PMBD

I have a package with siteground, an american host for all of $5 per month inc domain. I get 900GB transfer each month. We found our host after about 1 hr of research and going to places like rate my host. There are several hosts who are now even offering bigger bandwidth allocations, for maybe a dollar more. Our host has 99.9% uptime, and we have not had a single outage yet.

If my site went donation, it would be like 10 or 20 cents each. Not to mention it would be a cold day in hell for me not to be able to afford our hosting even with exchange rates.

Now my site is a little quiet at the moment, knocking on average 50GB a month, last couple of months its been a little slower cause we're all busy in RL.

Now, for me it leaves 2 options in regards to those who should be destroyed.
Option 1: they are idiots and got locked into a dud package
Option 2: they are greedy and trying to live off the community.

I wonder which one applies to most people?

I mean, how much bandwidth could they really be using?

I think it's a combination and/or type of situation.

Either they are trying to get rich off the community, or they are complete morons who paid for the first package they saw, and it was a huge package too.

Pescado pays $50 per year for this site, with unmetered (read:  UNLIMITED) bandwidth transfer.  I believe he actually paid a bit more on top of that to get up to 10GB space, and he has a deal in the works to get an additional 60 or 70 GB of space.  So these paysite owners don't even stand a chance.

If they would do more research in the first place without dollar signs in their eyes, they could do what they claim to love (for the most part, except pervert Openhouse Jack :P) for free, and for less than the cost of a cappuccino every day for a month.

And you've had me wondering which site is yours for awhile, damn my curiosity.

Wow! I need to look into that too... I'm being ripped off!

i want to know what plan you have.

I already told you where to get it! Why are you still being ripped off? Silly Nouk. What kind of Dutchie are you?

hey nouk, your site is great but you have been ripped off, lol.
i just found a free host after searching for hours, www.profusehost.net and you get 1gb of space and 100gb of bandwith and a Cpanel account and a whole bunch  of other stuff. And if you pay i think like 2 dolalrs you get i think like 1.5gb space (i think) and 150 gb of bandwith. I signed up for free. But since you have a domain you can transfer and keep your domain free i think. I wish i would have found it sooner lol.

Alll the paysites are OVERcharging, especially when they make you pay for individual items.

I do not suggest a free site. Bandwith is cheap but it's worth paying SOMETHING for it - you don't get ads plastered over your site and it makes it more likely the provider will work with you if you go over your bandwith limits, rather than just yanking the whole thing.

It's always amused me when I've come across a partial pay site that was almost never up because they used a free server. You'd think if they were greedy they'd understand that initial outlay of money for constant up time = MORE MONEY in the end... Penny wise, pound foolish. :P

I'm tempted to offer someone free hosting on my domain.
You'd get your subdomain, 5GB hdd space and 100GB transfer per month.
No interference from my site, only catch - gotta be free, no donate button no nothing. Host is prepaid for a further 18mths.

Drop me a PM if anyone is interested...

-Missy

Sounds really good! But what happens if the site bloats to 500 gigs bandwidth, or more?  :shock:

I got up to 900Gb, and at the moment last month we pushed out all of 17GB.
I for a big time creator like you Nouk I'm prepaired to say: how much do you need/want?
-Missy

Ok, I'll give my two cents.

I went for a very cheap domain+hosting plan for my site(s).
It's an italian hosting service. My plan includes:
- Domain registration
- Hosting with unlimited space (wich is the mainly reason I like it (http://www.simplystella.com/icons/asd.gif))
- (I went for a Windows server instead of a Linux, but you can chose between Linux, Windows or Linus+Windows server)
- 5 emails with my domain name
- I also bought an additional MYSQL database.

I'm not sure about the bandwith. I'm not technically aware.
As for the cons.
I have to say the server isn't very stable. It happens sometime that my site is unavaiable for several hours and I can do nothing about it.
I also believe the bandwith isn't very high, since the since occasionally go down whenever I have more then 700 visitors in a day (but this doesn't happen frequently, lol), so I wouldn't recommend this to those who have lots of visitors.

Btw, this all costs to me about 30€ a year, wich I think it's pretty cheap, or at least something I can afford to pay with my casual jobs :wink:

My site is $7US a month for 35Gb disk space and 800Gb transfer.  There is no need for most of these sites to charge.  If the artiste spends one less evening going out and one more evening prettying up her website, she's paid for the month already.

