Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth

Lucas123 writes "Yahoo this week opened up a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses that allows unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth for $11.95 a month. Yahoo had been charging $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth.."

Comments

Hmmm.

[FredFredrickson]

Interesting to see a big company like Yahoo try their hand at the "unlimited" marketing game. Anybody who's had experience in the past with any company who offers "unlimited" knows better- Anybody remember Comcast "unlimited" broadband?

Bunches of online hosting companies offer "unlimited" services with as much space or bandwidth as you need- and all these companies have a disclaimer in their TOS that explains they can't use more than .0001% of their resources. Turns out you can have 500 gb of files, but coincidentally it takes just enough cpu to copy the file that they kick you off. Or some hosting companies go ahead and say it in the TOS- you can't have more than 1% of the alotted bandwidth, other than that it's unlimited!

Eventually, yes, they get brought down. Law suits, investigations, what have you. They will eventually add their limits to the fine print, just like everybody before them. The catch? Everybody with the host will suffer horrible service up till the day the limit is defined, and after that, it probably won't get much better. That is, if you're not already kicked off their service for using too much of the unlimited service. Anybody not completely disgusted with the service at this point will most likely be offended that their freedom is being taken away and may leave out of protest alone.

You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

Let's just take them up on the offer and get rid of them. Somebody call Google and explain to them there's a new host that will host Google's search engine for $12. We'll see how long Yahoo stays unlimited.

Re:Hmmm.

[stillb4llin]

"The service is only available in the U.S. from Yahoo's Small Business division and costs $11.95 per month."

looks like it is being offered to customers of the service already - technically unlimited, but not to an unlimited number of people.. this could stay unlimited... or at least a lot longer than you are thinking

Re:Hmmm.

[cheater512]

If I wasnt so lazy I'd buy 'unlimited' hosting and give it a terrabyte or two of files just to sue them when they run out of space.

Re:Hmmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out you can have 500 gb of files, but coincidentally it takes just enough cpu to copy the file that they kick you off.

I've had that happen to me few years ago when I was inexpirienced dealing with hosting providers. I filled the disk with 30GB of data (most of it temporary). My limit supposedly 300GB. My account was suspended.

But you see, the tiny print said, I can host up to 300GB of data, but up to 5 GB of scripts and software, 5GB of backups and archives, 5GB of media and images and 5GB of text documents. Other than that, I guess I could spend the remaining 280GB on configuration files and folders.

Re:Hmmm.

[milsoRgen]

Now I'm sure, at the very least, they've gone over their logs, looking at the capacity and actual usage, put it all into kick ass pie charts and crunched some numbers. They probably think usage will remain about the same or perhaps increase to an extent.

Now I'm not saying this isn't a potentially foolish move, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they thought this out, to a degree.

On a side note, you bring up Comcast and Yahoo! Music... To very different beasts. How can you apply them to what Yahoo! is doing with hosting?

Re:Hmmm.

[fonik]

They'll just throttle their upload speed so it's slower than their storage space growth rate.

Re:Hmmm.

[techpawn]

Now I'm sure, at the very least, they've gone over their logs, looking at the capacity and actual usage, put it all into kick ass pie charts and crunched some numbers.

It was in their marketing power point presentation for this year that they could do this! If it's in power point it has to be true... Like everything on TV or that you read online...

Re:Hmmm.

[bonkeydcow]

You could copy files you have already uploaded. EDIT: dang just found out it's a vista server. So, nevermind, that would be even slower.

Re:Hmmm.

[erick99]

It's worthwhile to wait and see how users evaluate it. There is room for such a service, especially if it brings prospective customers that might buy add-on services. I am not sure if that is their marketing plan but I imagine it plays a role in it.

-erick99

http://wwww.yourfavoritegadgets.com/

Re:Hmmm.

[Vectronic]

I suspect that it could be something similar to how government leaders will often impliment, or begin the process of implimenting a bunch of legislature just before their term in office is over...

Except the next leader, might be Microsoft... "Haha! deal with this Unlimited problem Microsoft"... sort of some self-sacrificing thing, cut off your nose to spite your face...

Although it could be to quickly gather a bunch of interest, raise their stock, maybe get some backing and financial help so that they dont give into Microsoft? or possibly to get more attention so that they can go back to Microsoft and be like... "No, see we now have 130 Million users, and 30,000 paying clients, we demand 66.4 Billion, instead of 44.6 Billion"

Re:Hmmm.

[cheater512]

I've got patience. :)

If there is any dynamic scripting allowed then I can make a script to fill the space quickly as well.

Re:Hmmm.

[FredFredrickson]

I used comcast to point out that there's no way to handle "unlimited" without it getting bigger and growing faster than you can keep up with- and I brought up Yahoo music, because according to Ian Rogers the number one reason they're cutting the unlimited is because they weren't making money off of it. (the idea was that behind the scenes, YMU actually payed a royalty for each listen, and hoped people wouldn't listen to such an unlimited extent that it would go upside down on them). Now whether or not they both immediately apply- it's obvious that the word "unlimited" is a dangerous beast and tends to bite even the best intentioned marketing departments.

Re:Hmmm.

[AndGodSed]

Could this be the first entire isp/web service that gets slashdotted!?

Re:Hmmm.

[paintballer1087]

LIES LIES LIES....

everyone knows that there's no edit button on slashdot

Re:Hmmm.

[nmos]

You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

Maybe the two are connected. It could be that closing their music service is leaving them with some extra bandwidth/storage/servers and they'd rather bring in some revenue then let those resources sit idle.

Re:Hmmm.

[nickj6282]

This has happened with plenty other "unlimited" plans too. Remember AOL when their dialup went "unlimited"? It was basically down for most people for weeks while they sorted it out. I think some companies have learned something from that (be ready for the initial surge) but your point is quite valid.

Look at what Time Warner is doing with their broadband now.

Re:Hmmm.

[ThePromenader]

I really didn't understand how they can offer "unlimited" disk space until I read this in their "terms and conditions" (the fine print, whot):

"You acknowledge that the Web Hosting service is offered as a platform to host and serve web pages and web sites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote disk space storage. Accordingly, You understand and agree to use the web hosting service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other equivalent technology."

So in other words, websites and databases (for websites) only (will they police this?). Yet there are companies out there offering unlimited disk space for remote storage, and how they go about this, I have yet to understand. Perhaps something along the same lines as Yahoo's former offering?

Re:Hmmm.

[Kuvter]

Somebody call Google and explain to them there's a new host that will host Google's search engine for $12. I think the point was that it's only for small to medium sized businesses. Such that they don't assume a small/medium sized business will need more than a certain amount.
However I do agree with you; I wanted to stress the business size detail. Don't you know 64k should be enough for anybody?

Re:Hmmm.

[Shakrai]

Other than that, I guess I could spend the remaining 280GB on configuration files and folders.

Put all of your data in plain text "configuration" files encoded into base64 and accessed via php scripts ;)

C'mon, they are just trying to help you to be more efficient on CPU and RAM resources.

Re:Hmmm.

[Iron Condor]

So in other words, websites and databases (for websites) only (will they police this?).

Even if they police this, it appears I can now start that web-hosting business I always wanted to start: I'll give you 10TB of storage and 1 TB/month throughput for, say, $1/month. If I can sell that to 13 customers then I'm ahead, right? And I'm a legitimate business, right? So they can't cut me off, right?

(Since it has to go through HTML, it'll run through some html-based web-management system like plesk, but at the rates I'm offering, how could you say "no"...)

Re:Hmmm.

[TubeSteak]

"You acknowledge that the Web Hosting service is offered as a platform to host and serve web pages and web sites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote disk space storage. Accordingly, You understand and agree to use the web hosting service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other equivalent technology." In other words, they're offering /. proof webhosting?

Re:Hmmm.

[allauthors]

Yes. It must be for a web site. --- I think I'll use their service to start a website which offers unlimited web-based hosting for only $5 bucks a month.

Re:Hmmm.

[ThePromenader]

Hmmm, perhaps it won't be so hard to police - block everything but port 80, 109, 110 and 366 for your virtual IP (web, pop, pop3 and SMTP respectively), constrain ftp access to only the site's root folder (and upwards), and limit database queries to localhost-only. I'm sure there's ways around that (and sorry, Plesk isn't that), but high bw traffic is always detectable.

As for parent, my boss said something in the same regard only a couple days ago - we are starting a secure online photo archival service - when he saw a similar deal. He suggested we sign up and upload a few TB just to see how far "unlimited" goes : )

Re:Hmmm.

[Vertigo Acid]

SMTP is port 25
What kind of bizarro world do you live in where pop2 (109) and ODMR(366) matter at all?

Re:Hmmm.

[ThePromenader]

Um. Oops. Answer to question... my own?

Re:Hmmm.

[Magic5Ball]

This is just waiting for someone to build a file system which stores information within file and directory names only. Depending on how they count data storage usage, this might allow one to have large amounts of storage without using any at all.

See: http://www.geocities.com/patchnpuki/other/compression.htm

Re:Hmmm.

[DrSkwid]

That would make a good plan 9 / Inferno file system, sadly I don't need to spend $13 a month to take up that challenge !

