I currently pay about $6.95 per month, and I get (not upgraded my account) unlimited MySQL databases, 300Gb per month transfer and 10Gb of HDD.

Their latest offer is 1Terrabyte of bandwidth per month, and tons more space - but with only 3 MySQL databases unless you stump up an extra $2.50 per year.

I would upgrade, but it requires re-newing my contract once more - and tbh, I think i'll sit it out since they had an issue for which i never got a suitable response OR apology for the out-time (FTP issues, meant when forums files updated, they wrote a blank file instead of the forum variables - which effectively broke the forum. This continued for about a week!).

How much bandwidth do i use? No idea at present, it's probs hovering around 300Mb per day - it has gotten up to 2Gb per day on release days before - and when it was busier it used to do a sustained 1Gb per day. However, after passing the mod on to others, tis just a forum now, basically. It should be more, but I dunno - I just seem to have very little time anymore - and unfortunately, less motivation.

The host I use is Globat - www.globat.com I've never had a problem with them until this year with the FTP issues, sadly it continued long enough to basically put my site offline for a whole week.

Yeah, I've looked at using (or abusing) Globat's current service offerings for the Forge site, bulk file storage, but their TOS and AUP pretty much scrapped that idea. I'm still not sure how they can make money on something like that, two of those accounts could match an entry level dedicated server in hosting resources.

Any thoughts on improving or changing your hosting?

I can't say for certain that cooperative hosting would cost less or have better customer service, but we can try to find ways to make it better. Kind of like building a better web host, and doing it without worrying about the pitfalls of a traditional business model.


-Burn

They offer that amount because tons of people sign up, but next to no-one will actually use the bandwidth or disk space. Kinda like having a car that can do 250mph - it's as fast as anything, but you never drive it above 70mph due to the speed limit. However, if everyone used their full quota, they'd be stuffed and probably start kicking people left, right and centre.

I've got tons of bandwidth, but never managed to use more than 50-60Gb in one month. I'd imagine that if i started draining their resources big time, they'd probably contact me and offer some other "suggested account improvements".

As for changing hosts - erm, well, to be honest - not really unless it's as cheap. Right now I barely use the site itself, it's just a forum and file repository - but considering we've no real download area, most of the files are inaccessible to the people. The cost is currently paid for by the Google adverts (literally, it just covers the cost of the site) - so it no longer costs me anything strictly speaking.

Thats the problem with oversold ultra cheap web hosting. A coop model can't effectively beat it by "claimed" hosting resources alone. It can certainly deliver on 100% of the resources alloted to each share, and any overage "fees" would just be at-cost extensions to the normal hosting account.

To structure a coop model to beat ultra cheap hosting like that and still fulfill the alloted resources, it would need an extremely high end server on collocation with upwards of a 100 shares minimum per server (rather than a dozen or so) and completely cut the financial safety net. Long term something like a load balancing blade cluster with a SAN could do it too, then the hosting accounts would be completely virtual rather than being assigned to a specific server. ...but neither one is possible for a startup project like this, just costs too much and requires too many people.

For your site specifically, it might be easier to just move the site to free hosting on common community resource pool rather than an individual account. The ads would have to be switched over to a community ad account to cover the cost. Main difference is all community staff members would have access to it, administration is a joint effort (that can be done without having community staffers register on the forum).

EDIT: For ads on community sites, another option is using an ad manager with a donation option to suspend the ads until the donated funds are used up in hosting resources. Its a bit complicated to setup but seems fairer to the site members.


-Burn

Edited by - megaburn on 2/26/2007 6:43:14 AM