We were just asked to pay some money for web hosting. 200 USD. Without giving too many unnecessary details, I know that someone else who previously helped us paid about 35 USD for a much larger domain or whatever it’s called. (I know nothing about this stuff)
Our host tells us that the high price is because our information is more safely protected. He tells us that cheaper providers do not have the same level of security and that the information saved on the website would not be as safe. I don’t mean to double-guess him so much, but it just struck me as being a lot of money for a small chunk of web space.
This brings me to three questions:
1-Are we asked for too much money? (200 USD)
2-Why are prices different for the same thing? It’s not like something tangible, it’s just web space.
3-Can anyone out there safely host our website for cheaper?
You have this little “donate” option, where people can use CC to pay, that’s probably why, I’d say it’s still expensive.
it depends what kind of feature you need on your website, and as far as I can tell, your site is pretty much straigthforward. I guess you are being asked to pay more because of your 'Donation" feature. But this, you should have known when you signed up.
I’d be interested to know who you are hosted with. That cost does sound very excessive. A simply website like yours I would not expect to pay more than USD5 per month for hosting.
Sounds really expensive.
How much bandwidth do you use and how much data is sent/recieved per month?
As that’s generally what you’re charged for and a little bit for the space on the server itself.
I’m paying about US$60 a year for my hosting including the domain name costs and registration.
Although that is a Danish company, but there got to be deals like that around elsewhere…
hehe… you could host with godaddy.com their basic package is $3.60 a month with more than enough features, and as a bonus you could purchase via groupdonate and earn 20% comission for ATK in the process.
Don’t use godaddy, there are endless horror stories about them and I’ve had several bad experiences personally.
200USD for how long? A month? That does seem wildly expensive.
That goes through paypal, shouldn’t cost anything on the hosting side.
Personally I’m a big fan of Tummy, to whom I pay US$25/mo for a little virtual dedicated server. It’s relatively expensive, but the support is fantastic.
The biggest difference will be in customer service. Will you be getting emails from guys in India (no offense guys in India) or from hardcore Linux geeks when you have trouble.
If something crazy happens (crazy things do happen) how helpful are they going to be with getting your site back online. Will they keep good back-ups of you site (daily/weekly/monthly) and be able to bring them back online quickly when said craziness happens.
I can. …
Wait a second, not I can’t. I just noticed your site is running ASP (some microsoft stuff.) I’m pretty sure you need Windows based hosting for that.
Still the above price is too much. You can get decent plans starting at around 8USD/month.
They have plans cheaper than that, but if you do your homework, you’ll usually find out that the cheaper will end up cost you more in the long run (in the form of headaches and lost time.)
I’ve heard good things about lunarpages.com/ maybe check them out. Also note that Windows based hosting costs more than Linux based hosting.
I have used bunjara.com, w/o a problem. It is about $10 a month or $120 a year for a shared server account. This is a just an example. Many hosting plans from different companies also allow multiple domains. So you can host many domains with one plan.
It all depends on features, service, and support you need and get. If you are getting a lot of traffic, then you will definitely need a robust and dedicated server. It is not hard to pick a good hosting company. For me, a user forum (uncensored) forum is a must. It is the best way to find how good the service is by the complaints and resolution on the forum.
Wait a second, not I can’t. I just noticed your site is running ASP (some microsoft stuff.) I’m pretty sure you need Windows based hosting for that.
[/quote]
ASP? Oh well… if all you need is reliable, safe web hosting (+ some IMAP or POP3 mail boxes), I could host it for free* on a windows web hosting account. You’d only have to be able to change the nameservers for atkaohsiung.org to point to my webspace (and mailserver). You could have you own (S)FTP access and even an MSSQL database. But I can’t answer any questions about ASP (a lengthy FAQ in English is provided by the web host, though) because I forgot everything I knew about it and never want to learn it again. The account is still there for “legacy reasons”.
Let me know if you’re interested.
