#296219 - 23/10/2007 10:29
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
Er, actually, it wasn't an email, but it was posted to their status page:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/policy-clarification-personal-storage-back-ups/
Something tells me that if someone was actually using their site to serve the amount of data they give you with their plans, they wouldn't exactly allow it. Network backup is an obvious benefit of Dreamhost, and, at this point, the only one, now that my $10/year pricing has expired and I'm on the hook for $10/mo.
Well, until they send me a notice, I'm not even going to begin to worry.
That's pretty much all I use Dreamhost for anymore. I back up my photos, music, etc. What else am I going to do with over 560GB?
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Matt
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#296220 - 23/10/2007 12:06
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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These guys look really good to me. No first hand experience with them, though: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
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#296221 - 23/10/2007 12:47
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Wow, that looks great. The prices for disk and bandwidth are unbelievable. I just hope they're sustainable as they grow. Mostly positive reviews here: http://hostingfu.com/article/nearlyfreespeech-net-2-weeks-reviewLack of cron jobs and no support for Gallery (need to use php "safe mode") are the missing pieces, but I think these guys could at least be useful for network backup until those things are addressed.
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#296222 - 23/10/2007 12:57
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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I fear they aren't for me, though they do look good. Using them as I do Dreamhosts (50GB of photos etc) would be very expensive, it would be cheaper to colocate my own server somewhere.
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#296223 - 23/10/2007 12:58
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
Something tells me that if someone was actually using their site to serve the amount of data they give you with their plans, they wouldn't exactly allow it. Network backup is an obvious benefit of Dreamhost, and, at this point, the only one, now that my $10/year pricing has expired and I'm on the hook for $10/mo.
Why web hosting is a gamble
Quote:
We both offer crazy deals (5TB a month for $7.95 / just pull this lever and get $1,000,000!) that seemingly should put us out of business in an instant.. and yet, thanks again to that Law of Large Numbers we both are perfectly safe from that ever happening.
And yet, nobody gets their Internets all in a bunch, posting “Ha, The Venetian is such a scam… no way can they offer double your money just because the ball lands on BLACK!” all over the coolest industry’s forums.
Somehow, people can easily grok that not everybody wins in a casino; and yet they can’t seem to grasp that not everybody uses 5TB a month. Even though there are a lot more of the former than the latter, this fact seems to elude the general populace. And it kind of sucks for PR!
Quote:
It’s just serendipity, baby, that the biggest bandwidth and disk sucks on this wide world of webs are pretty much all copyrighted material and illegal porn. We also have a much easier time than casinos in spotting the offenders (we use “computers”) … which means we have the luxury of only cracking down on the illegals.
They don't expect you to use up your allocation and if you do, then you must be hosting porn, movies or music...
Edited by tman (23/10/2007 13:02)
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#296224 - 23/10/2007 14:33
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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The problem is that when someone does win by betting on black at the casino, they don't tell them that they are not allowed to collect their winnings.
Either you're allowed to use the space they've said you can or you can't. If you can't then they're lying to you. If they need to reduce that amount, that's understandable. But telling you a lie about how much you can use is not.
Edited by wfaulk (23/10/2007 14:34)
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#296225 - 24/10/2007 06:40
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Either you're allowed to use the space they've said you can or you can't. If you can't then they're lying to you.
To this point, I've not seen anything that shows they're lying. They're gambling that not everyone is going to use the full 5TB allocation, but they're not preventing them from using it.
If everyone does use it, then they're going to have to buy some more storage, and incur the costs associated with managing that. But, odds are that most people won't be using anything like that much.
They've said that when people do use more than expected, they can investigate, and it usually turns out that it is copyrighted content, and so they can (presumably) legally turf them out and get that space back.
Where this gets sticky is when you're using that space for backing up your PC, which seems fair enough. But, I guarantee that a whole bunch of your stuff could be considered copyrighted (MP3s, ripped DVDs, etc.). Can you prove that you're not using their space to share that with other people?
As an analogue in the real world, consider (unmetered) water supply. The water company guarantees to provide you with as much water as you want: just turn on the tap. However, if everyone turned on the tap at the same time, and left them on all day, we'd soon run out of fresh water...
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-- roger
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#296226 - 24/10/2007 08:00
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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The problem I have is that they changed the rules and they are trying to pretend they haven't. When I signed up all it said was the account was primarily for hosting websites, which is what I primaryily bought it for. Coincidentally it also served as a handy offsite backup location. Now they have changed the rules to have an explicit ban on backups and are claiming that they haven't changed the rules. I went through all this nonsense with broadband ISPs and their unlimited accounts. They would also start out with terms and conditions that really were unlimited and as soon as people actually started using the bandwidth they started changing the terms and conditions. Plusnet got to the point where they were changing them every couple of months, not telling the customers and still claiming that the contract between them and the customer hadn't changed 
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#296227 - 24/10/2007 09:10
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
I went through all this nonsense with broadband ISPs and their unlimited accounts. They would also start out with terms and conditions that really were unlimited and as soon as people actually started using the bandwidth they started changing the terms and conditions. Plusnet got to the point where they were changing them every couple of months, not telling the customers and still claiming that the contract between them and the customer hadn't changed
Orange have an "unlimited" 3G data plan which is actually limited to 30MB a month. I can easily rack up over 1MB a day just downloading emails and whatnot.
