Hosting Account Research
Shared Hosting
Lately, I have been doing a lot of research in my quest to find good hosting accounts. First I wanted to make GoDaddy just a memory as far as hosting was concerned. I would like to leave my domains there, but not my hosting. So I decided I would go with BlueHost.
Within the first week, my site was down for over 2 hours. Now granted, I didn't actually have a site up and running on it yet, but it was still down. This to me was a bad sign. After talking with HostMonster support, I found out what was wrong. Hostmonster is more or less the same thing as BlueHost, only they have better customer service. I had already tried contacting BlueHost support and couldn't get anything out of their support staff. The Hostmonster representative was a lot friendlier and a lot more helpful.
The Host Monster
Apparently, some animal had crawled into something and gotten electrocuted. This more or less affected the entire city's power. This is why my site was down. The representative said it wasn't typical, and she couldn't remember a time when they had a company wide outage. So I let it go, and coughed it up as a weird coincidence.
Once the site was back up and running I tried to install PHP Motion. PHP Motion is a video sharing application much like YouTube. Well, since it was shared hosting I couldn't get the access I needed to be able to install the program. I guess it was just wishful thinking on my part. They would give me shell access but not root access. So then this put me in a state to where I had to do some more research on hosting.
I had to find a good dedicated server hosting plan.
I have a plan to build a site that will have video hosting as one aspect of the site. Now in order for me to know how much I need to charge for this site/service, I need to be able to determine how much bandwidth would cost. Some companies just would not give me a straight answer.
The Warrior Forum
So I proceeded to the Warrior Forum to get some answers. My exact title of the thread was, "HIGH BANDWIDTH DEDICATED SERVERS". In the original post, I mentioned exactly what I was looking for and that I needed high bandwidth on a dedicated server.
About 60% of the responses were answers that I had already specified I wasn't looking for. Finally, I got some real answers. There are some nice options out there for a High Bandwidth site owner. It isn't as expensive as you might think it would be.
Rackspace is the Best?
Rackspace, kept coming up in my research as extremely good support, but so far as I can tell, they aren't even close to being cheap. I plan on going with a managed solution, because I want a system in place where I won't have to worry about the technical details of the software on the server. Rackspace offered that, but I couldn't get a straight answer from them on the cost of bandwidth.
The closest I got to an answer was .80 per GB over the 500 GB of bandwidth that came standard with their servers. I told them multiple times it was a video site, and I needed to know what the cost of bandwidth would be. Video will eat up bandwidth in a heartbeat. If I went 10,000 GB over their limit, I would be paying around $7000 in overage fees. This definitely wasn't what I was looking for. I am still talking with them trying to figure out what decent plan they could offer me.
The Planet, Un-Metered Bandwidth
So I continued with my search for a High Bandwidth Managed Dedicated Server. A couple of people on the Warrior Forum mentioned a company, The Planet. So I checked them out. I didn't look at them in detail but I could probably get a great starter package for around $1600 per month. This didn't seem bad, but it was still a capped limit on bandwidth. If my website were to take off, I could be slammed with all kinds of overage fees still.
Continuing through the responses I was getting I started hearing something about un-metered bandwidth. I am still not exactly sure what that means. On some sites it seems like there is unlimited bandwidth when you use that option. On others it is some calculation used on the uplink to determine your bandwidth.
There are also a couple of different options with un-metered bandwidth. On one side of the coin it is dedicated, and on the other it is shared. Shared is never good when you are trying to build a high traffic site. There was one company that had dedicated for about $2000 per month plus the cost of your server per month. This normally runs about $200 to $500 per month.
The calculated version amounted to about 32 TB (Terabytes=1000 GB) based on a 100 Mbps (Megabit per second) uplink. This seemed ideal for what I was looking for, and I don't remember right off hand how much it was, but it was still in the $1500+ Range. The shared version of this was about $700 per month.
Surpass Hosting
I still was not satisfied with what I was finding, so I kept looking. I had another response on the Warrior Forum, about a company called Surpass Hosting. They truly offered the most cost effective option for me. They had an option for unlimited bandwidth on a fully managed dedicated server. I even customised this server to the maximum on most features except the hard drive. The cost was still under $4000 per month.
This company also was one that I could feel that I could grow with. Now as far as their reliability, that is yet to be determined. A lot of people praised the reliability of "The Planet" and "Rackspace". Although I got mixed responses on the quality of support from "The Planet". Rackspace is apparently the hands down best, when it comes to support.
They have had 100% uptime for seven years. They can also have parts replaced in your server within an hour. The funny thing about them, was when I was trying to explain to them I wanted to do a video hosting site, they said they used to host YouTube. How ironic is that?
Location, Location, Location
While researching these dedicated server options I found some good strategies I could employ. AYK Solutions is in Chicago, IL. Rackspace and The Planet are in Texas. Surpass Hosting is in Orlando, FL. Another company I researched was called Silicon Valley Web Hosting. It was of course in California.
If I really wanted to grow this site, and make it huge and provide 100% uptime for my clients, I could locate redundant copies of my website in these different locations. Since my domains will remain with GoDaddy, I can just make a few DNS changes and voila! My site is back up and running, with a few clicks of the mouse.
Hopefully for anyone out there looking for Dedicated Servers this has helped you out. Most of you it won't even apply to, because you may not be running high traffic or high bandwidth applications. There are option for folks like you that are a lot cheaper.
Links to the Companies I Researched
High Bandwidth Dedicated Servers
The Planet - http://www.theplanet.com
Rackspace - http://www.rackspace.com
AYK Solutions - http://ayksolutions.com/
Silicon Valley Web Hosting - http://www.svwh.com
Surpass Hosting - http://www.surpasshosting.com
Shared Hosting
Blue Host - http://www.bluehost.com
Host Monster - http://www.hostmonster.com
GoDaddy - http://www.godaddy.com
Low Bandwidth Dedicated Servers
APlus - http://www.aplus.net
1and1 - http://www.1and1.com
HostGator - http://www.hostgator.com
HostV - http://www.hostv.com
