Forum Moderators: phranque
My main site gets 250,000 to 300,000 visitors a month. Bandwidth ranges from 30 to 60 GB's a month, although traffic to the site is growing constantly. Disc storage is probably a few GB's, although I don't see that amount locally for the site's files. I use a SQL Server database on the site. I also use ASPJpeg and ASPUpload, for which I have licenses.
The owner of the site asked me a couple of years ago to do SEO work on his hosting sites. He's now saying that the value of the service he's giving me is worth $400 or more a month, and he wants $400 worth of SEO services (although he balks at my suggested rate of $50 an hour).
He tells me that he's had to put my site on a server that's almost dedicated, with only a couple of small sites on it, because my site sucks up so much bandwidth and CPU.
He's now dropped the new site in my lap, with 100's of pages to optimize in just a few weeks.
This hosting company offers plans with 2500 GB's of bandwidth for far less than $400 a month.
I need a reliable company with good uptime, tech support, etc. But I just get the feeling that I'm being abused.
I'd go to another company, but I don't know who to trust.
Am I being abused, or is what I'm getting worth $400 a month in my services?
For $20/mo - all the above from old, trusted, reliable hosting company with cellar full of batteries ready to run for months if power fails...
Do your own research, this is extremely important decision you are going to make. Test a few websites served by host in question for performance (hint - look for them in local forum signatures). Sniff their forums for any signs of poor customer support. Consider buying IP for each of your sites ($1/mo).
This is just what comes to mind immediately, by no means everything you should look into. There are lots of good advice, just search using your favorite engine, trust generic advice and don't trust advice targeted at particular host. The decision is yours.
R
I would not go with a "budget" host that offers huge amount of disk/bandwidth allowances unless reliability is not an issue.
I will say with your requirements you can find an excellent host for a lot less.
Nowadays for $10/mo you can get something like 50GB storage, 50GB/day transfer, MySQL, php, FTP, log files, ~5 extra domains and all the basics mostly everywhere.
The owner of the site asked me a couple of years ago to do SEO work on his hosting sites. He's now saying that the value of the service he's giving me is worth $400 or more a month, and he wants $400 worth of SEO services (although he balks at my suggested rate of $50 an hour).
Are you actually paying for your hosting, or is it a closed pocket agreement where your hoster provides a machine and bandwidth and you provide SEO help? According to your wording, I suggest the latter. In that case it is difficult to say who is right here and if the $400 or 8 hours work according to the rate you mentioned is fair. There may have been periods in the past where your hoster provided substantially more hosting capacity than you provided in services and we cannot decide on that.
It would be better in the long run if both services are separated and a neutral, countable valueing system is used for both the hosting service and your SEO services you provide. The easiest neutral valueing system I know is called money, ;) i.e. you pay an agreed amount per month for the hosting and he pays an agreed amount per hour or per task for your SEO services.
That said, for $400 you can get reasonably powerfull managed dedicated servers with Microsoft SQL server setup, and for an unmanaged dedicated server you would probably pay less.
I'm paying a lot more for a lot less bandwidth and disc space offered by those plans but I don't have to worry about my site getting shut down because 50 people came online at once.
You may be like me, in the middle. VPS is a little more than you want to take on and they don't offer anything that will fit what you need in a regualar hosting package. I'd made the switch to mananged VPS a few months back and glad I did. It's like going from AOL dial-up to broadband cable. :)
Nowadays for $10/mo you can get something like 50GB storage, 50GB/day transfer, MySQL, php, FTP, log files, ~5 extra domains and all the basics mostly everywhere.
While this type of hosting may be fine for a hobbyist or for personal sites, you'd be rather foolish to put a mission critical business site on any shared server. As far as 50G a day, that's an oversell, if any company where actually giving 50G per day for $10 a month they'd be out of business rather quickly.
Best thing to do is shop around, might take while but there are some gems out there. What you need to find is large enough company that they can compete with the big boys yet small enough to give you good service at reasonable price.
Something like 500GB a month for $20. That's no lie and its not oversold as far as I can tell because they are very transparent with issues, I don't see a pattern of complaints in the forum to suggest otherwise.
There is no way a host of any size can provide 500GB whether it be bandwidth or disk space for $20 a month...sorry, please check out bandwidth cost with tier one providers or the cost of power and other hardware. Any host that offers these packages will boot you if you use a % even coming close to 25% of what they offer. Of course they won't say they are booting you for those reasons, mostly will state CPU usage etc.
See your sticky.
The company you sent me has more than their share of problems. In a recent outage ( a couple days ago) they blamed it on one of their bandwidth providers. By reading the thread I sent you they then restored accounts from old or corrupted backups on several accounts. Why does a host restore backups if it was a bandwidth provider issue? Quite simply they do not. So they were not telling the truth about the outage....period. That alone would make me look elsewhere.
I will repeat what I always say: why would you sign up for hosting with a company for a plan in which you know they cannot deliver upon as far as bandwidth/disk space? You have no idea on what they will actually deliver before booting you, but you do know they won't deliver what you signed up for...
I prefer to purchase hosting and buy what I actually need and know that I can use every bit of those resources in an environment at a top-notch datacenter using top-notch hardware and uses premium bandwidth providers. As far as backups and restores (although you should always keep your own), there are so many hosts that state daily backups, but I know clients that couldn't get backups newer than a month old on countless occasions from the overselling crowd of hosters. Yet I know other hosts that deliver what they offer and have multiple restore points on a daily basis for all http, database, and mail settings/messages. No, they do not promise a Cadillac at the price of a Ford Focus, but you will get exactly what you are paying for.
As far as backups go they don't guarantee them unless you pay for the premium service, I'll think you'll find similar language in most agreements. In any case relying on someone for backups isn't the most intelligent thing in the world to do even if you're paying for it.
Actually if you dig a little deeper you'll find it was power outage at a datacenter that caused the network outage.
If it was a power outage, that still doesn't answer why they were doing restores to accounts with old or corrupted data :)
If your power goes out at home does it cause you to lose all your data on your hard-drives? Again, they are stating things that didn't make sense when they said them, and still don't.
As far as backups, "good" hosts will do this automatically and it is built into their service/costs and are not an extra cost...
Like I say, to each their own, but I am more than willing to pay for quality instead of quantity I would not, and could not ever use. Hosting is cheap anyways all things considered ...even at a premium host.
To tell you the truth the reason I went with this company is because of their reputation for good service, price really wasn't a concern. For the record I'm not on that particular plan but a more expensive VPS plan that has far less bandwidth and storage space than that. ;)
I only mentioned it above because it seems like quite a deal and every review I've seen mostly form the users seems to support that.
