I told them to review my resume and offer me a real position.

It's right here:

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

you stupid fucking WebHostingTalk parrot. You must be that dipshit owner of CartikaHosting.

DreamHost just celebrated their 10th Birthday too.. by giving away 500GB of space and 5TB of bandwidth for $9.30 for the first YEAR!

DreamHost just celebrated their 10th Birthday too.. by giving away 500GB of space and 5TB of bandwidth for $9.30 for the first YEAR!

... and we all know what was the best momment of all: doing the right stuff!

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Great hosting200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

Aaah what I really want to know is about those "chispets", are they some kind of pokemon from intel or something?

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Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

Let's knock out the obvious ones first, shall we ?

http://www.megaupload.com/ has one offering, 250gbyte. Prepaid for one year it's 50 Euros (or whatever their site says for the US locale). That's 70 bucks. You /can/ use this as a storage-only service, but of course you can also use it for distribution and such -- no transfer limits. Rapidshare.com has similar offerings (with "unlimited" storage but a 5gbyte/day cap) at similar prices. Both of these rely heavily on customers infringing copyrights, so it's anyone's guess how long they'll stay around. Both also use somewhat nonstandard file deposit and file delivery methods. There are countless others in that market (oxedion, mediafire, upfile, rs.de, filefront, etc., all with varying foci).

The regular webhosting market has things like this to offer as well. http://www.dreamhost.com/ : The cheapest plan, at one year prepayment, would be around 120 bucks and offer 145gb of space. I say would since you can use their promo codes (check the forums) to almost triple the space or drop the price to a lot less. So that's 400 gb of storage, a couple terabytes of transfer a month, and some processing power to boot (WebDAV/FTP/SFTP/SCP/rsync/etc. are all possible). I imagine competitors to DH will have similar offerings space-wise. We're looking at around a fourth the price for almost double the storage space. Don't you dare yell "overselling" -- Google does, too.

If you can be bothered with some cumbersome setup (to laypeople, anyway), Amazon S3 will get you storage space for $0.15/gb/month, plus traffic ($0.18/gb). If you actually use 250gb, the price will be comparable to Google for storage alone (i.e. no transfers other than the initial incoming transfer); the difference is that you get charged by the byte, not in large pre-paid packages. If you use 1gb and transfer it twice, you pay $0.51 that month. Also consider that if you use less than the 250gb Google offering, you're probably get away cheaper (since the smaller Google plans are comparatively more expensive while Amazon's offering exhibits a linear price curve over the amount of storage used).

The value Google's space has is probably the integration with its applications -- Picasa, for instance, lacks decent online functionality using standard protocols -- and Google will probably deliver GREAT online functionality with their own service.

If all you really need is a foolproof backup, open up an FTP and let the world mirror it. I wonder who would do such a thing ...

Bullshit.

Again, I call bullshit. Yes, Dreamhost does oversell like crazy. They even admit to it!. But they actually will let you use all the bandwidth and disk you're given. All of it.

Right now, a quick look at my panel shows that I'm using 64.1GB of space (as of last measurement). This month, I've moved over 1TB of HTTP traffic alone (I've used another 20GB or so of FTP traffic). No black mercedes. No phonecalls. Not even a damn e-mail from Dreamhost.

As Dreamhost points out, the only usage-related issue they'll cut you off for is CPU usage. For serving static content (i.e. not PHP pages), Dreamhost actually kicks ass. They really will let you hit both your quotas. Sure, you won't be able to run the next iTunes Movie Store off one of their shared hosts, but you can actually use all the space and not get so much as an e-mailed warning.

We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes

Whoa, slowdown boy, just tell us how many laptop-miles of power this machine has!

I tried Pipex and was unimpressed, among several UK hosts. Still, they did come through on their 30-day money back guarantee, and on the last day possible even.

I had a client that *required* a use a host within the UK and I never did manage. It was a nightmare. In the U.S. I use Dreamhost http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?134994 in L.A., Even though I'm in Amsterdam using Drupal which requires much server interaction, I'm very pleased with my subscription for nearly 2 years already. I've seen and heard of similar good US hosts, and some nearly as competitive here in the Netherlands, but I'd really like a solid UK host with skillz to step up to ./ and tell us what they've got, and why they deserve our business.

