They have an amazing offer right now - 1TB web space, domain for life with unlimited domains, 10TB bandwidth - - $40/year. I'm tempted but I've found some reviews that scare me. Before I spend money on something like this, I need to know if those reviews saying they're horrible are a small percentage.. or are they the majority ?

I'm not going to be setting up media sharing sites, just my genealogy stuff, maybe my portfolio, pretty mundane stuff IMO.

Soo... what do you all say ?? Anyone got any experience, good or bad, with this hosting company ???

I've had no experience with the company, but consider this: the average 1TB hard drive goes for about $300. That means that, if you're the only customer on the server and they don't overbook it (not bloody likely), then you'll have to be a customer for over 7 years just to cover the cost of the hard drive. Never mind the other components...this is just the hard drive.

Also, plans like this tend to attract people who, as you said, put up media sharing sites and expect that, at the $40/year range, the host will perform well. They usually don't. The words "fly by night" come to mind.

Personally, I'd stay away from it for those reasons.

Good points Adam, thanks. That's why I've asked for input - that old adage 'if it sounds too good to be true - it probably is' certainly is repeating in my head here.

This host is being advertised, and the special 'offer' is made by a very reputable site that I'm a member of. Maybe I'll ask over there too, since they're obviously promoting and maybe making money off this 'deal'.

For the type of sites you're going to put up you don't need 1TB disk space and all that bandwidth. IMHO you'd be better off with a host that offers a realistic lot of resources for the money.

And then if you want to host multiple sites/domains $40/year isn't very much, $3 a month, so you're really looking at bottom line budget hosts for that sort of budget.

I've had no experience of that host, they may be fine, but if you have any doubts look elsewhere

You're right, I don't need 1TB of space.. lol. I was thinking long term. I'm already thinking it's not such a great idea. Comparing GoDaddy and HostGator, HostGator has a better package for slightly less money than GoDaddy - and I like GoDaddy, never had any problems with them.

HostGator's offering 3.95/mo for 350gb space, and 3TB of bandwidth, plus all kinds of good add-on stuff. Enough for me, and it's also more than adequate for the site I'm going to be building for our Condo Association. People seem to like HostGator too. GoDaddy, for 6.99/mo is only offering 100gig of space and 1TB of bandwidth, plus most of the same extras as HG. With the condo assn. site, I think they may wind up with a blog and they do want a "members only" area for residents, as well as a classifieds section.

Stop for a moment and think about how much space you'll actually need for your sites (a very very rough guide!)...

- A typical blog might use 5-10mb space for the scripts
- A blog database won't use much unless you're posting every 5 minutes, you'd probably struggle to use 5-10mb on an average blog site in the first few years
- If you post one 100k photo every day on your blog you'll probably need about 50mb disk space in the first year
- A typical classifieds script with a couple of hundred permanent listings will probably use 10-15mb for the scripts and 10-20mb for uploaded images and data
- A member area would probably be a few scripts, html page and images so say 10mb for good measure.

Total that up and you'd be looking at about 100mb for the whole condo site, sure it will grow as time goes by but unless you're hosting big files the volume of growth will be relatively slow.

Ok so let's look at bandwidth (or data transfer!!!)....

Taking an average page size of 100k you can serve 10,000 page views per gigabyte (page views actually work out more because data will be cached but we'll use a worst case scenario).

Bear in mind that the vast majority of sites use very little bandwitdh, most of my hosting customers use less than 2gb a month. I've even got one customer running 6 shopping cart sites, they still only use 10-15gb a month with about 1gb of disk space (and are quite successful BTW).

So if you use those numbers as a rough guide you can start to figure out roughly what your projected needs will be.

Hostgator overall seem pretty ok. Sure they get a lot of complaints but they also have a lot of happy customers as well. Budget "all you can eat" hosting does attract those who moan the loudest when something goes wrong - I suspect that many have broken HG's TandC's and that's whay they grumble! Bear in mind that with any budget host your sites will live on crowded servers and it only takes one rogue script or resource hog and all your sites will slow down or the server crashes - the more sites on a server the more chance there is of problems happening.

If I was advising you as one of my customers looking to host their own sites in the US I'd probably ask them to look these hosts. their prices probably reflect the true costs of hosting and providing quality 24/7 support.

http://www.dathorn.com/
- I've seen a few negative forum posts about them recently, it may be grouchy customers

http://www.unitedhosting.com/
- they always seem to get positive comments, good support etc

http://www.clook.co.uk/
- who I use, they are Uk based but have US servers as well. The US site is offline at the moment while they restructure but I have trusted them with most of my clients sites for 4 years now. Superb support 24/7. Only last night I had to restore a database from a server backup, job done in less than 15 minutes!

Finally check out http://whreviews.com/ that contains forums posts (most from here!) about various hosts.

Sorry, blue-dreamer, but I gotta take umbrage with you on the HostGator thing. I spent over an hour a couple of weeks ago on my girlfriend's dad's laptop trying to diagnose why he couldn't send email off it, and it was due to them telling him to change his SMTP port to 27, as well as creating three additional accounts within Outlook, all of which contained the same info (although that could have just as easily been him misinterpreting what they said...he's not what you call tech-savvy). That, and their legions of affiliate forum spammers, are enough to kill them as a quality host for me.

I will support the United Hosting comment, just because if I recall correctly, the owner's name is Matt and I've seen him provide help to a lot of people on a lot of things in the past.

Don't know the other two hosts. Never heard of them.

The rest of the advice is very good advice. My only issue is with HostGator, like I said, and it comes from fighting with my girlfriend's dad's laptop.

As a point of comparison, I've pretty well thrown everything I've done over the past 6 years onto my dedicated server, and I only use 21.7 GB. So you probably won't need anywhere near that much (I'd say around 100-150 MB, like BD suggested.)