Are you talking about my host?  They have an excellent reputation - you can read their support forums before joining and get an idea of what type of complaints they get and how they fix them.  Lunarpages.

For everyone who wants a cheap reliable host: http://www.godaddy.com

• 5 GB Space   • 250 GB Transfer = Just $3.99/mo (for 2 months, if you buy more it gets cheaper :) )

• 100 GB Space   • 1,000 GB Transfer = Just $6.99/mo ( 24 months: Just $5.59/mo )

• 200 GB Space   • 2,000 GB Transfer = Just $14.99/mo ( 24 months: Just $11.99/mo )

Well, atleast I think its pretty cheap..

Competitive pricing, but they probably have a draconian TOS and are too susceptible to whining.

Well...it seems to me those pay site owners are lying about "helping pay for bandwith"..... :evil:

Mr. Teadrinker uses Godaddy and he's fairly happy with them.

i want to know what Pescado has....

Ok,

as i decided to browse your board for some time, i could add my own server stats here. Maybe this is interesting for some of you.

I currently run Pimp my Sims.com with the follow stats:

10,000+ users per day on average, more than 15,000 per day at the weekend
About 40GB traffic per day, more than a terabyte per month
About 200.000 Pageviews per day
Based on Typo3 as Content Management System (quite powerfull, but hungry for CPU, RAM etc.)

This is run on a server with AMD Opteron 175 (Dual-Core), 4.096 MB DDR-RAM and 2 x 250 GB harddrive (Hardware RAID1).

More simple servers simply could not handle the traffic and database queries produced by our visitors and i did upgrade every 3 month since the start of my site.

This server does cost me about 160$ per month.

I considered using some cheaper providers but did not due to the following reasons

• lack of stability (i would like to make sure, my provider is still alive next year)
• Performance: i want users to browse my site as fast and easy as possible
• Features: Hosting packets mostly include very much restrictions on configuration etc
• Bandwidth: The most important point. At least in germany, every single "you get as much bandwidth as you would like to" provider somewhere in his terms of use includes a little "reasonable usage" sentence. This means, if you reach one terabyte, you can bet your house they will kick you.

And yes, i could still run my site at lower costs, if i would distribute downloads to yahoo-groups, free webspace etc. But in fact, i would not be able to check hundreds of files splitted on dozends of webspaces, providers etc. This could simply not be handled at a reasonable effort.

I don't cry about the money i spend, but I do not think that those "5 bucks for heaven on earth" examples posted above fit to every site or the country a website owner lives at. Those costs vary from site to site, so a general "if you pay more than XY, you pay to much" isn't realistic in my opinion.

Solander

We'll probably break a TB either this month or next month. Our host hasn't even blinked at this. Last month we clocked in about 850 GBs. Malaysian hosting has been good so far.

Using normal html pages is less hungry than a database backend.  I am only using the forum model for my site at the moment becuase I am not expecting to be creating masses of stuff.   If I got really busy I would go back to webpages.

Whatever, I decide what I can afford to buy and don't put more stuff up onto it than I can afford.  The few houses I have made went straight up onto MTS2 cos they were big :)

Anyway Solander, you're a multi-creator site.  They do get expensive to run.   I can't spot if you're a paysite or not, I didn't see any paypal buttons, but in general another way of running a multi-creator site instead of asking for the users to pay, perhaps the creators could each pay their share like they would if it was their own site.

My site is not pay and the other creators are some friends of me, so it's free for them, too. I just wanted to point out that bandwidth and webspace costs vary from country to country so running a high-traffic site in malaysia maybe costs much less than in germany or another country.

I am in the UK and I wouldn't dream of having a UK-based web host!!!   Are there site owners who think they had to choose a server local to them?  No wonder it's costing.   US hosting services are many times cheaper than in the UK, and Malaysia might be cheaper, I haven't looked into it.  No wonder people are moaning about the costs if they think they're limited to one country to buy the service from.  :lol:

Oh, i don't think i am limited to germany as source for potential providers. But i would like to get support in german and i feel more "save" if i know, german laws apply to my provider. If some provider in malaysia would kick me, i would have no chance to do anything but searching a new one.