Maybe when I have some spare time I will look for a limited storage space and bend their rules :)

Re:Hmmm.

[chill]

Their system will work fine, because they are using an incorrect and dishonest measurement for "bandwidth". There is no such thing as "500 Gb" of "bandwidth". Bandwidth is a flow rate, like 1.544 Mb/s, not a flow volume.

Thus, while you may get 500 Gb of transfer, it could be thru a limited rate pipe. The difference is like getting 5,000 gallons of water thru a hose. Yahoo is going to give you the garden hose, as opposed to the super firehose you really wanted.

Re:Hmmm.

[cgenman]

I'm a customer of one of the other "unlimited disk space" (for remote backup) companies. It is pretty clear that unlimited disk space does not equal unlimited bandwidth. Even on a very fat upstream, it has taken weeks to backup 40 GB.

Re:Hmmm.

[ncc74656]

I'm a customer of one of the other "unlimited disk space" (for remote backup) companies. It is pretty clear that unlimited disk space does not equal unlimited bandwidth. Even on a very fat upstream, it has taken weeks to backup 40 GB.

Weeks? Are they throttling your connection down to dial-up speeds for that backup? I set up a cron job recently to back up the files and databases we have at a colo to a server at our office. The initial rsync of about 5.5 GB took several hours overnight to run; the limiting factor was the T1 at the office. I'd think a 40-GB backup job might take a couple or three days to complete; multiple weeks sounds unreasonably slow. Hopefully the backup service you're using offers something like rsync for periodic updates, as the periodic updates would otherwise take forever to go through (just checked, and the update on mine took less than a minute to run).

Re:Hmmm.

[cgenman]

>>Weeks? Are they throttling your connection down to dial-up speeds for that backup?

More or less, yes. I haven't determined exactly what things are throttled down to. I'd suspect an exponentially decreasing curve which flatlines somewhere around 39.9 GB, but as it was crawling at the beginning too I can't really say.

Your Slashvertisement here!

[lonesome_coder]

Ask us how!

Disclaimer:

[morgan_greywolf]

[*] $11.95 does not include our $200/day charge for being 'Slashdotted'.

Re:Disclaimer:

[theazreal]

[*] The $11.95 Unlimited Plan includes the surcharge of YOUR SOUL at the outset and the BRAIN of one (1) KITTEN per day for each day that we actually make good on our promise and give you real unlimited access to anything on our network.

Re:Disclaimer:

[m85476585]

I had the $11.95/month plan before it went unlimited, and it survived Slashdot just fine. It barely even slowed down at the peak. I switched to inmotionhosting to save some money, but I don't know how they will do under the same conditions. I supposedly get 15TB of monthly data transfer, which works out to about 50MBps continuous. Wikipedia only uses about 48TB/month according to something I read.

Once Microsoft takes over...

[Anonymous Coward]

And once microsoft takes over, you'll be required to make your site work in IE only, or they'll "help" you make the "fix"

How longs it going to last?

[roguetrick]

Will this service continue after Yahoo is bought? Is it just something to cause their price to go up before they are bought by claiming more customers?

Re:How longs it going to last?

[qortra]

My guess is that this is part of Jerry Yang and Co's stand against Microsoft. I bet that they don't want to be bought out, and they need to increase shareholder confidence in them in order to prevent it. If I'm right, it won't stop here. There will be initiatives and announcements about future projects and products over the next few weeks, all in an effort to increase shareholder confidence.

Re:How longs it going to last?

[B3ryllium]

... or they could be trying to create a poison pill scenario that Microsoft will be unwilling to swallow.

Re:How longs it going to last?

[failedlogic]

I was thinking the same thing. It might be a service that makes or breaks Yahoo, and I guess Yang is looking at it to make MS uneager to buy Yahoo. If Yahoo offers the service and then MS cuts it off, Yahoo does't stay popular anymore and would be a total write-off for MS. And they still wouldn't be further ahead against Google.

Re:How longs it going to last?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, suicide rather than being bought? Any poison pill Microsoft can't swallow, neither can Yahoo.

Where's CmdrTaco?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Slashdot admins, are you moving over to Yahoo? I bet that'd cut back on your hosting costs by quite a bit. That'd also be a great test of how truly unlimited it is.

Re:Where's CmdrTaco?

[Fred Ferrigno]

I'm sure Yahoo would gladly host Slashdot for free, as long as they could fill up the page with advertisements and rename it Yahoo! Slashdot!

Re:Where's CmdrTaco?

[Chabil Ha']

as long as they could fill up the page with advertisements What? And call them Slashvertisements(TM)?

wd mybook

[stillb4llin]

11.95 a month -- like a WD mybook that has a monthly fee -- and blocks the illegal files...

Timing

[Wowsers]

How long before Microsoft see this as an area to get into and collect "anon" user data on what you use your connections for, on top of their attempts at their search engine?

Re:Timing

[paitre]

They already are moving into this area.

What do you think they're building all those shiny new datacenters for?

Re:Timing

[Gazzonyx]

They already are moving into this area.

What do you think they're building all those shiny new datacenters for? Heating? When I need to warm up my apartment, I just pull a 500Gb drive for a moment and then put it back in and warm up while my RAID 5 rebuilds. :P

The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[1sockchuck]

Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms, who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[paitre]

IMO, it's more than likely marketing.
Everyone already knows that these resources are oversold, so it really was just a matter of time before someone said "fuck this, all the bandwidth/disk/whatever you can use on a shared server for one low monthly fee".

The catch is that they =will= shunt people off onto dedicated servers if/when the need arises, and then they'll crucify them costs-wise (and I wouldn't be surprised to find in the small print that they have the right to move your account, at whim, to best serve their needs to balance the load).

I'd LOVE to know how they plan on making money with this, too.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny unlimited disk space and bandwidth, but read the TOS on resource usage. Visitors to your site use up too much processor cycles, simultaneous database connections etc... and get your account suspended.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[eebra82]

Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it. I don't think it's so much about attracting customers who need a kazillion gigabytes of space as much as it is attractive to people who just want a service that works without any added costs. I mean, how is a regular guy supposed to know if 50 gigs per month is enough or not? This is flatrate. Use it as you please, just pay the fee and we [Yahoo] will sort the rest.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk?

I'll let you judge, let's take one of those supersized shared hosts, which offers up to 750GB of disk space. In the ToS however, I find an interesting clause that says, paraphrasing: "750GB, but no more than 5GB archives, no more than 5GB of media files, no more than 5GB of data files or programs, no more than 5GB for SQL data dumps".

So, I went to chat with the support, and ask, what the hell I'm going to use then those 750GB for? Names and domains replaced, since, no need to single out either one of them (they're all the same anyway). Here's our conversation:

------------

Support Guy1: Hello

Support Guy1: Welcome to XXXXXXX Hosting Services!

ME: Hello, please clarify your ToS: "NO more than 5,000 MB of a Linux shared hosting account can be allocated to Executable files and all other files which are the result of compiling a program. These include but are not limited to .exe, .pdf, .psd files."

ME: PDF and PSD files are not compiled programs

Support Guy1: yes they are not but they are considered as applications

ME: why does XXXXXXX put limitations on the meaning of the bytes I use on my eventual account

Support Guy1: Could you please hold on a second so that I can transfer you to one of our experienced senior sales assistants for better assistance :)

ME: ok

This chat session has been transfered to Support Guy2 [sales]

Support Guy2: Hello

ME: hello, can you please explain the rationale behind XXXXXXX putting limitations on the meaning of the bytes I use on my eventual account

Support Guy2: Well of course - on our shared hosting accounts there are a lot of users and in order to maintain optimal performance we have to limit some of the file types stored on the server.

ME: can you explain how does it differ performance-wise to store 5MB of an mpeg and 5MB of an SQL file.

Support Guy2: Well the limits are far wider than 5 MB - they are actually 5 GB - so you can store 5 Gigs MPEGs total :)

Support Guy2: in regards to the SQL files - you can have as big file as you wish, as long as it does not load the server :)

ME: I realize, it's an example :) make it X MB of mpeg and X MB of SQL

ME: if I don't serve those files, would that section of the ToS apply to me

Support Guy2: Well if you do not use those kind of files, you should disregard this line in the TOS, since it does not apply for you :)

Support Guy2: May I just ask what do you plan to host?

ME: can I quote you on this, if I store 6GB of mpegs for example, and not serve them, and I find my account suspended

Support Guy2: Well I fear we have missed each other in the line... You cannot have more than 5 GB total multimedia files on the shared hosting account. In case you have 6, you should find an alternative solution like a VPS or a dedicated server.

ME: but you offer 750GB of storage, can you please supply one example what do your customers use 750GB for, if not for media files, archives, executables, dumps and data files

Support Guy2: Well you can have combinations of files plus other file types that are not limited like txt files.

ME: I can have 750GB of txt files?

Support Guy2: We do not apply a direct limitation on the txt files, but still may I ask you what do you plan to host on our servers? Like what kind of website do you plan to have and how large would it be so that I can help you with the most optimal plan :)

ME: I don't see limitations on the kind of site I can host in the ToS

ME: except for pornography,

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[HeroreV]

Random text generator. Fill that 750 GB up in no time.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[floodo1]

hahahhahahahha thanks man :)

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly right, yahoo small business is designed for people who don't want to pay someone to build them a site. Small businesses that "just want a website". They have templates, payment processing, a wysiwyg design tool. You (slashdotter) aren't going to use it.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[noidentity]

Base64 encoding, I take it?

