New Web Hosting??

[Frank Hagan]

All I want to do is pay the account a month ahead of time. Personally, I think it's a great way to handle money

It can be. Paying your mortgage 3 months ahead is great way to buffer the loss of a job. I have a vacation cabin with a $1.13 electric bill each month ... I send them $25 at a whack so I don't have to send a check each month. So I understand the sentiment.

There's nothing stopping you from doing it on your own, though. If you are on a cash basis, the next time you pay Dathorn, deduct $27 from your account instead of $13.50. Then deduct the $13.50 each month as usual. You have a one month cushion ... I personally don't like this approach, because you have to remember the overage manually. Or, overpay your credit card bill by that amount.

[earthandspace.info]

Business Hosting...

Okay. I never though so much controversy would be stirred over how one wishes to handle $$$. At this point, I'll just say to each is there own.

Sure I could run a business with an iron fist as one has mentioned. But, I must be realistic and keep in mind that I will be starting out from zero, naughta, scratch, zelch!! The luxury of pissing of clients over a cgi script or payment method will not exist for me. Going back to concerns about the inflexibility issue; I will be doing this on a part time bases to start meaning that I'm not quiting my day job just yet :-) So, if a newbie webhoster screws up while I'm at work, I would like at least some assurance that my clients will still have working web sites when I get home. Take a typical Dathorn account with 6 gig disk space. Lets say I put 6 clients on this account and one runs a bad cgi script. Andrew suspends the services resulting in me having to issue refunds to all six clients. Now I'm out at least a 100 bucks (cost of the account + reimbursed CC charges).

Taking this into consideration, it was decided that Dathorn is good for my astronomy web site. But, these services would suck if I tried to run a business on it. Also, I had to consider the fact that I would want to upgrade to dedicated servers once I had enough clients to support one.

[AndrewT]

Lets say I put 6 clients on this account and one runs a bad cgi script. Andrew suspends the services resulting in me having to issue refunds to all six clients.

That is where you are very wrong. If a domain causes a problem, only the one domain is suspended unless this becomes a very routine problem under your account that we have dealt with many times already.

[-Oz-]

Andrew is correct. I had one site run a bad script (oops, I wrote it), that domain/account was suspended but every other site on my account kept running just fine.

[Frank Hagan]

Lets say I put 6 clients on this account and one runs a bad cgi script. Andrew suspends the services resulting in me having to issue refunds to all six clients.

Don't offer an "uptime" guarantee on a shared server. I wouldn't offer one (er, I should say, I don't offer one).

I figure I bought web hosting from a company that does not have an uptime guarantee, so I'm not going to offer one to my customers. Instead, I show a link to the Alerta monitoring service showing the actual, historical uptime of my server.

Besides, have you ever figured out what a pro-rate uptime guarantee pays out? Let's say you charge $10 a month, and there's an average of 30 days in a month, for a total of 43,200 minutes per month. That's .0002314 cents per minute. If you are down for 24 hours you get a grand total of .33 cents.

How much down-time has my server had? Since 2003, it is still maintaining an average uptime of 99.824%. The biggest month in the last three saw 3 hours of down-time, for 99.558%. There's no way I want the trouble of sending a check for .99 to all my customers.

[Grunfeld]

I guess you seem to be getting your info wrong and confused, Andrew answered your question, and I suspect you were misinformed with your info...from what ever souce.

You will find Andrew is very fair and everyone here on these forums I suspect will vouch for how good things are here.

A part time business on a shared server I suspect would not offer a "uptime guarantee" as Frank said which is awesome input ...

If you are so worried about the "iron fist" well then move on and we wish you best of luck..... ask the right questions and you will get the right answers....

[earthandspace.info]

uptime guarantee

I never intented to include uptime guarantees in hosting plans. One reason is I will use only services that have 99% + uptime anyways. Also, I understand there is no such thing as 100% uptimes. Moreover, what a client thinks is downtime is most likely problems with his internet connection. I would not want to waste the time investigating over what may or may not be a nickle refund.

Sorry for the for the misunderstanding about account suspensions. I just always thought that matters are handled by accounts but not domains. In that respect, my number one concern about Dathorn was addressed.

In the long run, I will most likely want to use dedicated servers anyways. One can easily put 200 - 300 customers on one of those :-)

[Jonathan]

One reason is I will use only services that have 99% + uptime anyways

I can't even remember the last time I saw anything sub-99% uptime at
Dathorn in the year I've been here My other host went down 1hr every
other day if not every day...Dathorn has A+++ services and support, its
doubtful you'll find this kickass combo anywhere else for the same price tag.
I won't give you the same goodbye as Buddha but its on the tip of my tongue...

[Frank Hagan]

In the long run, I will most likely want to use dedicated servers anyways. One can easily put 200 - 300 customers on one of those :-)

Yep, that's the way to go when you have either the time to manage it your self or the money to pay others to manage it. While you can get the dedicated servers for about $100 a month, they are unmanaged. I checked a year or so ago, and the minimum management level I was comfortable with would cost an additional $150 or so per month ("time" is most important to me, so I wouldn't want to learn to manage it myself; you may have the opposite issue, where time is available, but money is not).