- - - -
you can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.

For anyone trying the latest K/X/Ubuntu flavor, or Debian 4 for that matter (as I did), wireless networking is easy, and cheap too, of you don't stray too far from these instructions.

1. Choose hardware from this madwifi/ Atheros list: http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility. Last week I picked up two El Cheapo Sweek 802.11g cards for 20 euros each, and Ubuntu flashed its restricted driver message at one once, I accepted, and it just worked, even with WPA2 + TKIP encryption at the router. Note there are no USB wifi dongles supported. But PCI & pcmcia, etc.

2. Part of the above is working with Gnome NetworkManager.

Stay focused on 1 & 2, and don't use little USB wireless sticks, and wireless on Linux IS easy.

disk encryption: bonus points for starting with Debian 4, since the EZ installer gives you the option to encrypt the whole (laptop?) disk from the Get Go. I opted for Debian's easy disk encryption (Ubuntu doesn't offer it, really) and chose to fight the wireless puzzle. It was a hard fight, but I think I picked the correct battle to fight. So now just add a nice rsync backup to my http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?134994 Debian server's non-public disk-space for $7 a month, and well that's a secure, yet functional laptop.

Oh, and www.Hamachi.cc makes for easy newbie intranets, and Firestarter is a nifty newbie GUI for IPTables.

- --

You can't be ahead of the curve if you're stuck in a loop.

They could always set up a wiki themselves. My webhost, DreamHost offers a wiki as part of their services. The school could set one up and input accurate info which the students would be allowed to refer, or maybe they are too lazy.

The problem is we all know what's gonna be the first result when searching "Caves on uranus"!!!

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Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

With behavior like that, SourceForge can't be considered a safe location for important code. I'd suggest that it's time to get projects off SourceForge. Make offsite backups of anything important now.

I'd probably have suggested this long ago. Last year they had at least a four day outage where there was no CVS access, which prompted at least one developer to pack up and leave.

I do appreciate the complexity of system uptime -- I really do. But if you can't have at least "one nine" uptime, you're not much good to anyone. I'm not sure if I care if this was an isolated incident or not, it should never happen for a service that's in such wide use. And yeah, I get that it's community supported and what do I expect for my $0. So I guess that's an excuse to do a poor job. So I guess I'll go pay money to Dreamhost and use their one nine uptime service instead. At least they'll apologize in a tongue in cheek kind of way when you bitch about it, since no amount of money will bring your little Billy back.

So I guess I've argued myself into a corner here. I started out being mad that SourceForge doesn't offer the quality of service I might like, and that you should go pick somewhere else to put your code. And then I realized that for the most part, no one offers any kind of service guarantee unless you run it yourself, in which case you can be pissed, but you're pissed at yourself. So you didn't fix the service problem, but at least you know where the bastard lives and can TP his house.

So never mind, no one does a good job. SourceForge is as good as any. Knock yourself out and turn the other cheek when CVS is down for four days or when they yank a part of the service that you liked.

Dreamhost offers WebDAV as part of their hosting service.

Another Dreamhost customer, I see. The great thing about them is that they've got a great backup policy. You should check out the wiki article

I've been meaning to write the scripts that'll handle all that stuff for me, but haven't really had the time. I've taken to autosyncing my irreplaceables to my iPod whenever it's connected and keeping financial documents in encrypted disk images.

What I really would like is the ability to mount FTP sites as writeable on my Mac. Rsyncing is fine for backing up, but the ability to drag a file onto a drive and have it show up where others can see it is the only advantage these file backup sites seem to have over a hosting account.

Wow, to add your site to publish they ask if it's or not over the million visits a month, a pretty high number if you ask me.

If your web is more modest you'd better go with text link ads.

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Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

If you're just going to redirect the nameservers to your webhost, I'd highly recommend Yahoo Small Business. Seriously, $10 a year, and the service has been pretty top notch compared to the other registrars I've dealt with.

If you do any web design/development, I'd also recommend Dreamhost. They're a reluctant registrar, as they mostly provide it as a service to bolster their website hosting business, but their support is very good.

DreamHost.com domain names are $9.95/year. However, apparently it is not possible to see the domain features unless you are a customer.

