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What is a web host? A web host is a service that gets your website onto the Internet. It can be done in quite a few ways, which we'll discuss. Typically you will pay a monthly or yearly fee in order to use their bandwidth, servers, and other features such as domain name registration. What types of hosts are there?
What is a reseller account? A reseller account allows you to sell a web hosts services and make commissions off your customers, usually by an affiliate-type system. Your customers will use the web hosts machines and bandwidth, and even control panel, branded with your company logo. How much bandwidth/disk space/memory do I need? Good question. Don't buy enough, and your site will slow to a crawl, or even taken offline by your host. Buy too much, and you're wasting money you could be buying baconators with. Many hosting packages will include tools for monitoring how much usage your account is incurring. Be careful, as many hosts will not allow you to switch plans and keep your data, may be responsible for transferring your site and its data from your current plan to your new one. Can't I just host my website on my home or work computer? You could, but you wouldn't want to run a restaurant out of your kitchen would you? Many home internet connections block ports that you typically use to host a server, not to mention it is also against most ISP's terms of service to run a server on a home connection. You also probably don't have hours of backup battery power, a generator, and 3 different fiber-optic internet connections going into your house. Hosting on your PC also means your website isn't accessible when you reboot and you don't have to worry about a hacker jumping from your website to your personal files. And at work, your IT department will crucify if you if they find you running a web site form your work computer. But my ISP gives me free hosting! Some of them still do. The amount of space is usually very small, and you may not get access to things such as databases or shell accounts. If you just want a place to store some pictures or meeting minutes from your Star Trek club, the space your ISP gives you should be fine. What does 1U, 2U, 4U, full-cabinet, half-rack mean? Here's a "42U cabinet":  A 'U' is a rack unit. That's the smallest individual unit of space in a cabinet. 1U, 2U, 4U all mean one unit, two unit, four unit, etc. Typically the smallest server is 1U, as are many network devices such as switches, routers, or appliances for spam filters or firewalls. Here's a typical 1U server:  As you can see, it's basically all the components of a server (motherboard, memory, hard drives, etc) packed into a compact size. As you may have guessed, you can cram 42 of these things into one cabinet. If you rent 4U of space from a host, you could put 4 1U servers in there, or 2 2U servers, or one giant 4U server. Or you could put a single 2U server, a 1U firewall, and then a 1U spam filter in your space. You can rent a whole cabinet if you want. 48U is also a common size, and you can do things like rent half of a cabinet. How much do they cost? Web hosting can run from anywhere from a few dollars a month for a shared host, or hundreds or even thousand dollars a month for dedicated hosting. What is a shell account? A shell account is usually a very low cost account where you can access a UNIX/Linux server via the command line. They are very useful for testing, IRC, and sometimes have limited space for files and websites. Many web hosts have 'shell access', where you can access your account using SSH. I want to host porn, IRC bots, or things that may not be legal in my country Check with your provider. Adult material can be very bandwidth intensive or go against the morals/beliefs of a provider. IRC often attracts attacks from other users and is prohibited by most providers. And if the legality of your content is questioned by your home country, you may wish to find a web host in another country whose views and opinions more closely match yours. Do I want Unix or Windows hosting? For most websites it doesn't matter what the underlying server is. If the software package you want to run only works on Windows or Linux, then the choice has been made for you. What is overselling? Overselling is the business model that shared hosts use to make money. It might sound bad at first, but it's not anything to worry about. Basically they promise you a huge amount (or infinite amount) of disk space and data transfer for an unbelievably low price. 500GB for $5.95?! A 500GB server hard drive costs $200, how do they buy one for every customer?! It's not magic. If you have 500 people signed up for shared hosting, 450 of them might only use 1GB of space. 50 of the remaining people might use 10GB, and there's that last 50 people who are going to use up 100GB because they're pigs. So it all works out in the end. It's kind of like the gym, where for $20 a month you can use the exercise equipment. They might have 500 members at the gym, but only 10 treadmills. Since all 500 people don't go to the gym everyday, or all day, they don't need 500 treadmills. However, like the gym, a web host can be 'oversold'. If you have too many people using too many resources on a server (or at the gym), you're going to want to find a new gym. You'll either be standing in line to use the treadmill, or your users will be standing in line while they wait for your website. What features should I get? Depends on what features you need. Why do I need a domain name? If you don't have a domain name, you'll have you access your site and servers through strange letter number combinations such as web34599291.megahost.com. So either buy your own domain name (they're cheap) or set up a dynamic domain name through a place such as DynDns. What is this data center thing I keep hearing about? A data center is a building which contains hundreds or thousands of servers. Typically it will have multiple high-speed internet connections from different providers, massive cooling system, generators for backup power, high building security (you don't want people going in and pulling pranks like unplugging your server).    