I am very lucky with my provider that I seem to have the best of both worlds, but for the purposes of sharing free stuff for a game I wasn't overly concerned with quality and reliability like I would have been if it was the public face of my business that I was relying on for a living.   I keep a copy of my site on my hard disk so if I had to start again it would just be a case of trickling it all up by ftp over several hours.   That's one of the reasons why I am not entirely happy with the forum style for content it's much harder to ressurect after a move.

I feel like Pimp my Sims.com is my public face. If I find any wrong links (e.g. pictures instead of packages in downloads), I feel like standing naked on a market place in front of a large crowd. And I definetely don't like this ;)

Even 30minutes downtime are too much in my eyes. Maybe i'm kind of a perfectionist related to my website. So its my own decision to pay "somewhat" more than I would have to, if I did choose some other provider, but that's ok for me, as long as I can afford it.

Solander, have you looked at the godaddy site?
I doubt they will be gone next year, since they already exist quite a while.
You can buy additional options if you don't like what they offer, I'm pretty sure its cheaper than what you have atm.

Yes, so what's the benefit of hosting in Germany, then? Move your site to Malaysia instead. :P

If you can guarantee a 24/7 support with native german speakers and a place of juridication (thats the translation for gerichtsstand) not being in kuala lumpur, i will give it a try  :lol:

This looks nice, and the owner of hxxp://sims2writershangout.com is very happy about it. She has been there for about a year now.

http://dreamhost.com/hosting.html

200GB storage at signup (+1GB a week)
2 TB (2000GB) a month bandwidth (+16GB a week)
9,95 dollars a month

I wish I had the money to pay for a year. Setup fees for monthly hosting are very high though.

Well it happened that I personally didn't notice any problems with the host.

Now that I know that bandwith isn't as expensive as I thought I'll refrain from stating (like I've been doing for some time) that its ok to charge a minimal fee for running a site. All sites should be donation only. If you dont get enough donations to keep the site going, then as a webmaster you have the choice to pay out of the pocket and generously share with others or take the site down. These paysites act like they are being forced to keep the site online, or perhaps they are greedy and egocentric about their work?

As for godaddy, I haven't used them as a host, but I've been getting my domain names from them for years with no problem.

Food for thought...

TSR is a huge site and a lot of people pay for content (i did a few times also) now imagine if even 1/4 the members sub twice a year that site owner surely bought a new house and car and is living quite comfy. Well that is the thing that made me think twice about paysites or donation sites and honestly I have seen so many people who claim they don't ever download what they did not pay for have tons of payfiles... Therefor all these owners are probably living well. I for one will no longer support the life of leisure unless it's my own. They can work like me and get a 401k or IRA or something (whatever they might do) and save like me. I feel like the Sims is a 401k/IRA (retirement fund for those who don't know)for a lot of these people they knew eventualy this fad would have to come to an end when we came to our senses.

Re: Godaddy, I've been using them for quite some time now, they hosted my domain even before i was really using it for anything more substantial than a place to host shit. I have to say, I've never had any problems with them at all. I've had less downtime with them than I have at any other hosting provider, and the only issues I've had with slow speed turned out to be due to a user error (meaning I fucked it up).

Basically, Godaddy is fairly inexpensive, and it works. It doesn't have all the neat user tools that other hosts I've used featured, but I didn't really use those much anyway, I pretty much use FTP alone to get things done. It works for me.

And if you don't have site-making skills you don't need to pay someone to do it, just go to your c-panel (most cheap hosting places give you one) click on "fantastico" and set up a forum.   It's all automatically set up for you.  Attach your stuff to forum posts.

<--------- wonders how many people have had refunds for bandwidth they
               havn't used while subscribing/donating.


"here you are, I noticed you havn't downloaded in over 3 months and you paid for 6 months, have half your sub back"

Yeah right.

when pigs fly and do somersaults while chewing on mariah carey's fat, juicy thighs.  refunds are possible if that happens  :lol:

This is what I get for $10 per YEAR at hostingrevolution.com and have never experienced any downtime:

Subdomains: unlimited
Parked Domains: 1
Addon Domains: 1
Mysql databases: unlimited
Disk usage: 50.00 MB
MySQL Disk usage: N/A MB
Bandwidth (per month): 5120 MB
Email accounts: unlimited
Email forwarders: unlimited
Autoresponders: unlimited
Email filters: unlimited
Mailing lists: unlimited
FTP accounts: unlimited

Edited to correct missing punctuation.

