Registration and hosting services

[ME]

Julian Plamann said:
> On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 19:14, Andrew wrote:
>> A friend of mine wants to set up a small website for his
>> home-based business and needs registration and hosting services.
>> I looked through last January's thread on this list about
>> registrars and saw that gandi.net, domainsdoneright.com,
>> domaindiscover.com, and mydomain.com all received nods from
>> various people, with gandi.net's being the most enthusiastic. Has
>> anybody's opinion changed since then?
>>
> You may also want to check out godaddy.com -- I've had good luck with
> them so far...

As soon as mine get closer to expiration, I'm moving mine to gandi.

I presently use internic, no wait, NetworkSolutions, no wait, netsol, no
wait, Verisign, no wait netsol...

I pay lots of money for bad service. I figure I can pay less for better
service with gandi.

As for Hosting services, there are many ways to go.
If you are just doing web hosting and little else, you can find places
willing to do just email for a domain and/or web hosting with a virtual
host served under a single apache server on one IP address. Sonic offers
this kind of thing, but their bandwidth caps are a bit expensive. If your
site has low bandwidth, or you can work out another payment plant more
equitable to your services, sonic is an option.

Some places are offering "virtual machines" where you get network access
to a computer that is kind of like a vmware based "box" running a full OS,
but on a kind of virtual hardware. Each virtual box gets their own IP, and
things from the outside and in use feel like you have a real box, but you
actually dont. This cuts some of their costs and often offers free backup
service. This is one of the cheaper "systems.

If you decide to go with your own hardware and the place is remote,
consider costs for hardware service. Ugrades? Clicking the reset switch if
things go bad? Some places charge for these things, while others give you
1 or more "freebie" support calls per month.

Some places play favorites with specific hardware. Say, if you dont care
what hartdware it is (and OS) you can get a cobalt systems with "raqshaq"
and they go something like $79/month for 40GB/40GB.

If you want your own 1U there are businesses that offer colocated,
throttled connections (like 128kbps-1.544Mbps) per port links. The slower
you accept throttling, the less they charge. Found one place that would do
768/768kbps (note lower case "b" = bits while upper case "B" = bytes) for
about $69, but they had 15GB/15GB per month caps and charged much per GB
beyond.

The best deal I found for my money as a hobbiest was $105/month for any 1U
system with 40GB/40GB per month. It is a small company, and they are
notshooting for 5-nines, let alone 3-nines uptime, but they work for
me.(They have other restrictions: no porn, no irc servers, no 3d game
servers (quake, RtCW), etc., but I dont need those on my server.)

Many places that dont advertise rates are often expensive. Places like
sonic where I was quoted about $200/month with 5 or 10GB caps per month
and $5 or $10 extra charges per GB over the max caps. On of the highest
places was asking for $800/month for 10GB/10GB and charges $10/GB over.

It seems the curve for Cost vs nine-up-time is very steep. The greater the
reliability, the higher the cost, but costs seem to grow much fster for
each small increase in reliability. (Certainly, pipe sizes had something
to do with it, but that was nearly "linear" with respect  to cost.)

Just what system you decide to go with it obviously up to you. Whatever
you do, consider traffic. If you expect the site to be busy. Estimate how
many visitors per month you would have visiting how many pages each. Then
total the size of content of pages (with images) to see if your
projections come close to your max cap bandwidth. Then consider mail, ftp,
and any other services and add them too. Then add an extra 10% or so for
overhead. Consider room to grow too.

If they did not require Cobalt systems, I would have gone with RaqShaq.
For price/value/service, they seem pretty good. I just dont like cobalt
for my own uses. I prefer a cheap 1U Dell system with Debian. :-)

-ME



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