[ale] OT - Linux Based Web Hosting Services

[Alan Dobkin]

On 1/7/2005 12:16 AM, Bob Kruger wrote:

> Storage - 30GB
> Bandwidth - 600GB
>
> Price $16.95/month if paid for two years.

This plan is completely insane.  There is no way any reliable web 
hosting company can afford to offer this if their clients actually use 
the allotted storage and/or bandwidth.  Keep in mind that 600 GB of 
bandwidth basically equates to giving you a full *dedicated* 2 MB pipe 
and saturating it for an entire month!  This is like having more than 
your own full T1 in a data center environment, which normally costs over 
20 times what they are charging.  And 30 GB is a big chunk of space on a 
server, assuming it is in some type of RAID and backed up on a regular 
basis.

The only thing I can imagine is that they are counting on the majority 
of their customers paying for this service and then only using a tiny 
portion of it.  They may also be using cheap/unreliable hard drives and 
may not be doing regular backups.  If a significant percentage of their 
customers actually *use* the space/bandwidth allocated in that plan, I 
expect it would quickly put them out of business, assuming they are 
actually able to deliver it in the first place.

Do you really need that much storage space and/or bandwidth from your 
hosting provider?

Alan