|
I found it hard to believe, but suddenly I was faced with a real problem. Well,
I suppose most people would not consider it a huge problem, quite the opposite,
in fact. However, it was stressing me out complete, interfering with my writing.
I even had trouble sleeping.
What was this horrendous problem? My web site was becoming very popular. So
popular, in fact, that I was getting very worried about bandwidth charges.
You see, this was happening after September 11th, 2001, and I had been reading
about some people who had created very special and beautiful sites. These sites
were so incredible that they attracted lots and lots of visitors. So many visitors
that they received hundreds of gigabytes worth of traffic. The webmasters suddenly
found themselves charged hundreds or even thousands of dollars for using bandwidth
over their allocations.
I had purchased a contract with a shared hosting service which allowed 27gb/month
of traffic. This seemed like more than enough at the time. However, I was noticing
the bandwidth increasing at an alarming rate - about 2gb/day.
At that rate, I would exceed the allotment by quite a bit. I had some time,
but not much.Okay, what to do? I looked around at the various shared hosting
options and didn't see much that was all that attractive. There were some that
offered "unlimited" bandwidth - I didn't trust these at all. Most
of the terms and conditions actually did place a "reasonable" limit
of some kind.
I preferred a limit that was know verses a limit that was unknown.Actually,
truth be known, I was getting a little tired of the paid host option. I mean,
it's far improved from free hosts, but there is still much room for improvement.
Some of the things that were bothering me were:
Downtime - All of the shared hosting servers that I'd checked out so far seemed
to be down more often than desired. I've been in the computer industry for over
23 years, and to me a few hours of downtime in an entire year is about all that's
acceptable. It's not that hard to achieve these kinds of statistics - I've been
doing it myself for years.
Support - The level of support from virtually all hostingcompanies I've used
to date has been pathetic to mediocre. My expectation is simple. My site is
down, I want someone to work on it quickly. I want to call someone, get an answer
right away, and get the problem resolved. Especially during normal business
hours.
I have never received that level of support from any hosting company yet.Strange
errors - I've noticed that my web sites will run fine for a few days or weeks,
then start having strange delays. I know this because I monitor my sites with
an automated service. These delays are probably caused by things that other
customers are
doing on the same server.
Lack of communication - Web host support people seem to forget that we webmasters
and businessmen depend upon our web sites. I don't know about you, but if my
site goes down for any length of time I completely freak out. I want to know
why it's down and what's being done about it. And virtually always I get no
answers. This is most annoying when the downtime has been planned - these hosts
have my email address, why is it so hard to send an email and let me know what's
going on?
Log file issues - Log files are very important to any true webmaster. They
are useful for finding errors, gauging traffic and determining the success of
promotions and articles. Yet so far all of the shared hosts gave me incredible
grief about log files. They seemed to want to initialize them at odd intervals
(unpredictable), didn't allow easy access, allowed too easy (unsecured) access
and generally made it difficult.
Okay, given all of that, it was time to make a change. Not just a change to
another host, but a change in paradigm.
I had tried free hosts (three of them) before deciding they were not at all
suitable for anything except a small hobby web site. I moved up to paid shared
hosts and for a while as happy. I moved, then moved again, then again. The hosts
were all fine for a while, then starting having trouble.
Shared hosting was not doing what I needed. The straw that broke the camels
back was a question of bandwidth. Internet Tips and Secrets was exceeding 50gb
a month (almost four million hits and three quarters of a million page views).
Wow. I could not find a shared host that offered a package of a full gigabyte
of disk and upwards of 50gb a month. Not a single one after looking at over
a hundred different packages.
I had a real problem. You see, go over the monthly bandwidth charge and you
get smacked with huge overcharges. For the web host I had at the time, the charges
were $6 per gigabyte. This would make my hosting bill very large indeed.
Thus I began looking for a dedicated hosting service. I quickly found a company
and purchased a single month. Here's what I got. A web server all to myself.
I could define as many as 250 different web sites on the server, and I had
complete control of the DNS. I had root access to the server (meaning I was
more or less god on the box) and could literally do anything I wanted. I could
install anything, do anything and control or not control everything.
I had 9gb of disk space. Best of all, the service provided a whooping 400gb
of bandwidth usage per month. The server was extremely fast for my needs. All
for around $200/month plus a setup fee.
The downside (there is always a downside, isn't there)? The price was a little
steep, but a predictable $200 a month is far superior to a surprise $500 or
even $100 hosting charge. They also didn't provide any real autoresponders (but
I solved that by purchasing a package) or web based email. Their support is
also very basic - they have a 24 hour help desk which is friendly and competent,
but they do not appear to be technical heavyweights.
Thus I have now, after a week of hard work, begun a new adventure - a dedicated
web server for the 16 sites that my wife and I own. So far, the experience is
far superior to the shared hosting nightmares that I've been facing.
About the author:
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net
- Visit our website any time to read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about
how to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge. |