EDIT 2: Well, I do realise that the above-mentioned plan wouldn't do much good for a site of this magnitude, but it's quite useful for my puny little website, especially since I used to pay $3.99 per month for the same plan from a different host. I believe that Hosting Revolution has other plans, which are probably quite reasonably priced. It might be worth looking into for peeps who are paying up the butt for bandwidth.

That's great for a site with few downloads, or just starting out ... but when you hit the 7 gigs downloads a day mark very regulalry, you're screwed  :shock:

So then you move to a better plan. You get what you pay for. :P

Personally, I think that plan is somewhat of a joke, since your home connection may be faster and you may as well be running the site off your own computers. But then, it is cheap.

Yahoo web hosting- for 11.95 /mo (less than ONE subscription to Carla Niven):

5gb web space
200gb data transfer
free domain name
200 email addresses
PhP, MySQL, Perl

for $39.95/mo (2.5 carla subscriptions):

20gb space
500gb transfer
1000 email addresses
plus the stuff above

well holy crap yahoo is expensive.

1and1.com

1&1 Linux Developer Package (they also have a Microsoft Developer Package)

10chatchannels
250GB space
2500GB data transfer
50 FTP accounts
10 blogs
Perl, Python, PHP3,PHP4, PHP5
100 MySQL Database (100 MB)
5 included domains
free private domain registration
600 subdomains
DNS management, url masking, etc
3000 email accounts (and a bunch of features for that)
firewall protection, daily site backup, 90 day moneyback guarantee, 24/7 phone and email support, and a bunch of other things (like a sitebuilder and crap to help newbies)
$19.99 per month...No hidden charges...No setup fee

they have smaller plans, and options for servers or eshops but that is a shitload more for half the price of yahoo's $40/mo plan...
I've been using them for about a year with no problems, and when there was a "user error"  :oops:  i called in the middle of the night and actually went straight to a person and they resolved the issue...I was lucky enough to sign up when they were having a sale...and then I upgraded when they were having another sale...

I'm currently using icdsoft.com for my site's host. They've always been very fast to answer support, they have great uptime (except one time where the ftp was down for close to a month or so, but I had the inbrowser one in the cpanel so I didn't much care), and quite frequently add more space and transfer for free :)

I'm using their universal (http://www.icdsoft.com/hosting.php) package right now which was great before but I'm about to outgrow it with transfer this month :/

Even so, I still make no attempt to make it a pay site nor have donation gifts. There is a donate button on one page if people want to contribute, but I don't want anyone to feel as though they have to.

I'd also recommend 1and1. I had a site (non sim related) hosted with them for three years, which ended in october. They had this promotion going where you could try out their hosting free for three years. Great hosting, I had no trouble. Only thing was that the cpanel was really slow for me, and set up oddly. But, it was still pretty good otherwise. Looking at what they're offering up now, I think I might move over when my hosting runs out in March.

Necromancy.

(I've wanted to do that for a while!!  :lol: )

If you want to do that properly, you have to say,

"Necromancy is bad, m'kay?"

And of course you should be able to back it up by locking the thread. However, considering the subject, I'm going to leave it unlocked.  Yes they resurrected an old thread but it wasn't with useless information and I'd rather they resurrected this thread then started a new one with the same information.

*cowers* Okay. :oops: *practises proper saying*
Well I wanted to do it before somebody else hopped in, and I'm glad it was me who got told off for it.  :lol:  8) I'm sure there'll be people out there who don't like that. ^^
And yeah, I guess it's useful information... :lol: Useful to me, too, in a way.
But what's "1and1"???

I'm another Lunarpages user, and have been using them for... I think... five years now? I get incredibly fast responses when I email them about problems, and they solve those problems quickly.

This is the package I have: http://www.lunarpages.com/basic-hosting/
Actually, when I started, you could only have 1 addon domain, now you get ten. That was a pleasant surprise, I must say. :) A lot of the features they say are for "new" customers... I'm a pretty old customer, and they just give me access to the new and improved stuff. That sounds like a small thing to comment on, but most businesses I've run into (not just web services) don't do that for you.

I don't have a super huge site, but I do host a lot of image files and get a fair amount of traffic.