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[NitroWolf]

Hmm... if you UUEncode your files in 7 bit ASCII, wouldn't that be considered text, then? You could store a lot of shit UUEncoded in 750GB.

They didn't say the text files had to be human readable, did they? Just that they had to be text files.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

so, just convert everything to base64 and you're fine

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[richie2000]

And may I guess you will fill the account with files like big-assfile.mpg.txt, all encoded in the binary-only language of Swapr0nski, a small island off the coast of Zimbabwe?

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[gnuman99]

Easy to fill up 750GB. Just host all revisions of Linux kernel and Debian source trees. In uncompressed form.

Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend

[BungaDunga]

1. Get a bunch of MPEGs

2. Convert each frame into an "ASCII image" version

3. Put them all online, as .txts

4. Write a flash viewer

5. ASCIITube.com

6. Profit!

What the hell, Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

ONCE AGAIN you post something from ComputerWorld or NetworkWorld where the submitter is CLEARLY one of their employees. Are these guys your new sponsors?

Re:What the hell, Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Employees of ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld, Wired, Wall Street Journal Online and the New York Times are regular submitters here and have been for some time. I'm sure there is some sort of arrangement that allows their stories to appear here day after day.

"Unlimited" my ass

[elrous0]

Dear Yahoo,

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[Anonymous Custard]

Dear Yahoo,

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.

Dear elrous0

You keep misquoting that movie. I do not think it means what you think it banana.

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[mackil]

"Unlimited"

oblig quote...
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[timster]

I just have to say that replacing the second "means" with "does" makes the quote 72% less awesome.

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[orclevegam]

Dear Anonymous Custard

You keep banana that movie. I do not think it means what you think it leaflets. Dear FiloEleven

In soviet Russia, meme misquotes you!

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[EntropyXP]

I like this new meme. First one that has made me laugh for a while.

On a related note, does this mean that with my FiOS broadband (if I had it - *wishes*) could I continously upload gigs and gigs to their servers? I really think Yahoo has bitten off a little more than they can chew.

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[nospam007]

You killed my bandwidth, prepare to die.

Re:"Unlimited" my ass

[cayenne8]

"You keep banana that movie. I do not think it means what you think it leaflets."

"May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"

--with apologies to Steve Martin

All you can eat?

[IndustrialComplex]

3 months later, an upset Yahoo Exec was overheard saying,

Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.

Re:All you can eat?

[morcheeba]

Just one wafer thin mint?

Re:All you can eat?

[funkify]

Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.

YARRRR!

Re:All you can eat?

[Dan Posluns]

"Mrs. Spammer, what did you do after Yahoo! cut off your bandwidth?"
"We pretty much went straight home."
"Mrs. Spammer, you are under oath."
"We drove around until 3 AM, looking for unprotected wireless hotspots."
"And when you couldn't find any?"
"We got Comcast." *sobs*

Dan.

Yahoo! hosting has almost 100% uptime

[ScienceDada]

I know that many people might be attracted to Yahoo! hosting being reliable for uptime (as per http://www.webhostingstuff.com/uptime/YahooWebHosting.html), as it is close to 100%... I know from experience from other hosting providers that this is not the case with several others.

Small and medium businesses?

[Ndkchk]

If I were a large business, and saw unlimited space and bandwidth for that price, I'd jump for it too. You listening, Google?

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[paitre]

This won't meet the needs of large businesses.

not even remotely.

And these are -explicitly- shared hosting accounts, and there are some restrictions - including how quickly you can grow your disk usage, and if you are using too much bandwidth you'll be flagged. Another is that they explicitly are saying that it's not to be used as a datawarehousing resource.

All things that a large business is going to want to do.

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[DragonWriter]

And these are -explicitly- shared hosting accounts, and there are some restrictions - including how quickly you can grow your disk usage, and if you are using too much bandwidth you'll be flagged.

Heh. "Unlimited bandwidth", but if you use "too much" you'll be "flagged". IOW, Yahoo! has just joined the long-tradition of "unlimited" hosting services where "unlimited" means "we won't tell you up front what the limits are, but they sure exist, and you'll sure be nailed for breaking them."

Better off getting an account where the limits are disclosed, and you can pay to get them raised.

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[paitre]

Exactly :)

You get what you pay for, and in this case, you get a home broadband style "unlimited", where you won't know what your limits really are until you hit them.

Gotta love it.

NOT

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[RealGrouchy]

Unlimited = no limits to how many arbitrary "constraints" Yahoo may place on the customer.

- RG>

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[Hatta]

And these are -explicitly- shared hosting accounts, and there are some restrictions - including how quickly you can grow your disk usage, and if you are using too much bandwidth you'll be flagged. Another is that they explicitly are saying that it's not to be used as a datawarehousing resource.

Um, ok, what CAN you do with it?

Re:Small and medium businesses?

[jordan314]

I'm also wondering if this would work as a super cheap reseller plan. Even if they didn't allow DNS bindings to go to different subdirectories of your account, you could set up the redirects/includes via PHP or .htaccess. Then again, if yahoo flagged you for abuse, you'd have a lot of angry clients.

Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimited.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unlimited at all.... they just redefine unlimited.

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/Lwebhosting/home/bb/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/

Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

I would take Yahoo! up on this offer, but for one thing: Microsoft.

I don't have "feelings" for Yahoo! one way or the other. I do, however, have a very negative opinion of Microsoft and their software.

Don't make beds in burning houses. If Yahoo! declares they aren't for sale to Microsoft, then I'll buy their hosting. If they leave open the possibility of being owned by Microsoft, then they can keep it.

Re:Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares about your irrelevant, misguided opinions, moron.

Unlimited?

[WK2]

So, is this unlimited, or "Comcast Unlimited (TM)"?

Yahoo's service has been going downhill for years, and now Microsoft is going to be running things. I can imagine some arbitrary restrictions, or "random" failures, that makes this service not so great. Unlimited bandwidth is nice, but if your pages take 20 seconds to render because the download speed is 128K/s, or if it takes 1 week to upload 100 Gigs, it stops looking so good.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't tried this service, and it sounds great. I just wouldn't give my hopes up.

Re:Unlimited?

[phantomcircuit]

Yahoo Web Hosting is run on FreeBSD.

I seriously doubt that microsoft is going to continue that.

Close and delete this topic

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the big deal. This is not news, big deal if Yahoo, who was already a crappy web host, joined the ranks of 1000s of other really crappy webhosts.

Next year that $11.95 price will be $5.95 if you pre-pay for 10 years.

horrible terms of service

[Anonymous Coward]

You acknowledge that the Web Hosting service is offered as a platform to host and serve web pages and web sites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote disk space storage. Accordingly, You understand and agree to use the web hosting service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other equivalent technology. Yahoo! Web Hosting is designed to serve the web hosting needs of small, independently owned and operated businesses in the United States. It is not intended to support the greater web hosting needs of large enterprises or internationally based businesses. Yahoo! Web Hosting is also a shared web hosting service, which means a number of customers' web sites are hosted from the same server. To ensure that Yahoo! Web Hosting is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer's web site usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. Additionally, the purpose of Yahoo! Web Hosting is to host web sites, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files is prohibited. You further agree that if, at Yahoo!'s sole discretion, You are deemed to have violated this section, Yahoo! may suspend or terminate Your account without notice to You and with no liability to Yahoo!. more here

(No porn, either..)

One size fits all

[rastoboy29]

The thing that annoys me about most hosting plans is that they scale up disk space and bandwith together--as if one inevitably follows the other.  For example, I have a miniscule website that hosts a ~200 meg game download.  So I need a whopping ~300 megs of disk space.  But when I get a spike of downloads, I can hit several gigs of bandwith per day.  But I would have to purchase additional "disk space" along with bandwidth if I were going with a traditional hosting plan.

Annoying.

Re:One size fits all

[Dekortage]

Well, maybe you shouldn't go with a "traditional" hosting plan. Find a web hosting company like us (or, frankly, many others) who let you add bandwidth to your hosting account on a monthly basis. So in theory, you could have an account with 5gb of disk space and 10 terabytes of bandwidth...

Re:One size fits all

[cliveholloway]

I recommend Nearly Free Speech - this will suit your needs incredibly well.

Re:One size fits all

[geekoid]

I just want 1 bit and 10 tera-bytes of bandwidth. I'm working on a new distribution system

Re:One size fits all

[morcego]

You mean a "web hosting reselling company", right ? Because from what I noticed on your site, you guys are a GoDaddy reseller.

Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with being a reseller. Many resellers provide better support and additional services than the hosting company. But please lets call things by their correct names.

Re:One size fits all

[SanityInAnarchy]

Trying so hard not to be a fanboy, but...

Have you considered Amazon S3? I assume your download isn't dynamically generated...