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#296229 - 24/10/2007 12:34
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Quote:
To this point, I've not seen anything that shows they're lying.
Okay, fair enough. They've just changed their contract so that things that used to be allowed now aren't. I understand their point of view, and I understand the concept of oversubscription, but they really should have taken this sort of thing into account to begin with.
Quote:
As an analogue in the real world, consider (unmetered) water supply.
Do Brits have unmetered water?
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#296230 - 24/10/2007 12:48
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
Quote:
As an analogue in the real world, consider (unmetered) water supply.
Do Brits have unmetered water?
Sort of. Newer houses tend to have metered water but older places will be unmetered. If you don't use much then it can be cheaper to convert from unmetered to metered but you can't change back later on if you don't like it.
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#296231 - 24/10/2007 12:56
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Do Brits have unmetered water?
As tman says, older houses tend to be unmetered, newer ones metered. We recently got our house converted to metered (it's cheaper that way), but it wasn't available for Jen's flat (not enough space around the water main inlet).
If you have unmetered water, you just pay a flat monthly/quarterly/yearly fee for fresh water. I think everyone pays a flat fee for sewerage.
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-- roger
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#296232 - 24/10/2007 17:18
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Well, after playing around with my nearlyfreespeech.net account, I've crossed them off the list. Their pricing model is fantastic, but the features just aren't there. They have significant restrictions on what you can do with the shell account, everything must run in PHP's "Safe mode" so things like Gallery are right out, and they state that the ssh account should only be used for things directly relate to the hosted sites, so it would seem rsync backup would be frowned upon and eventually lead to a nastygram.
It's a shame, because I really like their philosophy and business model. I just wish they had another higher pricing tier that gave you legitimate ssh access and less restricted PHP hosting.
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#296233 - 25/10/2007 11:53
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
Wow, that looks great. The prices for disk and bandwidth are unbelievable. I just hope they're sustainable as they grow.
I don't see how those prices are good at all. Maybe if you're just putting 100MB up there, sure, but if you use that service for storage, the prices get ridiculous. I'm using 30GB of my allotted 560GB on Dreamhost, and 30GB on that service would cost $350 per month, instead of the $380 I paid for two years.
Here's what I recall about Dreamhost: at one point they went a little crazy, and decided to offer double the storage and bandwidth they had been advertising, and they applied this to everyone who was already signed up in addition to new people. They quickly realized that they couldn't support this, and consequently went through a couple months of very poor service (which is, I believe, the period that most of the people here were complaining about). Since then, they cut back on what they were offering to new people, but they let the people they had upgraded (me, for example) keep the new plan. I went from ~220GB to ~440GB of storage. That was cool.
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Matt
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#296234 - 25/10/2007 15:30
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Yeah,.for some reason when I read the pricing I read megabyte-month as gigabyte-month. Obviously that's not sustainable. $0.01 per megabyte-month would not be good with the 12GB I currently have on my Dreamhost account.
Then again, if Dreamhost does crack down on backups as they say they're going to, I will have to find something else eventually.
I also think you're understating the case of how bad Dreamhost's service has been in the last year or so. I'd say the service went from below average to extremely sucky and back to below average in terms of web server load averages and availability. The storage and bandwidth can't be beat, assuming they let you use them all, but the servers are WAAAY overloaded and that's before you hit CPU throttling.
[tonyc@fig.dreamhost.com:~/tonyc.org]
uptime
10:29:20 up 3 days, 21:48, 6 users, load average: 54.77, 46.33, 31.39
Yowza! That's pretty typical, not just a spike.
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#296235 - 26/10/2007 13:05
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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How about an online service specifically geared towards backups, like Mozy, MediaMax, or Xdrive?
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Bitt Faulk
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#296236 - 26/10/2007 13:18
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Last time I looked all the dedicated backup services didn't have Linux clients and that is where most of my data is now. Sure I could probably mount the Linux drive over the network on a Window box, but it isn't ideal (and some of the dedicated backup services don't backup network drives).
The other issue is with the dedicated backup services that is all you can do, backup. With something like Dreamhost I can backup all my photos to there and then I can also serve the files over the web*.
At some point I need to get my own dedicated hosted server, I guess this Dreamhosts change will be another push towards it.
* doing this might make me escape the new Dreamhost terms, who knows ? I have 60GB of data on Dreamhosts, so I guess I'll be one of the first to find out how they actually police it.
