What Host Site(s) Do You Use For Your Website(s)?

[neil poulsen]

For those who have their own websites, what hosting site (or hosting sites) do you use as a place to put your website for internet access?

> What do you like about them?

> What's their maximum space alloted per customer.

> What don't you like about them?

> How much do they charge per year for hosting a website?

> How much do they charge per year for domain name registration or renewal?

> What kind of technical support do they provide?

> How long have you used them, and would you recommend or not recommend them?

I'm asking, because I'm looking for a hosting site for a friend's site. But in general, I thought it would be interesting to hear about the different sites that people use, and why they might be good for photography.

I'll start.

I'm currently using www.ipowerweb.com. It's a little more expensive at about $97 per year, but they have a system that enables one to host up to 100 websites as sub-domains for that price, and their annual renewal for domain names is $6.95/name/year. As to sub-domains, to visitors it looks the same as separate websites. I have multiple websites that I want to upload, so this plan works well for me.

They alot up to 50 gigabytes for those up to 100 sub-domain websites and 750 gigabytes transfer. (Whatever the latter means?)

They have quite decent technical support BY PHONE! However, they avoid getting into questions about website design, and concentrate on possible problems with hosting. Still, after getting the right person, they helped me solve problems on uploading a website for the first time and instructed me on some stuff that could technically come under the "design" umbrella.

Not too much to dislike about them, except that one guy turned me down on helping me with something that someone else said they could help me with prior to my signing up. I called back again, got someone else, and no problem.

I like them, but too new to recommend them yet.

I tried 1sthostweb.com. Yuk! I needed technical support to get going, and using their email tech support didn't work. Might be OK otherwise, but I didn't get that far. Their "tech" support also didn't help me repointing my domain name that I have registered there. I had to go to sales to get that done, even though that service request falls under the tech support umbrella. Tech support also couldn't help me with something that turned out to be extremely simple. They said it was too complicated to answer. Their tech support was outsourced I think. Their written text had an obvious accent. (I don't mind the accent; I just needed the help.)

[Walter Calahan]

http://www.dogbark.com

Tell them I sent you.

http://www.walterpcalahan.com

[QT Luong]

theplanet.com

I've a dual 2.8 xeon box with dual 160GB drives and max bandwidth of 2.5TB/month.
The server is managed, 100% uptime SLA, with 24/7 phone/ticket tech support. Highly recommended, and an excellent value at $220/month.

[Oren Grad]

max bandwidth of 2.5TB/month

< gulp >

A different "planet", indeed.

Thanks to Neil for posting his questions - I'd like to add another: how much bandwidth do you need for your site, and what kind of site is it? That is, I'm curious to get a sense of the range typically needed to support a modest personal site aimed at sharing work with friends, vs a "serious" gallery site with e-commerce pretensions, vs a megasite like QT's.

[robc]

< gulp >

A different "planet", indeed.

Thanks to Neil for posting his questions - I'd like to add another: how much bandwidth do you need for your site, and what kind of site is it? That is, I'm curious to get a sense of the range typically needed to support a modest personal site aimed at sharing work with friends, vs a "serious" gallery site with e-commerce pretensions, vs a megasite like QT's.

you can work it out fairly simply.

daily visitors × average image size kb × average number of images viewed by a visitor × 30 × 2

note that the × 2 doubles up the value to give you a safety margin and accomodate email bandwidth and backup bandwidth.


so for example, if you 100 vistors a day with avaerage image size of 100kb and each visitor views 20 images then you get

100 × 100 × 20 × 30 × 2 = 12000000Kb or 12000MB or 12GB per month.

You will need to look at your web stats to work out what the averages are for your site.

getting visitors will be the key to how much bandwidth you need.

ISP's can offer massive amounts of bandwidth to tempt you to buy in the knowledge that very few sites will ever use more than a tiny fraction of that bandwidth.

Also some ISP's include their daily backups of your webspace in your used bandwidth figures.

What is the most important thing is how well the ISP manages the load on its servers. Unless you purchase a dedicated server, then you are on a shared server and you may be sharing it with 5, 10, 50 or 100 or 500 other websites any of which might suddenly implement a high bandwidth web site and the performance on your site will drop accordingly. At that point a good ISP will do something about it. The cheap ISP's won't.

Nearly all ISP's only offer support on their services, they don't offer support on design and scripting. They may help you with FTP to your web space.

[j.e.simmons]

I'm using hostgator.com - they have several hosting plans - a basic one is $10/month. They charge by the month, which I have decided I like. I previously used a host that charged annually, and when they failed me, I was stuck with having paid for several months that I would not use. Both addon and subdomains are allowed.

Hostgator has proved very reliable over the 10-months I've used it.
juan

[Daniel Geiger]

I used to be with ipower, until they screwed up my e-mail most royally, lost a bunch, and in the end had to tell them what went wrong at their end. They switched my account from one server to the other without telling me, so reference links got screwed up. I asked them to credit back the remainder, but don't thingk I got anything back. Not worth checking into for the few bucks.

I am now with startlogic. For the same price as ipower ($100/a) I get 10x the storgage (5GB). Tech support has been adequate, though I only had a few simple requests (e.g., reset password). My site is also pretty flat html, no flash, do database, no e-commerce. Just ftp-setup, and a couple of e-mail accounts. ipower and startlogic use the same server software so the transition was very smooth.

If you don't know what transfer rates are, most likely you don't need to be concerned about them. With my low cost option, I use about 1&#37; of transfer rate. Webup load is limited to files to about 30MB, for larger files you have to use a ftp-utility.

[Rory_5244]

Wow. "Ipowerweb.com" looks great.

I use FutureQuest. My humble website uses their cheapest package (Visionary) with 100MB of storage space (of which I have used 33MB) and a 5GB bandwidth. I pay $100. per year approx. for the site and one "IRO". Their service has been excellent for the 14 months I have been with them.

[Rory_5244]

Holy crap! How is "StartLogic" so cheap!?

[Michael Graves]

My website is hosted through 1AND1.com. I used their Business Solution, which gives me the following:

I can host three different dedicated domains.
I have a total of 200GB of storage.
I can have up to 2,000GB of traffic per month without incurring extra charges.
It allows 1,995 more email addresses than I need (anyone want to rent an email address?)

It costs $9.95 per month.