web host

[gusl]

My web host is disappearing all of a sudden. I just spent the last several hours working on an emergency backup. All the files are backed up, but it's still unclear whether my wiki will be saved.

In any case, now I now need to find a new host. The main requirement is that it be able to host MediaWiki (basically PHP and MySQL). Also, I should be able to FTP and SSH to the server. I'd also like to have a capacity of about 1 GB, but less may be okay too.

Finally, I would prefer to not pay more than $5/month. Any recommendations?

Comments

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

http://www.site5.com/

but you have to pay for two years down at once. i did it myself. no-leverage.com is hosted there; as far as my experience goes, they're not TOO shabby.

though at one point over the summer, i was just dumping a lot of my stuff on there as a backup, and about half of it got deleted for reasons i couldn't figure out, and when i sent in a ticket about it, they were just like 'too bad, we can't figure it out either, shit happens, stop asking us'

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

nearlyfreespeech.net is good. Dreamhost sucks balls, but if you don't mind low SLA they're cheap. Just keep your own backups. :-P I have my own server I can host you on, if you don't mind no SLA whatsoever, and/or you're desperate.

[alanv]

I use
http://www.totalchoicehosting.com

They have a cheap plan, but I'm probably leaving them soon because their space/bandwidth for the price is pretty expensive.

Probably moving to http://www.hostmonster.com

[rinku.livejournal.com]

1and1.com should work too.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

What's SLA? I haven't heard that term.

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

Service level agreement, i.e. what promises of service quality are available. In my case that would be none...

[rinku.livejournal.com]

That seemed good to me at first, but "Bandwidth overage is charged at a rate of $2.50/GB"

Granted I'll probably never reach their 7500 GB per month limit (my site now uses 100 GB per month on average and has never exceeded 1000), but that's an enormous overage rate, it'd mean using 7500 GB is 5$ a month but using 7600 GB is 255$ a month, which would be bad news if a site got Dugg or Slashdotted or something.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I think your units may be confused. 7500 GB per month is many orders of magnitude more than I'd ever expect to use.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

Which units are confused?

It depends on what you use it for of course, if it's just a personal wiki then of course that's fine, but what if you write a really great list of recommended books, and the link spreads all over the internet. Let's say it takes about 10 MB of bandwidth to load the page, if it has a few images that's not unreasonable. 7500 GB of bandwidth would mean that 750,000 people, if they view that page, would reach the limit. That is not inconceivable. It might not be likely, but it could happen, and if it did, you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars extra.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

If it went over by one fourth, and 1 million people saw it instead of 750,000, that's a charge of 250$*25, $6250.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't use images very much, so my pages shouldn't take much more than 1 MB to load. I guess they might have the option of taking down the page. Just let them know that you you have no more money. ;-)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

also, if that made people saw my page, that would be worth a lot of money. But, yeah, I should switch to a new host.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

True, if they have that option then they sound pretty good, it's a lot cheaper per GB of bandwidth up until that 7500 GB than nearlyfreespeech.net, which is 20 cents a GB at its cheapest rate, which would mean $1500 a month instead of $5 a month if someone reached exactly 7500 GB a month on both.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

It would if you catch it in time. But sometimes a site gets on the front page on Digg.com, a million people visit it that day when the owner is asleep or doing something and doesn't notice, and the opportunity to advertise to them or whatever is lost, because the traffic will trickle down to back what it was soon after that.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

But if you want the cheapest price for a reasonable amount of bandwidth, I still think 1and1.com is a good idea -- it's currently 2$ a month for 10 GB of space and 300 GB of bandwidth per month.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

it's two dollars a month only for the first three months, and then four dollars a month. I hate how deceptive this is.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't notice that! Good catch.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

nearlyfreespeech.net is more than good! I should have listened to you the first time!