Goon-Run Hosts https://www.lithiumhosting.com https://www.apisnetworks.com http://www.singlehop.com/ http://www.hostdime.com/ http://www.angryhosting.com/ betaForce Shared hosts - these are all generally terrible. Good luck! Dreamhost Host Gator 1&1 https://www.justhost.com https://www.bluehost.com https://www.inmotion.com https://www.powweb.com https://www.hostmonster.com Virtual Private Hosting AKA THE CLOUD http://www.rackspace.com/cloud https://www.linode.com https://www.asmallorange.com https://www.prgmr.com https://www.vultr.com/ http://ramnode.com/ https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/ https://www.digitalocean.com http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ Dedicated hosts https://www.rackspace.com https://www.serverbeach.com https://www.theplanet.com https://www.verio.com Free Hosts https://www.0catch.com https://www.yourfreehosting.net https://www.250free.com https://www.007sites.com Control Panels https://www.cpanel.com https://www.webmin.com https://www.parallels.com/plesk/ https://www.directadmin.com Forums for discussing hosts https://www.webhostingtalk.comra Bob Morales fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2010 15:10
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Anything after hostgator under 'shared' is the same company IIRC (Endurance IG) and suck very very badly. edit: also, contribution quote, my post from another thread: "There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or disk space, it's essentially a lie. As soon as you start using any you're kicked off. Also, in addition, all of the major "unlimited" hosts show you prices with default range set to 2year+ prepay (some up to 10 year prepay) - when you pay monthly there's typically a huge setup fee plus it costs nearly double or triple the price you were shown." may not apply for some places, but they will ALL cover their asses with ToS and figure out a way to toss you out if you don't conform to a 'normal user'
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Apr 7, 2010 03:43
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Elected by Dogs posted:edit: also, contribution quote, my post from another thread: "There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or disk space, it's essentially a lie. As soon as you start using any you're kicked off. Also, in addition, all of the major "unlimited" hosts show you prices with default range set to 2year+ prepay (some up to 10 year prepay) - when you pay monthly there's typically a huge setup fee plus it costs nearly double or triple the price you were shown." I've seen people run video hosting on HostGator account (which have "unlimited" bandwidth) for the Let's Play subforum, and as far as I know, they didn't have any problems. Well, to a certain limit, I suppose, but basically, for all reasonable intents and purposes it worked fine. An example of this is GrimFiend, which has hosted quite a few LPs, and is run by Static_Fiend on a HostGator account. I'm fairly sure that site has pulled quite a bit of bandwidth without any problems, though it's probably better to ask him.
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Apr 7, 2010 16:59
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Apis Networks definitely deserve a mention in the OP. They're goon run, and provide an excellent service. Their hosting is cheap, fast, and customer support is fantastic. By far the best host I've ever used, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. FYI, they have a thread in SA Mart with deals for SA members. http://apisnetworks.com/
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Apr 7, 2010 17:28
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It would be nice to have a list of all the goon-run hosts. I had to do the digging myself when a friend wanted a hosting recommendation.
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Apr 7, 2010 17:53
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While I disagree that all shared hosts oversell (I don't), I would agree that there are a bunch of them out there that do have that as their business model. Anything 'unlimited' is bogus. Everything has limits, and those limits are sometimes easily reached. In fact, it was that exact reasoning why I was kicked out of Dreamhost in 1999 or so for my personal site (too many MySQL "conqueries") and why I created my own company. If anyone wants to 'ask a webhost' why we do what we do, fire away. I've ran the gamut of services from dedicated servers to full cabinet colocation, and am currently deploying individual colocated servers across the US. I'm not sure where this thread wants to go, but I'm glad to see it. Edit: some evidence that not all shared hosts are evil.. If all users used up 100% of their allocated storage, they would be able to use 2.45TB. They are currently using 1.2TB. I have around 5TB of storage between my servers (hardware RAID6 250GB or 320GB SATA, 8 drives per chassis). Similar story with transfer: they could use up to 24.77TB of bandwidth. They used only 3.6TB last month. I have 30TB available. I run out of CPU /way/ before disk and transfer is reached. I run 8 drive RAID6 to keep up with IO demands. I would love to use SAS but too much cost per GB. My current servers are dual socket Opteron, six-core 2425HEs in my newest deployment, 16GB RAM on each. optikalus fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 8, 2010 |
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Apr 8, 2010 01:42
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optikalus: which host are you? I'd like someone to talk about colocation costs... is 1 amp enough for a basic 1U server with two hard drives? 95% billing scares me - if I exceed my allotted bandwidth for just enough time I could be on the hook for huge overage charges, right? I'd rather have a set amount of transfer per month or a set maximum bandwidth (say 2mbps) and not even be ABLE to exceed it. Is that possible?