[earthandspace.info]

Dedicated Servers

I'm exploring both options. I'll probably start out with a managed server and work my way up to unmanaged--both just a few more steps up the learning curve of web hosting :-) I believe one thing that will help me in this endevour is the fact that I've aquired good web mastering skills. As far as monies go, I'm going to set aside $2000.00 to get this thing going. Just need to save up from three more paychecks.

Jonathan, I like those moon shots of yours. Mind if I assimulate a few into my astronomy site? If you say yes, I'll make one image of the month and link it back to your site. My next major update is just a few week away!

As far as leaving Dathorn, I'm keeping the astronomy site here for now. Sorry to burst your bubbles people!! HA HA HA>... My site's traffic is 100 a day and climbing. After my next update, I'm gonna do an advertising blitz so traffic will likely climb to 400 and level back off at 200 - 250 per day. I used to have my site under to-scorpio.com until I ran into $$$ problems. That bad boy got about 500 + a day. I'm just wondering how kind Dathorn will be as my traffic goes up while staying within my bandwidth allotment. Hate to say but previous web hosts got tired of my site REAL QUICK!! It was normal to keep my site on two accounts at a time so when one host goes "NO-GO", I just switch over and got a new host as a backup for when the host goes "No-GO" again. That's why I'm keeping my site hear. If Andrew does not get tired of Alpha Centaur's Universe, I'll just have extra space on my home biz!!

[ChrisTech]

I'm exploring both options. I'll probably start out with a managed server and work my way up to unmanaged--both just a few more steps up the learning curve of web hosting :-) I believe one thing that will help me in this endevour is the fact that I've aquired good web mastering skills. As far as monies go, I'm going to set aside $2000.00 to get this thing going. Just need to save up from three more paychecks.

Jonathan, I like those moon shots of yours. Mind if I assimulate a few into my astronomy site? If you say yes, I'll make one image of the month and link it back to your site. My next major update is just a few week away!

As far as leaving Dathorn, I'm keeping the astronomy site here for now. Sorry to burst your bubbles people!! HA HA HA>... My site's traffic is 100 a day and climbing. After my next update, I'm gonna do an advertising blitz so traffic will likely climb to 400 and level back off at 200 - 250 per day. I used to have my site under to-scorpio.com until I ran into $$$ problems. That bad boy got about 500 + a day. I'm just wondering how kind Dathorn will be as my traffic goes up while staying within my bandwidth allotment. Hate to say but previous web hosts got tired of my site REAL QUICK!! It was normal to keep my site on two accounts at a time so when one host goes "NO-GO", I just switch over and got a new host as a backup for when the host goes "No-GO" again. That's why I'm keeping my site hear. If Andrew does not get tired of Alpha Centaur's Universe, I'll just have extra space on my home biz!!

So you can't budget $13.50 a month, but you can save $2,000? Something sounds odd here???

My forums get around 1k visits per day, and got 25k unique hits last month, 2nd highest so far this year (may was like 300 more).

Monthly

Daily

[earthandspace.info]

Bandwidth!!

Keep in mind that my site is EXTREMLY graphic/multimedia intensive. On 100 visitors a day, I'm drawing close to 2.5 GB per month. Without the portal page, I would draw a bit more. On 200 visitor, that would 5 GB. Bump that up to 500 + and you get the picture! Basically, at capacity, my site will easily chop away 20 GB per month and 30 BG during peak times. One time, my site was mentioned on a Canadian radio station during the dead of January when everyone was couped up indoors. Since I had two hosting accounts, I was able to switch over after all the bandwidth was used up.

Of course, I'm in the process of making improvments that will help trim bandwidth use some. One was the making of a portal page (low-band) explaining what my site is. This way, I'm not wasting throughput on those not interested in my site. Go to www.earthandspace.info .

The background MIDI will soon be dumped since most users don't have their soundcards configured properly for MIDI set up. Video files will be converted to flash format. Flash will be incorporated thoughout the site to replace all video formats. This will help solve cross compatibility issues that many experience with Quicktime, MPEG, AVI, WMV, ect.... Also, pages that has music will have an inline player control so users can activate manually.

As far as images goes, they will always be a bandwidth hog. Being space/astronomy images, I do not want to compromise the quality in favor of faster/cheaper loads.

Back to payments, I just bought a Netspend card and will put a few hundred bucks on it. Dathorn and Namecheap will be drawing from this account when I get the card. Personaly, I still think it's easier to just pay a month ahead of time as I've always had. Hell, I even offered to pay Dathorn for a whole freaken year.

[Jonathan]

Jonathan, I like those moon shots of yours. Mind if I assimulate a few into my astronomy site? If you say yes, I'll make one image of the month and link it back to your site. My next major update is just a few week away!

Thank you Sorry but I have to say no. I do not really wish
for my pictures to appear anywhere on the web except my
website and the one or two forums I visit. Thanks for the offer though