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How Much Do You Pay to Host Your Website?
DosGusanos asks: "I was curious how much people around the U.S. and around the world pay for hosting. Obviously size in cabinets/rack units/square feet, included features such as bandwidth, UPS/generator, management, etc. factor in. The configuration I am particularly interested in is three machines, one www, one search, and one database. The machines would be hooked up to a T1 and networked to one another over Ethernet. Anyone paying for colo or hosting in this same ballpark? How happy/upset are you with your provider?"
I like them a lot. $100 / month for a dedicated server that's a 1ghz duron with 512 meg of ram and 60 gig hard drive. That's more than enough power for the sites I host. For $1000/month with them, I could get a site that can't be slashdotted.
The downside is support. They only have a mail ticketing system, and you're pretty much left to handle your own problems, but that's okay. I pretty much considered it a learning experience installing / configuring my own BIND, Apache, Mysql, and GD.
The best part of this is that they include 400gig/month in bandwidth to use. It would take some serious bandwidth to suck all that up. It's burstable too.
FYI they're based in Texas. If you're looking for discounted hosting, go for it!
Of course, don't cry to me if you run a commerce site with them. It's my belief that any site that's a breadwinner for a company should run at a place that has 24/7 support. A ticketing system is fine, just make sure there's always someone there to answer it.
Overall, I like them. Cheap enough to keep me happy, and it's my own machine with root so I can install/config and run whatever I want.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Eryxma Networks really has done a great job for me. They use GNU/Linux servers and are dirt cheap (right now 1GB of storage and 50GB of transfer for 3 bucks/month).
the service has been great. the ceo even gave me his AIM screenname. I recommend them highly.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
We pay roughly 6,000 per year. This includes the software, the hardware, the bandwidth and the service. (This is through http://www.ezboard.com) We have been very happy with the service, receiving assistance from the company CEO when need be. Their software/hardware is also capable of handling very long threads, (our longest being over 12,000 posts and 130mb for the text only before becoming corrupted.)
I do security
well - speakeasy isnt so great for some customers. I had my DSL through them (covad/northpoint) and when PacBell put a CO in across the street from my house that offered full DSL speeds I wanted to switch (or at least upgrade).
Speakeasy could only offer me sdsl at 128k - for $60/month... PacBell wanted $49 for 1.5/384 adsl.
I wrote them a bunch to find out the terms of my contract - and was told different things by different people. So I decided to leave.
Since I told speakeasy that I was going to leave they were trying to charge me $350 for terminating the contract. I told them no way I was going to pay that. I told them of all the conflicting info I got from all their service reps, and told them that since they couldnt even clearly show me the terms of my service, their claim that there was a termination fee of that size was BS. They said they'd have to bill me for it. I said go ahead and bill me - but there is no way in hell you're ever getting any money from me. I have a better service here - you cant/wont match it, and you want more money for me. We can go to court if you like - but I doubt you would win. They billed me once. I mailed them all the email correspndence I had with them - and they dropped it.
Did you read the link you posted? On the first page there were several horror stories similar to what I described: overcharged, underprovisioned, horrible speeds and/or latency, rude/lying/unresponsive customer service, etc. etc. Their advertising promulgates an image of them as being a place that caters to geeks by providing a low-fluff connection and great service for a premium, which is 100% A-OK, but as I and other people have observed, they're not very good about living up to their advertising. Sure, there are a bunch of 5 star reviews, but there are also a bunch of 1 star reviews. If i had the time to flame them good, believe me, I'd be typing in pages there and giving them a ZERO star rating if the form allowed it... Maybe, being *very* charitable, it's a case of growing too fast on their part... Honestly I as a paying customer shouldn't have to care about that though. I was paying for 1500/768, getting more like 300/200, and that with 300-500 msec pings to grace.speakeasy.net (their shell server) or any of the servers where I work (an ad firm/programming shop here in Austin).
If speakeasy.net is the cream of the crop, the others must shoot your dog or something. I honestly don't see how an ISP could be any worse.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I'm glad you mentioned this. I've been using Verio for the last couple years. Everything has been really good, except for little skirmishs with the blacklists.
When I first signed up, just about two years ago, there were just a couple of the minor blacklists listing a netblock that had my IP number. The listings were for a spammer that Verio had kicked off months ago. I contacted the blacklist maintainers (only one of those lists was could be be called "maintained"). It's remarkably difficult to contact these people. Eventually the better list dropped the block, and that gave me enough leverage to convince the other two to do the same (the spammer had long since moved on for greener pastures).
But in the last year or so, there's been a whole new crop of spammer acusations. I can't verify them... it reads like a whole lot of conspiracy theory. But a couple weeks ago it even got posted as a slashdot story (so it must be true, right?)
I called Verio. Before the slashdot story, they would just deny everything. They didn't admit they were catering to any spammers, but they didn't flat out deny that no spammers were operating on their network.
Verio claims that their hosting business is very separate from their network provision services (T1, T3, OC-something lines.... more bandwidth than I can envision). So far, the more reputable blacklists haven't waged netblocks on Verio's hosting side, or at least the few IP numbers allocated to my little server.
So because of these escalating wars between the spammers and blacklists, if you intend to host a mail server, the ISPs record about hosting spammers should be your top concern. Saddly, there are a lot of mixed messages and it's hard to tell if any particular provider is any good. Two years ago, for example, Verio was listed at the top of SpamCop's page of providers with exemplary anti-abuse policies.
Recently I've been making some tenative plans for jumping ship from Verio. Other than this spammer/blacklist issue, and one little incident where they didn't notify me in advance of (supposedly) scheduled maintainance (they claim they did), the decicated hosting service from Verio has been great.
But hitting blacklists, even occasionally, is a real show-stopper. For my little site, we do a light amount of e-commerce. When a confirmation email to a customer bounces (they placed the order over the web), we look like a little fly-by-night company out to steal their credit card info. Of course, emails bounce for a variety of other reasons, so we've gotten into the practive of picking up the phone and calling them with the tracking number.
The sad news is that there doesn't seem to be any really good way of determining if a provider is hosting or provisioning bandwidth to spammers. Even if everything looks good in advance (as it did 2 years ago with Verio), things change.... and they change more rapidly that you'd want to move providers when everything else is running so smoothly.
I wish I could recommend Verio, as the service, performance and reliability has been excellent. But this spammer problem and the reaction from the blacklisting community is definately something you don't want to get caught in the middle of.
I'm taking Rackspace off my short list of "plan B" options if the Verio/blacklist situation gets worse. Rackspace was actually at the top of my list.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
And as an aside, I'd -personally- consider it very poorly managed if you colo a machine (or lease a dedicated server somewhere) and the hosting company -DOESN'T- have root. That's fucking stupid, because -part- of what you're paying them for is to keep yer machine up. If you don't want someone else having root on your machines, then lease your own T1 and drop it into your house/apartment.
Seriously.