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Apr 8, 2010 04:51
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DNova posted:optikalus: which host are you? AngryHosting It all boils down to the CPU(s) and power supply efficiency. If it is a single CPU box with a fairly efficient PSU, 1A should be more than enough. If it is one of those old Paxville Xeons (165w TDP), good luck. Yes, 95th percentile billing can be scary, especially if you're on a low commit with a high data rate port (ie. 10mbit on a 1gbit). You'll probably never see that, though. You're not going to be able to set the port less than 10mbit. 95th percentile over a 30 day span only allows 1.5 days over the commit. For a 2mbit commit on a 10mbit circuit, you could use up all your bandwidth in 6 days (618GB), but you'd be billed for 10mbit. For lower bandwidth commitments, I would recommend standard usage metering or fixed commitments (ie. 10mbit on a 10mbit port) instead of 95th percentile.
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Apr 8, 2010 06:53
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It's worth mentioning that a good amount of smaller-sized shared hosts use cPanel/WHM which is an utter piece of poo poo designed to make web hosting nice and easy. People with no server admin experience press buttons on a web interface that setup customer accounts, rebuild server software, etc. This cPanel interface is also presented to the customer with nice shiny skins and "one click install random out of date forum/blog script" buttons. You may find your site has a lot of reliability problems on a cPanel server since the crudely written Perl scripts often fail and require manual intervention. Since the owners likely have little server experience, you will often find many cPanel servers are compromised through insecure scripts on their customers accounts, leaving your site open to data theft, defacement, etc. cPanel itself is also full of security holes, the majority of the code runs as root so.. yeah. After having my site on a cPanel server for a short time I can only advise you to stay the hell away from them.
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Apr 8, 2010 07:20
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Elected by Dogs posted:edit: also, contribution quote, my post from another thread: "There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or disk space, it's essentially a lie. As soon as you start using any you're kicked off. Also, in addition, all of the major "unlimited" hosts show you prices with default range set to 2year+ prepay (some up to 10 year prepay) - when you pay monthly there's typically a huge setup fee plus it costs nearly double or triple the price you were shown." I store about 400GB of backups on Dreamhost that I haven't heard anything about. That's an anecdotal example, and I don't rely on it, I just don't really use the account anymore. Home servers are a better solution then most people give credit, some ISPs (like Cablevision) offer cheap home plans that explicitly permit HTTP/mail servers. Mail can be hosted offsite for free with Google Apps, and Afraid.org offers a great free DDNS service as do other sites. For Windows there are prebuilt LAMP packages like XAMPP, and Ubuntu server is dead simple, the only annoying bit is implementing vhosts, but PHP/mysql come out of the box, none of that is terribly hard to set up even from the shell. As an added bonus you get a home NAS, bittorrent seedbox, it's still not really practical but a fun, potentially erotic experience, assuming that's your thing. NOTinuyasha fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Apr 8, 2010 |
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Apr 8, 2010 09:06
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Elected by Dogs posted:edit: also, contribution quote, my post from another thread: "There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth or disk space, it's essentially a lie. As soon as you start using any you're kicked off. Also, in addition, all of the major "unlimited" hosts show you prices with default range set to 2year+ prepay (some up to 10 year prepay) - when you pay monthly there's typically a huge setup fee plus it costs nearly double or triple the price you were shown." they're just rare and almost certainly have other problems (massive overselling, weird software, unreliable networks) that may make it not worth it
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Apr 8, 2010 10:21
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If you're looking for a good Windows host, I would recommend https://www.arvixe.com . They allow you to pay $5 a month extra to use the IIS manager, but their regular panel is pretty good as well.
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Apr 8, 2010 11:30
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I've been with DreamHost for over five years, and I'm hosting over 50 domains and subdomains for over 15 different users (some which pay me!). Currently I'm using 286 GB of storage and pushing 4.5 TB of bandwidth per month. Never had much trouble, and their live chat service usually fix my problems within minutes. I recommend them, it's basically unlimited storage and bandwidth. You can use the promo code KEEPYOURCASH to get $50 off signup where you choose to pay monthly, or $97 if you choose to pay yearly. Chiipai fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 11, 2010 |
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Apr 8, 2010 12:47
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If for some strange reason your app runs on a Mac, you can co-lo a Mac Mini http://www.macminicolo.net/  Apparently they work almost as good as Xserves and cost far, far less. One time I had a stupid idea to use an army of laptops for hosting.