*A link to my company’s website would be required (“free hosting by…”, “supported by…” or something like this) because a) people are too suspicious if I don’t ask for anything in return and b) my web host doesn’t want people to resell their webspace.
I’d be interested in what these bad experiences were. I have 1 domain hosted with them, and it’s been pretty trouble free so far, and I am thinking about switching another one to godaddy.
I spent the last half hour reading hosting forums and I am not convinced godaddy is that bad. Most of the issues seem to be people who don’t read the terms properly and get disappointed when they choose the wrong plan, or exceed the agreed bandwidth.
Thanks for the responses everyone, I haven’t replied yet because we are still juggling our options and learning about this.
hypermegaglobal,
OF COURSE we are interested. Let me start another thread first and find out some info, and I’ll let you know as soon as I know. Two questions for you for the time being:
Can you host Linux as well? And would we be able to have email addresses through you? We need about five, but we could do with three email addresses. You know, addresses like “chris@atkaohsiung.org”
A “free hosting by…” link would be no problem, and we’d be glad to add something to our list of sponsors, too, if you wanted.
Thanks for the generous offer. As I said, I will start a thread first and get back to you ASAP.
[quote=“bobepine”]Thanks for the responses everyone, I haven’t replied yet because we are still juggling our options and learning about this.
hypermegaglobal,
OF COURSE we are interested. Let me start another thread first and find out some info, and I’ll let you know as soon as I know. Two questions for you for the time being:
Can you host Linux as well?[/quote]
Yes, that would even be better because I could help in case of technical or configuration problems.
No problem, you can have way more than five (each 1GB big).
A quick whois on your site reveals its being hosted in Vietnam if I remember correctly? Anyway nothing wrong with that but $200 a year is a little high. I have all my domain names with godaddy and hosting with them and hosting with another company. So far Ive had no problems at all with godaddy hosting and its the cheapest/basic package.
I’d be interested in what these bad experiences were. I have 1 domain hosted with them, and it’s been pretty trouble free so far, and I am thinking about switching another one to godaddy.
I spent the last half hour reading hosting forums and I am not convinced godaddy is that bad. Most of the issues seem to be people who don’t read the terms properly and get disappointed when they choose the wrong plan, or exceed the agreed bandwidth.[/quote]
We used GoDaddy to host the Hess website for a while. We were calling them about twice a week. Highlights include:
Updating MySQL to 4.1.7 without telling us. In the transition from the old version to the new one, MySQL gained character set support and started strictly enforcing it on all tables. As a result, our entire database of thousands of web pages, all in Chinese, was completely destroyed. They didn’t take any backups or help us out with migrating back to the previous version. We had to go back to our own backups and then go through an incredibly tedious process to get them (mostly) working with the new version. It took us (me) three days. That works out to about 300,000 visitors who saw a broken website. That’s a lot of money.
Bringing our server down for maintenance, without warning, on a day we had paid about a hundred grand for a front-page yahoo.com banner.
Consistently promising and then failing to reply to emails, requiring us to call them and, every time, work our way through a chain of totally useless “support” people by shouting abuse at them until we were passed up to their superiors.
Messing up our billing pretty much every month.
Tinkering with our Apache configuration, which I had spent days getting right, and breaking it.
Misconfiguring our mail server (which I had previously correctly configured) so that we ended up as an open relay and were blacklisted for a while
Installing a variety of entertaining software onto our server, without telling us, that did things such as:
Break all our Python CGI scripts by preventing them from running
Cause our Tomcat server to spawn ten processes for every request, bombing it out in about ten seconds. Every ten seconds
Delete all our log files
Break our database drivers and thereby trash the database (again).
I fully recommend these guys. I have been with them for two years+ now and I am well happy with thier service. I have only had about half an hour’s down time in all that time, and they get their fixes in very quickly after a report. I was hacked once, but that was my fault for having a simple password and nothing to do with the server, and when I looked back and read the bumph, they did warn me at the beginning.
…
The account is still there for “legacy reasons”.