Thanks for the link to the InterNIC list of all domain registrars.

000domains.com domains are $13.50 per year, with a list of no-extra-cost features.

They are in fact also a registrar.

http://dreamhost.com/domains.html

I'll spare you the affiliate link.

I would recommend DreamHost. Real shell access is included if that's important.

Firefox 2 includes the new WHATWG-specified client-side persistent storage. However, some argue it is critically flawed. Learn the arguments now and we can discuss this further on Slashdot in 2010!

Plus, they recently starting offering free hosting for non-profits which makes me really happy to support them. BTW: I don't work there. I swear.

Personally I dig Dreamhost for most of my domain stuff. They're a web hosting company and exceedingly nice people to work with, and they offer their own domain services as part of the web hosting package.

If you're not going for hosting alongside your domain, I'd suggest Yahoo oddly enough. They're basically just a reseller for Melbourne IT, but they're cheap, and I've had no troubles with them before. They can't handle full-out domain transfers as per my understanding, but have all the standard redirection services.

Slashdot just covered this:
https://files.dreamhost.com/
I think it's exactly what you want.

Simple, cheap.

dreamhost is offering a service for their customers: https://files.dreamhost.com/ - No DRM is allowed.. period! - Once you upload your file to sell, you pay a tiny one-time storage fee, and we serve it FOREVER at a nice, permanent, URL. - Anybody who buys a file somebody offers via Files Forever get an online backup of it included.. that is, they may re-download the file as many times as they want, FOREVER! - Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also "loan" to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it "back." (This is awesome, trust me.) - We handle all the payment processing / shopping cart stuff, and take just 5% + 50c for credit card fees. (We combine purchases to minimize these costs too.) - You can even offer an "affiliate cut" for people who re-sell your files!

Dreamhost (note: my hosting provider, and a referral link) recently announced Files Forever (non-referral link) that I think would let you do what you are after. It's beta now (I don't know if they will let non-Dreamhost customers in) but I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for. When they announced it on their Blog they specifically mentioned being able to use it as an iTunes alternative.

Hope that helps.

Dreamhost (note: my hosting provider, and a referral link) recently announced Files Forever (non-referral link) that I think would let you do what you are after. It's beta now (I don't know if they will let non-Dreamhost customers in) but I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for. When they announced it on their Blog they specifically mentioned being able to use it as an iTunes alternative.

Hope that helps.

Dreamhost (note: my hosting provider, and a referral link) recently announced Files Forever (non-referral link) that I think would let you do what you are after. It's beta now (I don't know if they will let non-Dreamhost customers in) but I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for. When they announced it on their Blog they specifically mentioned being able to use it as an iTunes alternative.

Hope that helps.

Dreamhost (note: my hosting provider, and a referral link) recently announced Files Forever (non-referral link) that I think would let you do what you are after. It's beta now (I don't know if they will let non-Dreamhost customers in) but I think it's an easy solution to what you're looking for. When they announced it on their Blog they specifically mentioned being able to use it as an iTunes alternative.

Hope that helps.

1 TB for their basic $10/mo plan.

Maybe we would enjoy reading this: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/10/03/itunes-music- sore/

Actually, I kept thinking he was this guy. KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.

The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.

I've done my share of Google-bashing (mainly due to their inability to move their newer products beyond "beta"), but here's an accomplishment I have to admire: 100,000 servers designed and installed, pretty much glitch-free, in just 2 years! By contrast, my old web presence provider, a reputable and successful outfit, botched a simple expansion involving just a few computers, forcing a lot of customers (including me) to eat their contracts and move on.

www.dreamhost.com Disk: 20GB/month, increases by 800MB/month; Bandwidth: 1TB/month, increases by 32GB/month. Price: $7.95/month. The longer you're a customer, the more space and bandwidth you get. Includes shell accounts, etc. On top of that, ssh/sftp/rsync bandwidth doesn't even count against your account usage. I use Duplicity (rdiff-backup+gzip+gnupg) to backup several gigs of data on a regular basis, and it's great.

Well, it's hosted on one of the top 20 (as measured by hosted sites) hosting companies, so ideally it'll survive. I guess we'll find out!