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Apr 8, 2010 13:37
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So I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't toot the horn for Ultra Serve. There a shared hosting company in australia based out of global switch. They have also just released a cloud product called Rejila. P.M me if you have any inquiries about them (and no im not in sales, just support)
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Apr 8, 2010 15:03
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Your cabs are all 48u? Bizarre, they're pretty much all 42u over in Europe.
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Apr 8, 2010 15:15
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I work at http://www.choopa.com We do mostly managed servers, and mostly adult sites. A lot of porno tube streaming video applications, and that kind of thing. We don't do CPanel virtual accounts anymore, but if you want to run your own CPanel server we sell it as an add-on. We also run http://unmeteredservers.com for unmanaged customers who want a capped speed port and not worry about how 95th percentile or transfer per month. I don't suspect a lot of people here to be that interested as we aren't a goon priced type of place that sells hosting for $10/month.
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Apr 8, 2010 16:29
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JHVH-1 posted:I work at http://www.choopa.com Do you guys run the choopa.net EFnet server too?
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Apr 8, 2010 17:10
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Onken posted:Your cabs are all 48u? Bizarre, they're pretty much all 42u over in Europe. Most of the ones I've seen are 42 in the states iirc R1CH posted:cpanel Too bad it's practically the industry standard for normal shared hosting now. cPanel sucks and I can't even add DNS entries to it. DirectAdmin lets you add anything from AAAA to PTR to SRV 
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Apr 8, 2010 18:05
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Bob Morales posted:Do you guys run the choopa.net EFnet server too? Yep. The last I remember it runs off its own fiber so its not part of our normal network. Our president and one of the network admins have run it for a long time. I believe they have a canadian server out of our montreal location as well.
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Apr 8, 2010 18:08
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JHVH-1 posted:I work at http://www.choopa.com unmeteredservers.com pricing actually seems pretty good, but I wish they had colocation as an option. I'd rather provide my own hardware.
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Apr 8, 2010 20:04
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DNova posted:unmeteredservers.com pricing actually seems pretty good, but I wish they had colocation as an option. I'd rather provide my own hardware. Where would you like to house your gear? I know most of the cheaper colos in the US that do single-server colocation. Also, what's your budget?
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Apr 8, 2010 20:15
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optikalus posted:Where would you like to house your gear? I know most of the cheaper colos in the US that do single-server colocation. Also, what's your budget? As close to Buffalo, NY as possible, ideally. Budget is low, $50-80/mo, depending on where it is and what I'm getting.
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Apr 8, 2010 20:51
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DNova posted:As close to Buffalo, NY as possible, ideally. Budget is low, $50-80/mo, depending on where it is and what I'm getting. I can't vouch for them, but turnkeyinternet.net has a special (for WHT) for $60/mo in NY with 2TB transfer up to 2U: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=939765 Natcoweb is in a SAS70 facility in Jersey and they seemed like good guys; eager to make a sale. $65/mo for 1U w/ 1A, 10mbit on 100mbit port. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=939455 I can vouch for Ubiquityservers, but only their LA facility (I must have got them at a bad time because it took a week for them to unbox and rack my server -- should have just driven it up myself). Their network is quite good, so far very happy with them. WHT has been *the* place to find good deals on single-server colocation.
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Apr 8, 2010 22:32
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optikalus posted:WHT has been *the* place to find good deals on single-server colocation. They do look like a great resource for this, thanks for looking for me!
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Apr 9, 2010 03:56
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What's this 95% percentile stuff you guys are talking about? Also, what's the point of selling a 10 mbit connection on a 100 mbit link? I don't know anything about hosting.
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Apr 9, 2010 06:30
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FISHMANPET posted:What's this 95% percentile stuff you guys are talking about? Also, what's the point of selling a 10 mbit connection on a 100 mbit link? I don't know anything about hosting. 95th is used colo/buying bw typically, per-GB is used everything else 10Mbps 95th on 100Mb link would mean you can continuously push 10Mbps (3300GBish 24/7 per month) but can burst up to 100Mbps for up to 36 hours (I think) without affecting your average. You can burst at any time, but after 36 hours your average will go past 10Mbps and you are responsible for paying per mbps (and overages cost more than prepaying, occasionally by massive amounts) Basically, steady traffic good is good Your port utilisation is checked every x amount of time, all of the samples are averaged together, and the top 5% thrown out, you're charged based on 95% avg if it's still confusing, think of it as "bandwidth allocation" on "port speed", like "x GB on a 100Mbps port" Elected by Dogs fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Apr 9, 2010 |
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Apr 9, 2010 06:35
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FISHMANPET posted:What's this 95% percentile stuff you guys are talking about? Also, what's the point of selling a 10 mbit connection on a 100 mbit link? I don't know anything about hosting. Basically every X number of minutes (normally 5) they check to see how much bandwidth your using. They save all this data, then at the end of the month they basically throw away the top 5% of your bandwith check numbers. (which as Elected by Dogs says, is about 36 hours worth of data a month). This let's you pay a lower rate for your "normal" traffic of say 10mbit, but when you get a big influx of users from an article appearing on slashdot or something, you have the capability to go all the way up to 100mbit (but if you go above 10mbit for more then ~36 hours in that month, they'll charge you extra).