Some quick calculations: Say you upload one version a month, and you might see 50 downloads on a busy day. That's:

$0.10 per gig uploaded * 0.2 gigs = 2 cents
$0.01 per 1k PUT requests means it will cost you a cent after 1k months = 83 years
$0.15 per gig stored. To make it easy, assume you have five versions archived at any given time: 15 cents per month.
$0.01 per 10k GET and HEAD requests means, assuming they HEAD before a GET (for some reason), it costs a cent after 8.3 years
$0.18 per gig for the first 10 TB/mo. 50*200 megs = 10 gigs (roughly), so you aren't going over that, so this costs you $1.80.

Adding it all up, this will cost you a little less than $2/mo. You might need additional hosting (and EC2 might cost a bit much) if there are any dynamic parts of your website, but at $2/mo, you can afford to host the big files.

The downside might be that it scales too well for you -- if you get Slashdotted, and you get hit with, say, a thousand unique users, it's going to cost about $35 for that month. (Most of us consider that a nice problem to have.) A million unique users means $35,000, which is going to hurt -- though of course, if your game gets downloaded a million times, you may be able to sell the concept for a few millions yourself. It does support BitTorrent, though, so if you catch your Slashdotting in time, that might save some money.

Re:One size fits all

[corvair2k1]

I have to also recommend nearlyfreespeech.net, which charges you for the bandwidth and disk you use on a daily basis. Very very reasonable.

Re:One size fits all

[muszek]

You have an error there... you said 50 downloads per day, yet you assume 50/month in your calculations. So it's $1.80*365.25/12 = $54.78.

Re:One size fits all

[rastoboy29]

Hey, thanks for that analysis.  I'll definitely go check it out!

Re:One size fits all

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're right. I did mean to say 50/month.

Re:One size fits all

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, now I see my mistake...

I was assuming 50 downloads on the same day, and no downloads for the rest of the month, as that would be the day the new version was posted.

Lets see how long it lasts

[JWSmythe]

    I just sent a recommendation to a very large site (daily peak bandwidth > 3Gb/s). I suggested that they drop in a .htaccess to redirect all their heavy content (pictures), and see how long Yahoo lets them play. :)

Re:Lets see how long it lasts

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth1000?

Time to throw away the tape drives?

[Bobzibub]

I see an encrypted fuse device in my future......

PHP 4!?

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP 5 has been out for more than three years!

Re:PHP 4!?

[iron-kurton]

Yeah, MySQL 4 also. That's the first thing I looked at, and I stopped looking after that. PHP 4? Come on...

Re:PHP 4!?

[noTimeAtAll]

That's not the main reason to change it. As of February 1st, PHP4 is dead. It would be just about time to rewrite the code to PHP5, as there will be no more security updates after August 8th. Then it's really dead.

It's a gimmick

[Dekortage]

Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system:

So what does "unlimited" mean, really?

Disk space:
You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

Data transfer:
In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

You can also upload as much as content as you like each month, subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow (see above).

OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?

(**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)

Re:It's a gimmick

[p0tat03]

While I agree that overselling is a valid business strategy that gets too much bad press, hosts can't have their cake and eat it too. The logic behind overselling is that the vast majority of your customers are using so few resources that you can support the few customers that take up a lot of space and bandwith.

The problem with many hosts is that they are unwilling to honour that concept, either by inserting misleading and insidious exeptions into their TOS'es, or just plain being dicks. When someone gets an immensely popular site (legitimately, i.e. no illegal stuff), the host kicks them to the curb.

Re:It's a gimmick

[aero2600-5]

What they're doing is really no different than a lot of hosting companies. It's true, you can use as much bandwidth and disk space as you like. The problem is really server processing power. You couldn't host Slashdot there. You most likely couldn't host anything popular. I'm willing to bet that just about any site hosted by Yahoo! will become unresponsive when it starts getting more than 4,000 hits an hour. Yes, this is great for small businesses who essentially have an online ad for a website that only gets maybe 10 hits a day.

That's the trick. Processing power. You can't build your 'MySpace Killer' with them because as soon as it starts to get popular, you'd hit processing power limits. Then you have to start looking at dedicated servers elsewhere.

I'm waiting for a hosting company to offer unlimited processing power. 'Your web site will never become unresponsive from too many users'. I'm not holding my breath.

Aero

Re:It's a gimmick

[eggboard]

Dekortage thanks for quoting this. I was about to myself.

Yahoo PR emailed me the "unlimited" press release. I immediately set about finding the unlimited terms, which are not noted in the lengthy terms of service, and which required several clicks to find.

While I appreciate Yahoo wanting people to not game a truly unlimited service, there's a difference between defining proper usage and defining abuse. In this case, they are offering no reasonable and dependable guidelines for a business to host itself with Yahoo without the business always worrying that they are "growing too fast." Whatever that means.

Yahoo could have cast this in terms of what abuse meant, and said, we won't cut you off unless you're engaged in specific abusive behavior, list follows.

I mean, if they're saying that 100 MB uploaded initially is too much or that adding 100 MB is too fast, that's going to be a problem for a business that hosts a lot of images. If it's 2 GB initially and 2 GB per month, that's probably fine, but why not state it?

I haven't used Arrow Bay, but I have done extensive checking on hosting services that provide shared and dedicated content. The services that people recommend always have explicit details on what is provided; the ones that don't lack these details.

It took Apple a few years to buckle down and actually publish their storage/throughput limits. Now they regularly increase them.

Re:It's a gimmick

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. I am one of those people (not with arrow bay). We use 1/4 of our disk space and are well withing bandwidth limits. But we do have occasional spikes and I want to ensure we don't get hosed when we release a new email campaign. Plus, as stated, the processing power we get with our plan is what really makes it worth while.

Could they also be metering the bandwidth? My hosting gives me unlimited bandwidth (metered at 10Mb/s - fine for my site - but wouldn't stand up to the slashdot effect).

Re:It's a gimmick

[mxs]

Hi,

Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. Thanks for stating the obvious.

We (spamlink)

offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, That sounds impressive.

How about $8 for 500gb of disk and 5tb of bandwidth ? Or even 8tb of bandwidth or 700gb, if you get the right promocode ? Dream host..ing ? (this is what a professional calls "surreptitious advertising", just in case you wanted a contrast to your spamlink). There are some people competing in a lunar-cyclish page way, and HOSTs drinking GATORade are out there as well.

and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Wow, that sounds reasonable, especially your recommendation to downgrade after the stars. Heartfelt, even.
Say, why don't you automatically downgrade those people if they are below usage, and automatically upgrade them to the next-higher tier when they exceed their limits ? Now that would be service. I'm sure some companies offer it.

Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Yupp, and I especially like that kind of language. You neglect to mention, of course, that Arrow Bay's (limited) service actually contains teh same kind of language :

You shall at all times use the Services as a conventional and/or traditional web site. You shall not use the Service in any way, in Arrow Bay's sole discretion, that shall impair the functioning or operation of Arrow Bay's Services or equipment. Specifically by way of example and not as a limitation, You shall not use the Services as (i) a repository or instrument for placing or storing archived files, and/or (ii) placing or storing material that can be downloaded through other web sites. So if somebody actually were to use the storage provided in full as a webdav-drive, or as historic storage, or actually as an archive of any kind, you can just terminate them and move on. The terms "traditional" and "conventional" are not defined. Is a site hosting 200gigs of home videos "traditional" ? Is it "conventional" ? How about a site that makes available collections of data ?
Certain dreamy hosts have changed their "interpretation" of their ToS in that way recently, as well. If anybody ever sells you any hosting service with > 20 gb of disk space, you can be all but certain that they really only mean "in theory", never "in practice".

Oh, do you know where I found that package ? Not near the limits. Not at all near the limits. You first go to the legal terms of service, then search another link way down on the page, then scroll way down (it's the second to last paragraph). That seems really open and honest. Really.

Re:It's a gimmick

[Tripster]

"offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth,
That sounds impressive.

How about $8 for 500gb of disk and 5tb of bandwidth ? Or even 8tb of bandwidth or 700gb, if you get the right promocode ? Dream host..ing ? (this is what a professional calls "surreptitious advertising", just in case you wanted a contrast to your spamlink). There are some people competing in a lunar-cyclish page way, and HOSTs drinking GATORade are out there as well." Yeah, quite the amazing offer if I say so myself, 2tb of bandwidth for $15/month ... wow. When I check datacenter costs at a reputable datacenter on their best connections it is upwards of $150/month for a machine that comes with a 250GB hard drive and 2000GB of bandwidth.

Since bandwidth is never delivered at a steady rate 24/7 it means you're going to be going through a cycle of peaks, I've got a game server pulling a terabyte a month and during prime time that is pulling 7mbit/s sometimes hitting 10mbit/s .. find me a 10mbit/s connection I can max out a majority of the time for $15/month .. apparently these hosts have found some hidden cheap bandwidth I guess.

Sure, we could go get a full time 100mbit/s connection from a NOC for a thousand a month, but when you're talking about the possibility of maxing out that line with 10-20 customers paying you $15, something doesn't add up. These high numbers being claimed are just as much horseshit as the guys doing unlimited.

If they can truly deliver 2tb for $15/month I've got a few download servers they can try out ... really, this should be putting all the NOCs out of business.