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#296237 - 26/10/2007 16:49
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Linux: a good point. Anyone have any experience with JungleDisk? It uses Amazon's S3 service for 15˘ per GB-month (plus some other fees) and presents it as WebDAV, which Linux can mount via DAVfs.
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#296238 - 26/10/2007 16:56
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
Linux: a good point. Anyone have any experience with JungleDisk? It uses Amazon's S3 service for 15˘ per GB-month (plus some other fees) and presents it as WebDAV, which Linux can mount via DAVfs.
Maximum per file is 5GB according to Amazon.
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#296239 - 26/10/2007 17:06
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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And you have individual files over 5GB that you need to back up?
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Bitt Faulk
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#296240 - 26/10/2007 21:46
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
And you have individual files over 5GB that you need to back up?
I do, several. They are mostly VMWare/Virtual PC hard disks. I also have some databases bigger than 5GB (customer databases that I need for testing).
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#296241 - 26/10/2007 21:58
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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I've got a couple DVD images that are > 5GB like my friends wedding video.
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#296242 - 01/11/2007 20:16
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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So, has anyone found any Dreamhost alternatives? I'm...kind of in need of one now. Long story, but now they are my least favorite company on the planet. I'm in pretty immediate need of a new host.
Does anyone have experience with at least domain registration on GoDaddy? I at least need my domains transferred ASAP, so I can get some of my email addresses back up and running quickly.
*edit*
Scratch that request: I really like the looks of Bluehost. At the moment, it seems like I can get a little more than half the disk space that Dreamhost provided, which is still a large amount of space, but I get MUCH greater peace of mind. Their 24-hour free phone support has sold me on their company.
Edited by Dignan (01/11/2007 20:39)
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#296243 - 01/11/2007 20:40
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: tonyc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
From an online review I found of BlueHost:
Quote:
BlueHost doesn't allow SSH/Shell Access by default, but says it will enable shell access for your account if you fax a copy of your driver's license, passport, etc. to them.
Aieeee, no sale. Driver's license? Passport? You've got to be kidding. Why could they possibly need this? I don't suggest they're doing anything nefarious with it, but really, we're talking about getting ssh access, which is just another network service you can connect on and do the same things you can do otherwise.
The rest of their package sounds great, but something about sending a hosting company a copy of my driver's license rubs me the wrong way. Anyone have any other suggestions?
It looks like that review might have been a little out of date. From the looks of it, SSH is now available by default, at least according to their features list.
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#296244 - 01/11/2007 21:24
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Dignan]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 15/01/2002
Posts: 1866
Loc: Austin
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Could you perhaps make your short long story less short?
I'd like to know what they did, as I'm hosting stuff with them.
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#296245 - 02/11/2007 00:12
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: RobotCaleb]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
Could you perhaps make your short long story less short?
I'd like to know what they did, as I'm hosting stuff with them.
Well, as long as you don't lose your cool like I did, you'll be fine. I sent a few too many emails to their tech support and they banned me for spamming. It was stupid, but after five hours without a single response to my urgent request (with call-back request) regarding non-functioning email addresses that I'd used on four resumes I sent out this morning, I was not in the happiest of moods.
Toss into the middle of this a generalized response (to everyone having problems today) that discounted my original ticket but didn't solve it, and I was one pissed customer.
They have since gone back on their ban (after chastising me a bit), but I told them I've already moved on to a company that I can get in touch with. Bluehost has a 24 hour support line, complete with constant voice prompts indicating your place in the queue. I was in front of my computer for four hours straight today, just hoping for someone to respond to my basic query. If I had been with Bluehost, at the very least I would have known how long it would be before they responded to me. With Dreamhost it seemed that my request was off in a void somewhere, and it was up to their whims as to whether they'd respond.
Like I said, I think I'm getting half the storage space for the money, but the rest is going to peace of mind.
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#306835 - 04/02/2008 04:09
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Just a quick update, Bluehost recently upgraded their accounts in a similar manner to Dreamhost. They now offer 1.5TB of disk space and 15TB/month for bandwidth. I've been very happy with them, my sites are served faster, and I really like the 24 hour in-country phone support.
Edited by Dignan (04/02/2008 04:10)
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#307056 - 08/02/2008 18:25
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/10/2000
Posts: 4931
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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Yahoo Web Hosting has an "unlimited" plan for $12 per month now. I'm sure there are some limits to what you can do, and they're probably not very friendly if you use it as massive file server. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/hosting3.php
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80GB 16MB MK2 090000736
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#307057 - 08/02/2008 18:36
Re: Web hosting redux...
[Re: robricc]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Looks good, but there's one problem: you can only use one domain name. It's not clear on the site, but I called them up to confirm. That eliminates it as a possibility for me. I have about six domains hosted on my site right now, with four or five more in the future. Plus it's almost twice as expensive as my host.
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