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Apr 9, 2010 06:43
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Is running a Zimbra server through Amazon EC2 any better from a privacy/security standpoint than using Google Apps?
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Apr 9, 2010 14:48
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If one wanted Subversion with lots of storage, is Dreamhost the only low-cost solution? Edit: Never mind, I forgot I had a 130 GB CentOS server to install Subversion on.  Now I shall attempt some sort of SSL certificate... Captain Pike fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Apr 16, 2010 |
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Apr 10, 2010 06:34
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Another thing to consider if you're new to webhosting - try find a relatively local company. I used to host in the US because it was cheaper than here in the UK, and most of my traffic comes from this country. I switched over to a VPS in BlueSquare, London and the decreased routing definitely helps. It's also useful to host with a company that is in the same timezone as you. WHT is the poo poo, you can get some great bargains in their forum that won't be advertised on vendors sites.
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Apr 10, 2010 15:07
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I'm looking for people to share a dedicated server in the Netherlands with. Split 8 ways, you'd get a VPS with 512mb ram, gigabit uplink, and a tonne of traffic for about €13/mo. This works out (significantly) cheaper than linode, slicehost, prgmr and bitfolk. Check out the thread about it in YOSPOS if you're interested!
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Apr 11, 2010 21:31
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Rufo posted:I'm looking for people to share a dedicated server in the Netherlands with. Split 8 ways, you'd get a VPS with 512mb ram, gigabit uplink, and a tonne of traffic for about €13/mo. That is a great way to share the costs, but just make sure you leave some RAM for the dom0 and adjust the cron.daily entries so that all the domUs don't try to logrotate at the exact same time. This will *destroy* your single SATA drive and basically make the server unusable at 4AM.
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Apr 11, 2010 22:29
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optikalus posted:That is a great way to share the costs, but just make sure you leave some RAM for the dom0 and adjust the cron.daily entries so that all the domUs don't try to logrotate at the exact same time. This will *destroy* your single SATA drive and basically make the server unusable at 4AM. Thanks for the advice 
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Apr 11, 2010 22:48
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This is more server-related, but is anyone out there packing 1U/2U servers with GPU's? What are your options and how many can you stick in there? Do you end up exceeding any kind of heat or power limitations a typical host would complain about?
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Apr 12, 2010 19:59
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You know what host sucks poo poo? Santrex! Santrex incident update posted:Hello,
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Apr 14, 2010 07:49
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JHVH-1 posted:I work at http://www.choopa.com I gotta vouch for unmeteredservers and choopa. I have a few servers with unmeteredservers and some other web stuff on a choopa box. Not only are they cheap but the support is awesome too. I had a datacenter tech fix a stupid user-created issue on one of my machines free and within 30 minutes.
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Apr 14, 2010 10:05
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I've been with a dedicated host called Honelive for about 4-5 months now on one of their Atom dedicated servers after I found that the connection on my Linode 360 was kind of flaky and was causing my Skulltag servers to stutter. I pay around $49 a month due to a special they were running on webhostingtalk, and sometimes they can go as low as $39 a month depending on if you catch them at a good time. I've gotta say that I've been impressed so far. Connection quality for my players was much improved over Linode, and it's nice not to be sweating about a 360 megabyte memory limit. They're very quick to respond to tickets too. The only issue I had was that a month or two ago, their upstream provider was knocked out of commission, but they were very forthcoming about their status and what was being done to rectify the situation.
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Apr 14, 2010 21:07
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If I were just looking for a shell account somewhere where I could screen my irssi (I drive to several different buildings per day and find it irritating to have to restart all of my network apps), where should I look?
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Apr 15, 2010 03:05
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GofG posted:If I were just looking for a shell account somewhere where I could screen my irssi (I drive to several different buildings per day and find it irritating to have to restart all of my network apps), where should I look? go on irc and find someone with a vps and ask them for an account or pay 3 bux a month at http://www.amdwebhost.com/
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Apr 15, 2010 08:52
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