Use Dreamhost. They work really well

And even their 7.50 (really it's 9.50, if you don't pay upfront) shared hosting is a rip-off. Only 1 Gig of space, and 50 Gig of transfer. With my current provider I get 20 Gigs of space and 1 TB of transfer for $7.95.

These guys actualy talked about that sort of thing. they said that they would loose money if a customer used up their full terabyte, but that because the vast majority of their customers use far less bandwidth they still honor their word even to the few that do.

Imagine we didn't "oversell" at all. We still offer 20GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth on our $7.95/month plan because that's what the competition has forced us to offer. 1TB of bandwidth is about an average of 3Mbs. 3Mbs for a month costs us about $90/month. The 20GB of disk space actually costs us about $200 (BELIEVE IT OR NOT!), because of the level of availability and backups we provide. So, we'd be losing about $200 up front and $82 / month on each and every customer!

And, all in the name of not "overselling", our disk arrays would sit 98% empty and our network pipes 1% full!

It's worth it!

What if you went to get a gym membership and they were like "We have a state-of-the-art facility with an elliptical machine, complete set of free weights, stairmaster, treadmill, yoga class, kickboxing, rock-climbing wall, and olympic sized pool.. per member! You'll never have to wait to use anything, anytime, seven days a week, 24 hours a day! Membership fees are $45,000/month with a $300,000 set up fee."?

It's the same thing.

But our "overselling" is even better then a gym's. At a gym, sometimes you're going to have to wait to use a machine. A machine you are PAYING hefty membership fees to use! That's not right.

But with us, you really CAN use all the stuff we're offering. You won't be disabled for it. You won't have to wait. Your performance won't suffer. It's just a good thing for us there's a difference between being able to use something and actually using it!

These guys actualy talked about that sort of thing. they said that they would loose money if a customer used up their full terabyte, but that because the vast majority of their customers use far less bandwidth they still honor their word even to the few that do.

Imagine we didn't "oversell" at all. We still offer 20GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth on our $7.95/month plan because that's what the competition has forced us to offer. 1TB of bandwidth is about an average of 3Mbs. 3Mbs for a month costs us about $90/month. The 20GB of disk space actually costs us about $200 (BELIEVE IT OR NOT!), because of the level of availability and backups we provide. So, we'd be losing about $200 up front and $82 / month on each and every customer!

And, all in the name of not "overselling", our disk arrays would sit 98% empty and our network pipes 1% full!

It's worth it!

What if you went to get a gym membership and they were like "We have a state-of-the-art facility with an elliptical machine, complete set of free weights, stairmaster, treadmill, yoga class, kickboxing, rock-climbing wall, and olympic sized pool.. per member! You'll never have to wait to use anything, anytime, seven days a week, 24 hours a day! Membership fees are $45,000/month with a $300,000 set up fee."?

It's the same thing.

But our "overselling" is even better then a gym's. At a gym, sometimes you're going to have to wait to use a machine. A machine you are PAYING hefty membership fees to use! That's not right.

But with us, you really CAN use all the stuff we're offering. You won't be disabled for it. You won't have to wait. Your performance won't suffer. It's just a good thing for us there's a difference between being able to use something and actually using it!

Dreamhost is AWESOME! I have been with them for a couple years and they are great and always giving new features. I wouldn't run something mission-critical on a $7.95 a month plan, but for email, blogs, non-traffic heavy sites, I would use them again and again.

-A

you get to spend the next week looking for hosting

dreamhost, which has RoR hosting :)

not to be spamy or anything, but I've compiled stuff on my dreamhost box before. They even gave me a sudo password when I asked politely. (In all fairness, I do have a dedicated server, and that might make a dfference.)

And I've been with em long enough to have a good number of concerns (mostly my fault) and they were always very responsive. (And always helped me fix it.)

If you're interested, http://dreamhost.com/ or http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?95192 if you feel like being nice to me ;)

not to be spamy or anything, but I've compiled stuff on my dreamhost box before. They even gave me a sudo password when I asked politely. (In all fairness, I do have a dedicated server, and that might make a dfference.)

And I've been with em long enough to have a good number of concerns (mostly my fault) and they were always very responsive. (And always helped me fix it.)

If you're interested, http://dreamhost.com/ or http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?95192 if you feel like being nice to me ;)