Re:It's a gimmick

[AaronLawrence]

In this case, they are offering no reasonable and dependable guidelines for a business to host itself with Yahoo without the business always worrying that they are "growing too fast." Whatever that means.

Indeed. I skipped Yahoo for this exact reason. Even though I have more faith in Yahoo's ability to actually deliver good value than $RANDOM_OVERSELLING_WEBHOST$ found on the net, if they are going to be deliberately vague about important aspects of the service then it's too risky to use, except for a brochure site that you don't really care about.

Our site is nothing strenuous but pushes the limits of typical shared hosting. So will Yahoo "flag" us if we install that 2GB of data immediately? How about if we decide to do some more software releases next week and that doubles to 4GB? No way to know - no sale.

Re:It's a gimmick

[mxs]

Yeah, quite the amazing offer if I say so myself, 2tb of bandwidth for $15/month ... wow. When I check datacenter costs at a reputable datacenter on their best connections it is upwards of $150/month for a machine that comes with a 250GB hard drive and 2000GB of bandwidth.

That's dedicated though. There is a huge difference compared to shared hosting.

Since bandwidth is never delivered at a steady rate 24/7 it means you're going to be going through a cycle of peaks, I've got a game server pulling a terabyte a month and during prime time that is pulling 7mbit/s sometimes hitting 10mbit/s .. find me a 10mbit/s connection I can max out a majority of the time for $15/month .. apparently these hosts have found some hidden cheap bandwidth I guess.

On the contrary. The cost for disk space is actually a lot higher than what they charge, and bandwidth does not grow on trees (though economies of scale apply). However, overselling in shared webhosting works, and it works very well. So long as the majority of your customers NEVER uses their allotted space or bandwidth, you are fine. You do not need to provision 500gb of space per customer when they sign up -- you just need to make sure your system has enough spare capacity to handle growth, and put in more disks/arrays when needed (marketing guys call this "just-in-time provisioning".

Sure, we could go get a full time 100mbit/s connection from a NOC for a thousand a month, but when you're talking about the possibility of maxing out that line with 10-20 customers paying you $15, something doesn't add up. These high numbers being claimed are just as much horseshit as the guys doing unlimited.

Not exactly. These are non mom-and-pop hosters that rent their servers and network connections by the port orby the half-rack. They operate their own datacenters (the serious ones, anyway), which gets you vastly different pricing for your bandwidth (if you deal in many gigabits/sec as opposed to 100mbit/s, prices do drop considerably).
You do not look at it as 10-20 customers on one server, but hundreds or thousands of customers on a number of servers with a number of storage arrays.

If they can truly deliver 2tb for $15/month I've got a few download servers they can try out ... really, this should be putting all the NOCs out of business.

It won't. You simply have not understood the concept of overselling yet. :)
They can sell you 500gb and 5tb precisely because the vast majority of people never use that much, even if they are allowed to. You CAN use that much if the host is reputable and doesn't wiggle out of their agreements ("conventional" and "traditional" websites my ass, pardon my French). For instance, there are plenty of folks on DH that are using upwards of 500g of storage and upwards of 3-4 tb of bandwidth (~3 tb would be an average of 10mbit/s (and yes, average, not peak)). There are thousands more, however, who use less than 1gb and less than 10-100gb of traffic. Given critical mass, this can work well, especially since shared webhosting has an expectation of minor problems (such as an overloaded mySQL server every now and then, or sporadically overloaded servers due to abusive customers (and I do not mean in the "let's kick him because he is using too much but still what is allowed" kind of abusive, but rather the "I'm using this server as if it were a dedicated one, spawning thousands of processes, using an entire server, even though I am FULLY aware that this is a shared webhost" kind of abusive. There is a huge difference between using 500g/5tb to serve mostly static files compared to trying to host a bulletin board with 800 online users at any one time on the same plan -- that's simply infeasible in a shared hosting environment :)

Your particular usage, for instance, is not applicable (game servers on shared hosting are a no-no, persistent processes are

Re:It's a gimmick

[deserttrail]

I happen to be in the market for a host so I checked out your link. I was a little disturbed by what I saw. Compare:

https://www.securepaynet.net/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?se=+&app_hdr=&prog_id=1t611&ci=5652#tabs

to

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp?ci=8886#tabs

Really? You couldn't have ripped off a better looking site than godaddy? Maybe you're affiliated, maybe they ripped you off, maybe it's some cots template... Anyway you spin it, sorry, but I'll be looking elsewhere.

Re:It's a gimmick

[ggvaidya]

That's because securepaynet.net is owned by WildWestDomains.com which is the reseller arm of GoDaddy's domain registration service. So both websites you linked to are owned by GoDaddy, which explains the identical website layouts.

Re:It's a gimmick

[deserttrail]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for doing the research that I wasn't willing to do :-)

Maybe it's shallow, but the primary thing I don't like about godaddy is their website. I find it cluttered and obnoxious looking. And as much as I like tits, they don't really sell me on domain and hosting services.

Traffic shaping

[Annirak]

The obvious answer is traffic shaping. They'll let you store as much as you want! And you transfer as much to them or from them as the connection can handle! Too bad you only get a 56k.

Re:Traffic shaping

[palegray.net]

No, you've got it all wrong. You're going to get unlimited storage and data transfer, at very high speeds. Unfortunately, all your pages will be modified in real time to include a nice little header: "Yahoo Hosting: Powered By Microsoft!!!"

I wonder if

[Anonymous Coward]

This service is available if my ISP is Comcast and it's not in violation of their TOS. Wait a minute, it would be in violation of their TOS. Dammit, now I gotta figure out where to upload all these dadgun copyrighted materials and porn for future use.

Quick Easy Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody sign up, throw up a few DVD ISOs, and link to them from Slashdot. We'll soon see how "unlimited" it is...

RapidShare?

[rrohbeck]

Let's see how long this will last if people start Web 2.0 storage sharing sites up there. They probably have deduplication and compression but that won't help if/when people put HD videos up there.
Those TOS are temporary until MS takes over anyway.

Re:Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimit

[tompaulco]

I think there is something missing within their service terms, like numbers. Okay, so you might not be able to grow as fast you want, well, before I sign on the dotted line, how fast CAN I grow?What happens to people who exceed this amount? Bounce to a higher rate plan, get charged extra for the extra growth?
I think Yahoo is just the latest company to cash in on the "hidden a-la-carte" fee structure. Just like cell phone plans, "Free checking" and just about every other "flat rate service", you can no longer tell in advance what you are going to get charged for something, and every time you tear open a bill, you know there is a good chance that it is going to be 50% higher than the month before because of some obscure item buried deep in the fine print.

Mod parent up.

[Animats]

Thanks for finding the "gotchas".

Chess egtb

[jshriverWVU]

So will they host the entire 3-4-5 and 6 men Chess endgame databases? We in the community have been trying hard over the last year to keep the dataset alive, but few people can house 1.6 Tb at home.

I try my best with my own modest server, but $12 a month? I'll bite, Yahoo will you host it?

Re:Chess egtb

[Anonymous Coward]

So will they host the entire 3-4-5 and 6 men Chess endgame databases? We in the community have been trying hard over the last year to keep the dataset alive, but few people can house 1.6 Tb at home.

I think pretty much anybody can store 1.6TB at home today...I have nearly 10TB of RAID-5 storage available via iSCSI to the web servers in my home.

But, I can only afford 15Mbps upstream at a reasonable cost. Unless I am making money off sites (which opens up a lot of worm cans), it would not be affordable for me to pay for the bandwidth. I suspect that most sites fall into this same category. 1Mbps only allows 10GB/day of transfer, so even 100Mbps would not be enough to allow one person to download the entire chess database you are talking about in less than a day. If you figure that something even moderately popular will be downloaded 10 times a day, then 100Mbps is only enough for 100GB of that kind of data. As popularity increases, then it's easy to see that you can't host more than about 1GB of very popular data without some serious speed.

Re:Chess egtb

[networkBoy]

If you're serious, I'll host it *but*
How will I make enough money from it to support the hardware & resources it consumes?
-nB

Re:Chess egtb

[jshriverWVU]

Good point, though while it is a large dataset, not that many people use it. I would roughly guess 50-100 people around the world? Primarily researchers in the field. It took us over a year to rebuild and recollect the pieces that various people had to have a solid set available again. I think the main concern isn't so much as having a good site for people to leech, but having a solid data warehouse and redundant. Dr. Hyatt once stored and offered the set on his ftp site via the university connection. When the array died the data was almost lost to the world. I think that was the main problem, 1 source of failure. The goal is redundancy yet somewhat accessible for those that do want it. The edonkey project has been successful in that regards, but it's still getting pieces from a lot of different people and myself have been unable to get the whole set, though I don't download like others have.

I emailed Google after their offer to host "open-source data" after the post here a while back. Hoping that too bears fruit.

Re:Chess egtb

[TheRaven64]

I don't know if you saw this story, but since it's a scientific (well, mathematical) dataset, you'd probably qualify for free hosting from Google soon. At 1.6TB, you're around half of their size limit.

Re:obligatory first post

[mrxak]

Hmm, maybe Microsoft will sign up for an account and try to ruin Yahoo so their stock tanks and they can buy them cheaper?

