Low-Cost High-Volume Web Hosting?

Aardvarkm asks: "I am currently searching for a host for a student film company's web site. Unfortunately, being college students, price is a major factor. I'm looking for a web host where I can get 100+ MB of space, at least 5GB per month of bandwidth, unlimited POP3 email, and the ability to stack domains and/or host a domain within a subdirectory of the site. And I need to do this at the lowest cost possible and preferably on a monthly payment system. Have any of you had experiences with such hosting services? The company's second film is going to be released shortly and we'd like to get the site up as soon as possible. Thanks for any help you can provide!"

Comments

Try Rackspace.Com

[DAldredge]

The company I work for currently has 2 servers at rackspace.com. For about $350 per month per server we get the following : 600Mhz Duron, 256 Meg Ram, 9.1 Gig SCSI HD, 10 GB transfer/mth. Additional transfer cost $3.00 per GB. We have had no trouble with them at all.

I just gotta pimp one of my hosts...

[crisco]

... csoft.net. Found them off a Slashdot banner ad. Figured that anyone advertising at Slashdot might be slightly cooler than normal.

Lets see, $15 a month gets you 300MB, extra domains and all that jazz. They say unlimited bandwidth within reason, maybe you can talk to them about how reasonable they'll be. They run Linux / BSD and offer tons of tools and goodies on the servers. The performance is pretty good, when I tested from various locations using tracert.com they seemed to have great connectivity.

The only downside is support. Email and IRC only, unless you want to get brave and hunt up a number via WHOIS on their domain and try calling it. Plus, they died on me for about 6 hours once that I noticed. On the other hand, they freely admitted the problem.

Compare that to Hurricane Electric who have ridiculously low disk space limits and reasonable bandwidth limits but have great performance and great connectivity and decent pricing. I had to call them one evening because MySQL was dead and they not only had a live person who knew what was going on but he called me back at home within an hour to let me know it was fixed. The few other times I've called with dumb questions they've been quite helpful. And aside from that MySQL problem, I've never seen them have any problems.

Your-Site (Low-Cost, But Good)

[resistant]

After an extensive search in Usenet and on the Web for a low-cost but still good site hosting service, I settled upon Your-Site. It's a "build your own plan" service at which you can accept a pretty decent set of services for $60 per year prepaid or $7 per month non-prepaid (50M disk space with a charge of $0.10 per month for each extra megabyte, 6G transfer exclusive of FTP and email with a charge of $3 per extra gigabyte in any month you exceed the limit, 25 POP3 accounts with a charge of $0.50 per extra POP3 account, PHP/Perl/C/Python CGI-BIN functionality).

I've been a tad busy and haven't been paying close attention per se to the three sites I'm building there as time permits, but haven't noticed especial problems. People who made comments about Your-Site in Usenet (that I saw) seemed happy with the service when I did the heavy research a couple of months ago, and I didn't see any negative comments about Your-Site (which is mildly significant all by itself, probably). The folks at Your-Site have been responsive to my concerns as well, and I have no worries about them.

To judge from an absurd amount of looking into alternatives, I'd hazard a firm guess that Your-Site is offering about the best deal you'll get from a low-cost site hosting service without running into problems from bottom-feeders out to make a buck without bothering to actually deliver on their promises, or problems with all sorts of limits on what you can do. I haven't tried the site hosting service mentioned by another poster here, "PHP Web Hosting", but that was another place on my very short list of top candidates at the end just before making a final decision. They do charge more at $9.95 per month, but more features are included up-front in the basket, and it may be a better deal for your needs, depending on what exactly you wish to do. This would be my next choice after Your-Site, and very probably my first choice if I needed "unlimited" disk space or POP3 accounts.

YMMV, naturally. :)

LinuxWebHost

[Skald]

I deal with linuxwebhost.com (since that sad day when MassLinux vanished!). They run Red Hat, have a lot of good tools installed, and are pretty reasonable to deal with. If you need something that doesn't quite fit with what they've got, you can generally talk to them about it. There's some slight inconvenience because they're really paranoid about security... but that's not all bad, after all.

Here are their rates... rounded up, because I hate it when people say "$9.95/month". They can have the nickel.

• $8/mo.
  • 50 MB HDD space
  • 50 POP Accounts
  • 3 GB transfer
  • 10 Mailing Lists
• $10/mo.
  • 100 MB HDD space
  • 100 POP Accounts
  • 4 GB transfer
  • 10 Mailing Lists
• $15/mo.
  • 200 MB HDD space
  • 100 POP accounts
  • 5 GB transfer
  • 20 Mailing Lists
• $25/mo.
  • 300 MB HDD space
  • 200 POP accounts
  • 10 GB transfer
  • 50 Mailing Lists