Anyway, that's about all I got to say 'bout that (oh yeah, and http://www.sectorlink.com is the best host EVER...I'm not just saying that either.)

I concede to your experience of Hostgator, it sounds as if they've grown too big took quick and employing monkies to keep costs down

Hey, those monkeys can be useful. Who else is gonna refill the tech support pop machine?

Well, cost isn't as big an issue for me personally as it is for the condo association, they ARE on a tight budget, so costs have to be kept to a minimum. I don't see the site as getting a huge amount of traffic, but since they've come to me to build the site and they know nothing about hosting, I want to be sure that they have something that will allow them some growth w/o the risk of being charged ridiculous excess-bandwidth charges. I don't foresee email as a problem either, at the very most these people MIGHT want a webmail account, but I rather doubt that. Probably use it more as a vehicle for inquiries when an owner has a unit for sale or similar. A large number of the residents here are retirees, and most are not tech savvy. That could easily change over the years, so this thing needs to have room to grow. The classifieds section would likely only be a few ads between residents only, I don't see a big growth factor there and updates via a blog would be maybe a couple of times a month, unless someone decides to get chatty.. lol.

For my personal hosting, well, my needs could grow for the geneaology - some photos, some narrative, etc. but I have no intention of doing any sort of blogging beyond that, I just don't see the point in a blog for myself.. who the heck would read it ??? Again, I want enough space and bandwidth so that it can accommodate me for a while, AND avoid any chance of excess bandwidth charges. I don't want to spend a fortune on hosting either.. call me cheap if you like .

Oh, and HostGator is on WHReview's "Honest Hosts" list...

The words "fly by night" come to mind.

Overselling, yes, virtually without limit. It's simply the new definition of budget hosting, as much as we may hate it. Fly by night? I'm not necessarily a fan of WHB, but fact is they've been around for 5+ years.

That taken out of our way, I most definitely agree that one has no need to hunt for huge packages when the foreseeable needs are actually limited.

Interesting enough is that it is in these "overselling hosts" best interest to be able to support at least some people's websites. It's a life's (or marketing's) irony I guess that these hosts, who on the surface would seem to specialise in hosting huge sites, in fact specialise in hosting relatively small sites, so that on average, they use only $3-$10 worth of everything. Some of these hosts do allow people to use huge amounts though. I've read accounts of people using hundreds of GB of space, and a good number of TBs of data transfer, but that's only possible with simple file transfers (images, videos), that use virtually nothing in terms of CPU and memory.

Choose Webhostingbuzz? If the huge allocations at $5 are the only reasons, no. And that goes for any host.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Well, cost isn't as big an issue for me personally as it is for the condo association, they ARE on a tight budget, so costs have to be kept to a minimum. I don't see the site as getting a huge amount of traffic, but since they've come to me to build the site and they know nothing about hosting, I want to be sure that they have something that will allow them some growth w/o the risk of being charged ridiculous excess-bandwidth charges. I don't foresee email as a problem either, at the very most these people MIGHT want a webmail account, but I rather doubt that. Probably use it more as a vehicle for inquiries when an owner has a unit for sale or similar. A large number of the residents here are retirees, and most are not tech savvy. That could easily change over the years, so this thing needs to have room to grow. The classifieds section would likely only be a few ads between residents only, I don't see a big growth factor there and updates via a blog would be maybe a couple of times a month, unless someone decides to get chatty.. lol.

Even then, the site's target market clearly has a ceiling, and not a very high one (i.e. the residents of the condo association). Depending on how the condo is set up for wifi, it's theoretically possible to design a site that they could host themselves on a cheap box and a static IP.

Mind you, that really depends.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

For my personal hosting, well, my needs could grow for the geneaology - some photos, some narrative, etc. but I have no intention of doing any sort of blogging beyond that, I just don't see the point in a blog for myself.. who the heck would read it ??? Again, I want enough space and bandwidth so that it can accommodate me for a while, AND avoid any chance of excess bandwidth charges. I don't want to spend a fortune on hosting either.. call me cheap if you like .

I'd read your blog, but only if you talked web standards in one of those sweet southern voices. Come on, darlin...it's late Saturday night. Be naughty and talk accessibility to me.

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Oh, and HostGator is on WHReview's "Honest Hosts" list...

They can be on any list they want. They still suck. And that's based on my review...which, as has been proven many times in the past around here, is the only one that matters (all of your opinions are just window dressing until I put my two cents in. )

I'd read your blog LadynRed, I'm sure you would have lots of interesting and valuable things to write about!

Budgets - the condo people have a tight budget which is fair enough, but how tight is tight? $10 a month is the equivilent of a pack of cigarettes here in the UK and in all honesty that's small change - even in the US of A $120 a year for permenant "advertising", a place for clients to interact, and show their offerings to the world is affordable I'd say.

Let's take Unitedhosting as an example. They have an extremely good reputation for service and support which is the number one thing to consider. Their basic hosting plan is $8/mo and for that you get 200mb space and 5gb bandwidth. From what you say their requirements are their is ample disk space for their site with room for steady growth. The bandwidth I reckon is more than ample - one of my personal sites get's 1,000,000 page views a year and only burns around 3gb per month at about 500 visitors per day, I can hardly see the condo site reaching anywhere near that. Even if they do burst their bandwidth one month (IMO unlikely at 5gb) then 1gb will cost $1.50 - just two coins from your pocket!

It's a minefield isn't it? So many choices, so many different price ranges.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Hey, those monkeys can be useful. Who else is gonna refill the tech support pop machine?

he he - it's what they do when all the pop machines are full! You can imagine the boss "hey you're not doing any work - go and fill in on the support desk for a while"