I would like to archive the internet

[esocid]

I, as an owner of a small business, would like to archive everything hosted on the entire internet. So 600 petabytes is included in that "unlimited" figure right?

Simplenet

[oahazmatt]

This sounds a lot like Simplenet from the late 90s. They provided you with a sub-domain and unlimited hosting and bandwith for about the same price.

Then a couple of sites got popular, and started causing problems for the servers.

That's when Simplenet sent e-mail messages to the "top users" and informed them they would be automatically moved to a new plan as they had qualified for an addendum in the Terms of Service. An addendum that was put out moments before the e-mail message was sent.

All I remember is a lot of people jumping ship, just out of spite. I hope Yahoo! has a better idea of what they're getting into.

Re:Simplenet

[siobHan]

I seem to recall that Yahoo bought Simplenet. A long time ago.

L

Dreamhost

[CopaceticOpus]

Storage space has been a big issue of contention on Dreamhost as well. I signed up for their service, feeling happy that I had 500G of remote storage to use as I pleased. It turned out it wasn't that simple.

Unlimited sounds great, until you start using a large amount of space and Yahoo has to find some reason to say that you're not complying with their terms of service.

Bad Service Trumps All

[Atomm]

I had webhosting with Yahoo once. I was amazed at the fact that their control panel used to manage your account was so unfriendly and unintuitive. They make you go through hoops that even the smallest hosting reller offering Cpanel or Plesk doesn't do.

Add all the disk space and bandwidth you want, but until you fix the real problems, "control panel and terrible customer service" it won't matter.

Anyone remember Netcom?

[PortHaven]

The company that came on and said 40 hours a week peek-time. Unlimited off-peak. Then several months later declared "Unlimited".

And we've never gone back. Dial-up pretty much was forced away from a per hour rate to a flat $20 fee for unlimited. And the whole industry was moved to a $15-$25 price point.

Wasn't until broadband came around that prices were able to be raised again. ;-)

It's not always an impossible thing...

Re:Anyone remember Netcom?

[morcego]

back. Dial-up pretty much was forced away from a per hour rate to a flat $20 fee for unlimited. And the whole industry was moved to a $15-$25 price point.

This is not a good example, since dial-up usage doesn't scale very much. You only have 24 hours/day, and your bandwidth is no more than 56k.

So, you see, if your average user stays connected 3 hours/day, the heavy user will only use 8x time amount. Now, if you consider broadband and your average users transfer 2GB/month, a heavy user will easily transfer 400GB/month. Thats 200 times more. And according to a quick calculation here (could be wrong), it is theoretically possible for a user to use 1.3TB/month on a 4Mbps connection (note: actually bandwidth usage, including protocol overhead etc).

If you consider webhosting, things get even worst. An average user will store 500MB, and transfer 2GB/month (if that). While a heavy user can easily reach 500GB and transfer 2TB/month. In both cases, 1000 times more (or 1024, if you like).

Unlimited can easily become a real nightmare.

Re:Anyone remember Netcom?

[networkBoy]

I was one of their first customers (and last FWIW). Stayed with their servers till the host I logged into died and earthlink couldn't find it.
-nB

Re:Anyone remember Netcom?

[softdevs]

Really! Well thats great! http://www.kanati.com.ph

Re:Anyone remember Netcom?

[PortHaven]

You're forgetting that we're talking mid-90's

When people paid hundreds of dollars a month for ISDN lines @ 64K.

Many people were still connecting via 14.4K & 28.8K. The backbone wasn't as big. Hard drives were far far smaller. So while one couldn't reach 2TBs on a 56K connection, the rest of the support system was much smaller as well.

So to say it's irrelevant seems pretty far fetched. Steamships are pretty irrelevant today, but they displaced sailing vessels during their day. A race between a steamship and a modern ship would be a quick lose for the steamship. But I wasn't trying to compare 56K to modern DSL. But each within it's own time. And in this case, Netcom provides an example of a reasonable flat rate that shattered the industry's then current model.

Yes, unlimited can easily become a real nightmare...I am sure Netcom had issues with power users who were on their machines downloading 24/7. And I am sure they had numerous users who used the internet so rarely they'd have saved money with Prodigy's $2.95/minute rate.

What this really does...

[Registered Coward v2]

is give companies certantity over their monthly costs while ensuring they can grow without hitting limits and needing to move their sites or pay much higher fees; as well as ensure acess to their sites without hitting monthly limits and paying more or getting cut off. For many smaller businesses that's a good deal - they aren't going to "grow too fast" or violate the TOS by using it as a data backup site or hosting massive files for download. Yahoo gets to attract more businesses to their services, spreading their large fixed costs over more customers and possibly migrating them to more expensive services as their needs grow beyond the small business model. They may even find a way to host adds preferentialy over say Google and others.

Despite the /. viewpoint; Yahoo probably doesn't care about the handful of customers that will try to game their offer by hosting large amounts of files, etc - they'll just cut them off under the TOS and be done with them.

Uh-oh, says Microsoft

[Tibor the Hun]

I think Microsoft's sphincter just imploded.
Didn't they just figure out a few months ago how to bump up Hotmail storage up from 2 MB? (And still no IMAP or POP for free?)

Not for business

[Dakisha]

As someone who works in the hosting industry; prehaps my view is a little bias - however..

Joe Blogs may find this useful; someone running a high-profile blog or creative commons music download site -- but businesses want someone on the phone, someone who can explain whats happened to their email (blocked as spam, not getting to person X who's misconfigured their mail server, etc), why their PHP form isn't working as expected, how to configure outlook - etc.

Businesses want someone they can hold accountable - and they want an instant response. What they don't want is a faceless company that directs you to the relevant help page/tutorial in the first reply and makes you wait 24 hours before your followup support ticket is replied to.

A good hosting company gains and retains their reputation not just through reliability and quantity - but through quality technical support.

We may not offer crazy levels of storage or bandwidth per month ; but a good chunk of our business comes through referals from word of mouth after they've had the pleasure of dealing with our support or sales people.

If Yahoo managed to offer this -and- offer 'unlimited' space/bandwidth; then I'd be worried. I'm sure plenty of other people will handle the obvious arguments regarding 'unlimited' though.

I question the accuracy of webhostingstuff.com

[CatPieMan]

My host is dreamhost. Their uptime is also listed as 99.99% ( http://www.webhostingstuff.com/uptime/DreamHost.html ).

From experience, this is not the case. For example, the site says that they had 100% uptime in January of this year. On their own status page ( http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ ) they show several outages for January. There was one night in January where some DH routers had issues and the Web servers and MySQL servers could not communicate. Any web site which did not require MySQL was fine, but those that did require it were not working.

There was also a couple DNS outages late last year, in which all websites that used DH's DNS were down (web servers were fine, its the DNS servers that were not).

I'm not complaining about DH, as they are fantastic compared to 1and1, who I was with before. I'm just saying that I don't believe 99.99% uptime is accurate for DH (it may be accurate for Yahoo!), and 100% for the past 6 months is incorrect.

Also looking at the site for 1and1 ( http://www.webhostingstuff.com/uptime/11InternetInc.html ), I know those numbers are not correct. I left 1and1 after my site had daily outages in March/April 07.

Re:I question the accuracy of webhostingstuff.com

[lena_10326]

I'm not complaining about DH, as they are fantastic compared to 1and1, who I was with before.

Wow. You sure have a high level of tolerance. You weren't phased at all by the security breach that compromised a number of machines, and the storage of passwords in clear text, and the frequent 200+ CPU load on various hosts, and the charging of accounts for a full year even though you're on a monthly plan, and the subsequent refund?

Still happy with them even though all of that occurred in the last 6 months?

By the way, I find their goofy newsletters highly ridiculous and unprofessional. Very symptomatic of a college dorm work atmosphere.

Re:I question the accuracy of webhostingstuff.com

[CatPieMan]

Yeah, I know. 1and1 was still worse. At least my static pages load in any reasonable time with DH.

Most of the problems have not been my cluster. I'm not too thrilled about the clear text passwords, but the site I have with them is all backed up. The DB site is more important than the files anyways. I don't run anything that is critical to my survival or my bank account on the DH site. I'm not familiar w/ the 200+ CPU load issue though.

As to the billing -- that didn't affect me. My CC expired the month before the billing issue and I didn't update the info yet.

The newsletter gets deleted as soon as it comes in, maybe I should read it more.

It becomes a question of what is worse. I can pay more for a website that never loads, customer service that can't answer a simple question, and has all of the same issues, or pay less for a website that loads in reasonable time and has ok customer service. DH is low pain compared to 1and1.

brings back fond memories...

[UID30]

...of my "Unix Programmers's Manual" circa 1983 from Bell Laboratories where they say something along the lines of ... "Filenames can be infinite in length (where infinity is set to 255 characters)..."

Simple solution! Redefine "Unlimited".

Tag This Article.....

[IHC Navistar]

Somebody should tag this article "misleading". If you have limis, it is not "All-You-Can-Eat".

Re:Tag This Article.....

[PaladinAlpha]

I actually think the "All-You-Can-Eat" moniker is pretty bloody accurate here -- it's the same type of psudeoscam. A business sells you the right to consume without limits, then makes sure it stays within reason. A perfectly honorable transaction if both parties are honorable, but then, corporations have little incentive to remain honorable.

