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Hosting Dilemma

Wednesday 14 April, 2004 ( 9:28AM GMT)

I've used a lot of hosting companies in the past. A LOT. And they've all been crap in one way or another, be it reliability, customer service, unwarranted demands for money / threats to sue me etc. etc.

They've all been crap except for one - Titan Internet. I've been using them for a few years now and it has been the home of HTML Dog since the start. I would recommend them anyway, but with my experience of the bafflingly large number of terrible hosting companies, this lot really stand out from the crowd.

So here's the problem. HTML Dog is now regularly going over its bandwidth limit. WAY over it. Pretty impressive for a mere collection of such lightweight pages. And now, justifiably, Titan want some more cash. The thing is, they're not the cheapest hosting company in the world (not that they're the most expensive by any means) and HTML Dog obviously doesn't make any money.

Should a non-profit organisation delve deep into their (pretty empty) pockets for guaranteed quality of service and avoidance of hassle, or should they opt for an alternative (I've heard good things about Newnet) that offers much more bandwidth at a more affordable price?

Comments

Comment 1

I'm not sure what your specific needs are, but I have had excellent experience with http://premium-host.com/, especially with customer service.

So said ahren on Wednesday 14 April, 2004 at 12:44PM GMT.

Comment 2

I just signed up with 1and1.com and for $10 a month you get 1G sotarge and 5Gig in bandwith... I think a great deal is there!

Another option os to get a hosting sponsor... if you get that much traffic you can use that as a pitch to one of the hosting companies like mediatemple.com or 2advanced.net and offer to advertise them for free for a discount.

So said Steve on Wednesday 14 April, 2004 at 2:38PM GMT.

Comment 3

What's your bandwidth cap? Comment #2's mention of 5 Gig is pretty small. For $27/mo, we get 5 Gig of storage and 50 Gig of bandwidth at Midphase, but their customer service isn't the best, nor are their features, in my opinion.

So said Richard on Wednesday 14 April, 2004 at 6:25PM GMT.

Comment 4

So have you analyzed the logs and figured out what is pushing you over the limit?

So said Will Rickards on Wednesday 14 April, 2004 at 6:57PM GMT.

Comment 5

Yeah. It's those pesky web surfers. Thousands of the blighters.

There's nothing heavier on this site than a lightweight web page.

So said Patrick on Wednesday 14 April, 2004 at 11:09PM GMT.

Comment 6

I do not know exactly what you need, but I have used http://www.pair.com for years with no problems, good prices, and great service.

i.e.
For $29.00/month
- 700MB/day transfer (21GB/month)
- 700MB disk space

So said Jason on Thursday 15 April, 2004 at 4:23PM GMT.

Comment 7

I recommand Lunarpages

So said on Friday 16 April, 2004 at 2:33AM GMT.

Comment 8

A major financial crunch and laziness restricts me to Geocities. That will change in the somewhat near future though.

So said Dante Evans on Saturday 17 April, 2004 at 11:07PM GMT.

Comment 9

Oh wait I have a solution:
Go through all your pages and switch all STRONG and EM tags to B and I tags. Think of how much space that will free up.

So said Dante Evans on Saturday 17 April, 2004 at 11:12PM GMT.

Comment 10

The trouble with that is those elements are supposed to be *emphasised*. Just because they are styled in bold and italics doesn't mean it's the same. <em> and <strong> are not the same as <i> and <b>.

That aside, knocking a few bytes off pages in this way won't help - the reduced size would be so miniscule it would just be a drop in the ocean.

So said Patrick on Sunday 18 April, 2004 at 9:56AM GMT.

Comment 11

I don't exactly how much bandwidth you need, but a couple thoughts:

http://www.eperfect.net/ is what I use. The largest package is 500MB of space, 20GB of bandwidth, 14.95/month. They're very reliable (I think my site's been down a whole twice in the year I've been using them, both for only part of a day, and I know two other website maintainers who praise their services). I don't know how the tech support is, honestly, mainly because I've never had to talk to them. ;)

You also could try http://www.fuitadnet.com/ Their *smallest* package is 4.99/month with 3GB space and 25GB of bandwidth, and it goes from there. I honestly haven't used them myself, but there's a very high-traffic website that I visit daily that is hosted by them, and it's almost never down.

Good luck with your hosting... I find this to be a wonderful resource. I got the chance to recommend it to a newbie website creator, and he thought it was great!

So said Liz Calkins on Sunday 18 April, 2004 at 1:28PM GMT.

Comment 12

A quick glance at the source shows an excess of white space. Edit the PHP to take out the excess linebreaks (and tabs if you want). The filesize difference will be impressive.
Also look into whether your host can support gzip/deflate on requested pages. Your pages will be miniscule after a spot of compression (and I hear it's easy to implement in PHP). All modern browsers can handle gzipped pages.

Follow-up: It _is_ really easy in PHP. See http://www.desilva.biz/php/zlib.html

So said Phil Green on Monday 19 April, 2004 at 7:34PM GMT.

Comment 13

I would check out 1and1.com. Post #2 said that it is 5 GB/mo, but it's actually 15 GB/mo. for 9.99. I've used them for a while and have never seen them down (close to 7 months). They have several other options, so check 'em out.

So said Ben on Wednesday 21 April, 2004 at 5:20AM GMT.

Comment 14

Hi,
I use midPhase as above. They are on a real fast network and their support is really 24x7 and really great !

So said redstar on Friday 23 April, 2004 at 7:17PM GMT.

Comment 15

I'm with TDMWeb (tdmweb.com) and so far I've had no downtime at all and Tech Support is really good. You'd have to look at the service levels though.

So said Phil on Tuesday 27 April, 2004 at 1:12PM GMT.

Comment 16

I recommend www.getmeonline.net for fantastic service and www.hasweb.com which seems to have a superb bandwidth options for cheap prices with a forum community and what seems a good support team on the face of it.

So said Darren B on Monday 3 May, 2004 at 7:25PM GMT.

Comment 17

I used 1and 1 root server they screwed me over by asking for 847 British Pounds when someone hacked in my server and went over my bandwidth limit in a number of days.

So said khan on Saturday 14 January, 2006 at 2:55PM GMT.

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