Or, put another way, walk into your favorite "All-You-Can-Eat" buffet and ask if you would be allowed to consume, say, fifteen plates of food, or wait at your table until you hungered again. It's the same type of thing.

Re:Tag This Article.....

[Torvaun]

Sure you're allowed to consume fifteen plates of food, but generally most people are not going to be able or willing to do that. That's actually the best parallel I can think of for overselling services. The business is advertising an upper limit that they cannot afford to have everyone reach, with the knowledge that most people are not going to reach it.

Let's test this out...

[kbob88]

Unlimited storage? Let's see how well they handle this file:

# cat /dev/zero >> unlimited.file.my.ass

Re:Let's test this out...

[raynet]

That shouldn't be a problem in any smart filesystem that makes a sha1 or similar checksum of each block and only stores them once. Like filesystem of Plan9 OS and possibly ZFS. Also EXT2 with GZIP extensions would probably work quite well. Maybe even any filesystem with sparse file support, not sure though if they can do a sparse file like that.

Any takers?

[Creepy Crawler]

I'm in need of a remote computer.

I need around 10 GB storage, 20 GB bandwidth per month (well, 10 up/10 down).

I dont care about HTTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, game servers, or most anything for that matter.

I need SSH access, and maybe speed equivalent to about 30 MHz at most.

Who has something like that, and how much does it cost?

Re:Any takers?

[Creepy Crawler]

The more that I think about it, batch processing would be more effective for me. I dont mind waiting for the commands to process, just as long as I have a reasonable access to my data.

SSH would be overkill... batch processing to shove it to a HTTPS session would be more effective.

Re:Any takers?

[Dakisha]

Firstly; you suck -- I was caught by your logout thing twice in a row before I had to pay enough attention to work out what was going on ;P

As for a real reply; you'll be looking for a UML/VPS. NO shared hosting provider worth their salt is going to give you proper SSH access. If they do; I'd not go within a nautical mile of them.

A cheap virtual server will offer you limited memory/cpu/disk usage and your own root enviroment -- they go for anything from about 10 bucks a month upwards.

Re:Any takers?

[corsec67]

I use DreamHost for that, and it is about $100/year, for 500GB.

I do host a tiny site on it, but nothing special, and not very big at all. (The good news is that you can't slashdot my webcams on there because DH provides a lot of transfer speed and size)

The main weakness of DH is the amazingly slow database stuff (at least when I used it with Gallery2), but you don't care about that.

Re:Any takers?

[corsec67]

Wow, that logout thing is interesting. That is a great example of why that stuff shouldn't work over a HTTP GET, but should instead require a HTTP PUT or POST. Imagine if you had a prefetch thing running, and that kept logging you out?

HTTP GET (or any other kind of retrieve action) shouldn't change the data, and should be repeatable.

Re:Any takers?

[Creepy Crawler]

The 100$ a year plan is not a VPS. I need shell access (root is helpful :P). The cheapest VPS they offer is 135$, managed. I know how to use and admin a linux/BSD box, so I dont need hand-holding. I also dont need buku resources. 48MB ram, 10 gig disk, 30MHz CPU, 20gig bandwidth symmetric is good enough for me. Storage matters more than everything else (expect for bandwidth).

Most places restrict completely any sort of proxies or iptunnels, even if they are private (security for wifi access points).

Re:Any takers?

[SanityInAnarchy]

It would help if you were more clear about exactly what you need.

I've been pretty much buried in Amazon's AWS stack for awhile now, so a part of me wants to say... If you just need storage, go with S3. It's pay-as-you-go, absurdly simple file storage that happens to be done over http(s). Can be private, or can be on the public Internet.

It's the 30 mhz figure that makes me wonder. If you need to do a batch job very occasionally, and you don't care how long you wait, you could always prepare an ec2 image, and bring the instance up on demand. Costs 10 cents/hour, which means it's a bit expensive to leave on all the time, but if you only leave it up for an hour a day, that's $3/mo. When you shut it down, all data is lost... unless you persisted it to S3.

Or, yeah, what other people are suggesting, if you're wanting a mailserver or something.

Re:Any takers?

[TheRaven64]

I use these guys. I have a full dedicated server with them, but since it's a Mac Mini it doesn't take up much space in their datacentre so it's pretty cheap. Their network isn't completely reliable - there have been a few periods of downtime, but the gaps between downtime have been growing and their customer support is excellent (I can IM the owner and bitch if stuff breaks, and get prompt replies).

I run OpenBSD on my mini. It took a hour of 'remote hands' time to install ($20) and then just worked. Actually, that's not quite true. About a year later the hard drive died and Apple refused to honour their warranty responsibilities. The hosting company replaced the drive for me from a third party supplier at their own expense (only about $100, and almost certainly less than the profit they've made from me, but that kind of service is why I've found it very hard to go elsewhere).

how to find it

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, so I browsed over to www.yahoo.com to find information about this service.

Can't find anything. Is it the briefcase service ? If so, there is no information about that service.

Re:how to find it

[HeroreV]

Maybe you could use a search engine. Like, say... Yahoo.com.

Why now?

[ghjm]

1. Yahoo isn't the smartest kid on the block, but they aren't *that* dumb. Nobody with a vague clue offers "unlimited" bandwidth or storage. And Yahoo has a vague clue.

2. Isn't it funny that they did this right after the Microsoft takeover offer?

It's possible that this was already in the works and has nothing to do with MS. But it's just so self-evidently stupid that I wonder if senior executives were involved. What's the strategic angle? Do they now accept an MS takeover as inevitable, and want to discredit MS as much as possible post-takeover (because it will be MSHoo, not Yahoo, who gets sued over the "unlimited" claims)? Or are they hoping to attract so many unprofitable bandwidth leeches that their service becomes undesirable and MS loses interest? Or is there a more subtle angle to this?

-Graham

what about

[geekoid]

Mr Guo? does he get unlimited bandwidth and storage?

Response to Microsoft hostile takeover

[diablo6683]

I think this may be the fruits of Yahoo's discussions with Google. And not really in an attempt to combat google on any front, but to prevent Microsoft from offering $31/share to buy Yahoo out. Yahoo is doing everything in their power to either force microsoft to offer more than #31/share (which comes out to nearly 45 billion dollars) or force Microsoft to drop its bid for takeover. Google announced last week that it would be helping Yahoo to develop plans to thwart the MS attempt, and this might be -one- of the results of those talks. -music, movies, microcode (software), and high speed pizza delivery.

Haham way to shiv Microsoft.

[geekoid]

heh.
Oh, your going to buy us? thats great, here's the keys. BTW, we have ten million people using unlimited bandwidth and storage. Good luck.

The next day every geek int he land is putting up and pulling off 10s of gigs of files.

What services are allowed?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, here's what I want. And apparently promoters of other hosting services are posting here, so I'll bite.

I want a hosting service of some kind that allows me to rsync a fair bit of data and bandwidth for around $10/mo. Allows as in, not against their TOS. Why yes, I plan to backup some of my datas that way. Something I used to do on a small scale (2-5GB) on Dreamhost, when it was even outlined on their support wiki. Then the over-selling marketing caught up with them, and they explicitly warned their users this is no longer allowed. It's for "websites" only. Which I realize, is hard to argue with.

Here's the thing. My "website" is maybe 100MB. Yes, I'm a web developer. And my bandwidth is probably usually lower. I use it for personal services, like syncing ics calendars or my own todo lists, crap like that. But supposedly, I had goo-gobs of disk space and a disgusting amount of bandwidth. I'd like to use that I'm supposedly "paying for". I've looked around, but most providers that really do support this sort of thing want a lot of month for a dedicated server. Honestly, the best solution I've found so far is possibly Amazon's S3 service since it scales. BUT, that doesn't still give me the basic web-service PHP support I'd like as well (but am only going to use very little of).

Unlimited bandwidth is cheap for Yahoo to deliver

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Keep in mind that Yahoo can deliver unlimited bandwidth much cheaper than a hosting company can. You have to keep in mind that Yahoo has an expansive network and they are doing settlement-free peering with all of the Tier 1 ISP's, as well as anyone else who happens to be hooked up to a common peering point. Hell, even at our regional hosting center we're connected to a peering point and we peer directly with Yahoo, bypassing the Internet.

The point is that all that bandwidth doesn't cost Yahoo nearly as much as a traditional hosting provider would have to pay for it.

Recent news amnesia?

[palegray.net]

Why has nobody brought up the point that you'd effectively be buying your hosting from Microsoft if the buyout goes through? Do you really want to pump more money into that beast?

Where to get 750 gig of text files ...

[trolltalk.com]

Mirror all the text pr0n in usenet!

Re:Where to get 750 gig of text files ...

[networkBoy]

Worlds largest ASCII art collection! Why limit to pr0n, can't be more than 50 gig of that around...
-nB

Re:Where to get 750 gig of text files ...

[rdradar]

Well apparently you couldnt host pornography on it :(

Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in October Verizon had to stop calling their "Unlimited Data Plan" for cell phones unlimited because the TOS made it limited. "Unlimited" meant 5 GB a month, regardless of use, and prohibited anything but web surfing, email, and intranet use.

I'd be real interested in reading the TOS on this.

Wait And See...

[blueZhift]

I've been using Yahoo webhosting for years and the service is just okay, but I don't ask for very much anyway. So the new plan is actually a significant savings for me and now if I want to place some big multimedia files on my site, I don't have to watch out for bandwidth usage if it gets linked to someone's MySpace account.

As for a Microsoft buyout, I'll just wait and see. I've stuck with Yahoo mainly because they make a lot of routine things simple and relatively easy. And when I first signed up, I felt like Yahoo was likely to be around a lot longer than Joe's Fast Web Hosting Service.

"Unlimited"

[Zatic]

How much is that in Libraries of Congress?

Unlimited == Undetermined

[Traa]

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/

Lots of disclaimers. No hard numbers. Definitely nothing to do with unlimited.

truth in advertising law

[F�an�ro]

How about a new law:

Just like food sold must include a list of incgredients, fat content, etc
so should certain groups of products have to include a list of guaranted minimum quantities offered, or your money back

Any advert that references these quantities, in the form of "unlimited", "up to 100 gb" "up to 500% faster" etc.
would have to disclose the minima too.

Companies would still be free to promise the sky. But since they would need to at least define a guaranted lower bound, customers would knew a number they could rely on, and compare products based on those.

Could this be used as a backup service?

[jordan314]

I was already looking into an online backup service (such as mozy.com) that would keep an off site backup of my files. Mozy has 'unlimited' storage too but only allows one person at a time to access the data. This would be great for mirroring files (such as class documents for students to access). Does anyone know a good way to use this service as an automatic backup? I'm thinking rsync if they support ssh or sftp. Is there OS X / unix backup software like Mozy's out there that will do this with any web host, or should I use a cron job?

Re:Could this be used as a backup service?

[Em Ellel]

I was already looking into an online backup service (such as mozy.com) that would keep an off site backup of my files. Mozy has 'unlimited' storage too but only allows one person at a time to access the data. This would be great for mirroring files (such as class documents for students to access).
Does anyone know a good way to use this service as an automatic backup? I'm thinking rsync if they support ssh or sftp. Is there OS X / unix backup software like Mozy's out there that will do this with any web host, or should I use a cron job? Frankly - no. The terms flat out say that you cannot use it for storage of data. Its for running a public web sites and storage of data needed for the site only, you cannot use it to do backups, etc. Also, the terms also say that since these are shared servers, your load is only unlimited as long as it is not interfering with other services - i.e. it is FAR from unlimited - more like un-metered but at a their whim. Its a great deal for a small site to not worry about bandwidth overages but its not unlimited by any stretch of the imagination.

Just send them this link

[jred]

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=unlimited&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Re:Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimit

[BeeBeard]

That's exactly right. It's just like the Time Warner-as-ISP issue described in another article earlier this week. Once your usage crosses some unstated threshold, you've violated their Terms of Service and they can drop you like a republican presidential candidate.

Definition of Unlimited = $46 BILLION

[Anonymous Coward]

Definition of Unlimited = $46 BILLION - a few hundred million in Executive bonuses.
Microsoft buy out anyone?
Nuff said.

You miss the point!

[Snaller]

It's $11.95 for ONE month - then they close up shop. So make the most of it.

www.nearlyfreespeech.net

[sdfad1]

I would like to take this opportunity to shill for my shared hosting provider, as a satisfied customer (I have not other relation with them). I was going to say that these guys offer $1 per G bandwidth, and $1 per Meg per month disk space, strictly on a pay-as-you-go basis. What was my hosting fees over the last year? I don't know, probably around $10 -> that's $7 for the domain name, and $3 for MySql, leaving a few cents for storage & bandwidth. I'm a very light user, and well, I'm working on getting more traffic/revenue etc, but it's a while yet. Ok, now I also have "unlimited account" email forwarding at $0.02 per day ie anything, ***@mysite.com gets forwarded.

So, at my most wasteful "always upsize setting", that's a whopping average spending per customer, I'm probably a big spender!). Can anyone beat that? That was before. Just now, I check their news pages, and found that the bandwidth costs have just been decreased (and check this out for those rational-minded ones out there) on a log scale!

I quote

These discounts aren't monthly or anything; the more you transfer, the cheaper your service gets, no matter how long it takes. It's also permanent for the life of your bandwidth account ... This is absolutely not designed to compete with the bajillion-gigs-for-$9.95-a-month* plans out there. Those plans are based on overselling, not actual cost of services. We'll never go down that road. Instead, we've been waiting a long time to get the purchasing power and volume discounts needed to make hosting even more affordable for our members, and it's very exciting that after six years, we're finally here. Languages supported (Yes! Haskell, Ruby, Lisp, everything under the sun, as long as it's not a persistent server model (ie must be "cgi") -- you'll probably need a VPS for that, or dedicated hosting). Oh, there's ssh too.

Re:www.nearlyfreespeech.net

[sdfad1]

Sorry a correction:

So, at my most wasteful "always upsize setting", that's a whopping <$20 for one whole year (looking at their average spending per customer, I'm probably a big spender!). Can anyone beat that? That was before. Just now, I check their news pages, and

Re:"Unlimited" defined

[g-san]

So, are we talking Comcast "Unlimited" or Verizon "Unlimited"?

And if I was in management at Microsfot, I would quickly suggest we move all our hosting to Yahoo cause it's waaaaay cheaper. Wait....

Geocities and web-hosted torrents

[Zantetsuken]

So basically its the new paid version of Geocities?

Oh well, I guess at least for the next month or so before people start being told that there actually are bandwidth limits, every torrent in the world will have like an extra 5 web-hosts...

obviously it's gonna have a clause that says no illegal activities, but you know people would try anyway...

Businesses

[kcbanner]

They can afford to do this with businesses because they assume they won't be useing lots and lots of P2P, they might even have a throttling clause in there somewhere. Fine print anyone?

!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC

[fulldecent]

Looks like we just solved W3C's problem.

Basically..

[fsckr]

Here you go, you can drink an unlimited amount of our beer, just as long as you drink it through this measly little straw. ...no thanks Yahoo. Now if it were really unlimited, I have a site that I'd like to host, I wonder what their TOS says about Porn and Bittorrent trackers : ) That will show them 'unlimited'...

Re:"Unlimited" defined

[mitgib]

So, are we talking Comcast "Unlimited" or Verizon "Unlimited"?

I'd just like a few of those unlimited hard drives they are using

Plan of action

[Tolvor]

I have 2.5TB of storage. Let's see...

1. Sign up for Yahoo hosting

2. Truecrypt the drives into 10GB pieces

3. Create a very basic index.html that links to those file - now those files are not data storage, they are web content.

4. Upload.

5. Upload more.

6. Upload backups.

7. Upload the archives from CD/DVD

8. When Yahoo shuts me down, sue as I only uploaded web content.

Re:Plan of action

[Anonymous Coward]

you really don't understand how much storage yahoo has available -- your little less than 3TB is not a big problem. in fact, go ahead and do it -- I bet you won't, but yahoo would not stop you or even notice.

they did it for the lulz

[ralphthemagician]

My favorite example of "unlimited" is Verizon's EV-DO broadband, where "unlimited" original meant 5GB/month and then they just turned off your service; and now it means 5GB/month and then we throttle your speed down to a max of 100Kbps/100Kbps, and might still cut you off.

What kind of text files?

[ben there...]

ME: I'll fill it up with txt files. SVG porn?

Re:Unlimited bandwidth is cheap for Yahoo to deliv

[mtk512]

Indeed, offering unlimited bandwidth puts the provider in a position similar to that of an insurer, with a high bandwidth user equivalent to a customer who causes insurance losses. Thus, for such a scheme to work, they need to have low loss coverage costs and broad risk distribution. As has been pointed out above, Yahoo can probably achieve the former; they are also in a much better position for the latter -- they have marketing channels through which they can reach a lot of average customers. Compare this to a small provider whose unlimited hosting package might end up attracting mainly users who got kicked out of their last "unlimited" plan.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

See, it's hilarious because of the more recent story on Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo?

OT

[Gazzonyx]

OT, but I couldn't find on your site (and your username doesn't have any contact info)... do you have any plans for data warehousing? I've got about 40GB that I'm rsyncing (the daily diff is usually a few meg, a few hundred when we dump images from our product pics) around, but I'd like a place to shove it offsite. It seems that the only plans available to meet my needs are dedicated root servers - just so I can run rsyncd. I'm not going to host a site from the thing. What would you suggest for an offsite simple backbone/service/raid box (besides the one I have at home - my ISP doesn't like services on the wire, and they're the only game in town if they cancel my subscription)?

Re:OT

[Dekortage]

Thanks for asking. No, we don't have any plans specifically for data warehousing (though that's something we are looking into). Our shared hosting plans aren't meant for rsyncing. You'd have to get a dedicated server (or a "virtual dedicated" account, which we began offering this week). But I don't know if it would be cost-effective for your needs, probably costing over $75/month no matter how you slice it.

Just a handshake away..

[freaker_TuC]

Oh, it's small, just a handshake and a bribe or two.