Very Cheap Web Hosting

TopLevelComp said:
I thought about taking the plunge, but I'd rather pay for hosting and not have to worry about it if hardware fails, especially if it's a spare machine that I don't have any parts for, or can't find parts for.
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I would use two machines with one being a hot spare.
 
I use FutureQuest and love them. 16 months so far without a problem of any kind, and on the few occasions that I've needed customer support it's been prompt, friendly, and efficient. Just under $10/month, but there are easy ways to make that even cheaper. I quickly found 2 local organisations which wanted to have websites but were on very tight budgets, so I quoted them a good price to design them and offered to host them on my FutureQuest account in parallel with my business site. The money I get from the two of them for hosting fees covers the $10/month, so for all intents and purposes the hosting for my site is free (although there is a modest one time fee each time I add a new site to my account).

For anyone who maybe has not heard of putting more than one site on a hosting account, here is a link to the information from futurequest. I'm sure there are other hosts which allow the same thing, I'm just familiar with this one.
 
jeubank said:
1. It is impossible for your ISP to block port 80.. that is every browser out there.. would mean, you get no internet at all.

(speaking on behalf of over 100 dedicated hosting accounts i have created over the united states, dealing with multiple ISPs)

2. A fail over generator.... hmm.. I didnt hear him say he didnt have one, nor that he did. however, Having said that. based upon your power company, demographics, natural disaster area, etc.. power outages are rare and infrequent. The mathematical probability that the power will go out, through power failure, just at the time a potential customer is hoping on the site, is unlikely.

3. Internet goes offline.. True.. but can be fixed with Dynamic DNS (which is free) and a free host like.. 000webhost or something, that runs a dynamic backup. Dynamic DNS cant ping the server, sends it to the next. simple and easy. But my internet has not gone done for 7 months.. and when it did, it was 40 minutes.

4. Hardware of any kind... errr. this is true for shared hosting. Find me a Hosting plan, dedicated or shared.. that this doesnt happen.. and I can show you a liar. hardware dies. Its the nature of our business. It puts food on our plates.

5. Overage on allowed bandwitdh for internet plan.. hmm. unless he is streaming Video and competing with youtube, we can ignore this. Plus, if he is in United States, we dont have such limits (the few cities and companies that do that.. well.. theres always 10 other companies that do not)

Remeber - the idea was the cheapest way to get a website up.

Shared Hosting = There rules, there server, what they support, what they do not, the languages you can use, the file permissions you can set, and the other 100 shared hosting accounts on the same box, fighting for the CPU / ram / Bandwitdh

your box = whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. All the power of your Celeron 800MHZ 256MB of ram 20 year old PC - at your will.. Is much faster then any Shared hosting plan.

I speak from 14 years of experience in this field. Hundreds of Business clients respect it. They love it. I love it as a developer. I have never had an issue.
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Again, it may be the cheapest, but it is surely not the most beneficial. Also you may want to research some of your points, for example port 80. Many ISP's block INCOMING connections to port 80 on residential plans.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=isp+block+port+80
 
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ProTech Support said:
Again, it may be the cheapest, but it is surely not the most beneficial. Also you may want to research some of your points, for example port 80. Many ISP's block INCOMING connections to port 80 on residential plans.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=isp+block+port+80
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I just find Shared hosting just garbage. Sharing resources with another 99 websites? Or the fact that i have to use the libraries they give me, rather than what i need as a developer. (PHP 4 instead of 5 for example).

Not able to execute .exe's on the server (some developments i have done, require an exe to be run)

Its just a pain. I prefer a fast, dedicated machine. Now i have talked to customers into paying for a dedicated plan as you can get a dedicated server for $30 month (this is for complex websites, with some decent traffic that required the ability to load other than CGI scripts or perl.)

But as i have said. Never had a problem with ISPs blocking ports.
 
Don't particularly like shared hosting either. Dedicated webhosting is by far better and not that much more of an expense. If you really want to do some serious business and not just a fun blog for friends and family then dedicated is the choice you go for.
 
lewisg said:
Don't particularly like shared hosting either. Dedicated webhosting is by far better and not that much more of an expense. If you really want to do some serious business and not just a fun blog for friends and family then dedicated is the choice you go for.
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Not sure where you get it not being much more expensive.

Dedicated hosting is a lot more expensive. If you were referring to the VPS offerings on the site you linked, they are practically no different than shared hosting. Instead of sharing the same process and such, you are running an entire OS multiple times on the same computer. A lot more overhead.

Fact is, shared hosting makes the most sense for most people. If you are doing serious development, then it will probably not be the best way to deploy an application. However, most shared hosts will install anything you need or request. They probably wont upgrade PHP for you, but if you need a library for it, they should. On the other hand, my WordPress site or the business I am hosting with 5 static pages, dedicated hosting would be a complete and utter waste of money.

But as i have said. Never had a problem with ISPs blocking ports.
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Your ISP will not block your ability to connect to port 80 on another machine, but I can guarantee you that running any sort of server on any port that is publicly available is against your residential terms of service and some residential ISPs will block access to port 80 being served from their network. If this is on your business plan, then it is probably allowed.
 
MrUnknown said:
Not sure where you get it not being much more expensive.

Dedicated hosting is a lot more expensive. If you were referring to the VPS offerings on the site you linked, they are practically no different than shared hosting. Instead of sharing the same process and such, you are running an entire OS multiple times on the same computer. A lot more overhead.

Fact is, shared hosting makes the most sense for most people. If you are doing serious development, then it will probably not be the best way to deploy an application. However, most shared hosts will install anything you need or request. They probably wont upgrade PHP for you, but if you need a library for it, they should. On the other hand, my WordPress site or the business I am hosting with 5 static pages, dedicated hosting would be a complete and utter waste of money.



Your ISP will not block your ability to connect to port 80 on another machine, but I can guarantee you that running any sort of server on any port that is publicly available is against your residential terms of service and some residential ISPs will block access to port 80 being served from their network. If this is on your business plan, then it is probably allowed.
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+1 i think we would all like dedicated hosting if we could afford and justify it. Websites of our nature will never have the traffic that requires a dedicated server. If your server is overloaded ask for your site to be moved. I have a link somewhere to show you how many sites are on your server although it doesn't tell you the loading of each.
 
I'm using ipage right now because they offer free domain with hosting and only $2.95 per month. I'm located in Australia, so you guys from the US should know of them. Anyone using them?


Regards,
 
I use Netfirms for my hosting, and it's a business account ($130 a year), but I can resell it also, which I do. I have 3 customers now, paying $50 per year each, so I'm making a small profit and domains are $9.99, my first domain is free also. They have a lot of features for site hosting, which are pretty good for more advanced websites.
 
Godaddy Fanboy here. I generally despise fanboys, but I am what I am. Everything that you could want for hosting, web development, SEO, Logo Services etc.. They do a lot, and they do a lot well. Also, there service and support is top-notch. But to be fair, I mostly use them for domain/web hosting which is the topic of this thread. Oh yeah, they are cheap. :)
 
OldSchoolPC said:
Godaddy Fanboy here. I generally despise fanboys, but I am what I am. Everything that you could want for hosting, web development, SEO, Logo Services etc.. They do a lot, and they do a lot well. Also, there service and support is top-notch. But to be fair, I mostly use them for domain/web hosting which is the topic of this thread. Oh yeah, they are cheap. :)
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I am pretty surprised to hear that. Specifically about the support. I have nothing against them, but a lot of my customers have nothing good to say about their support. Usually they switch over to me for that exact reason. That is interesting to hear. How long have you been with them?
 
ProTech Support said:
I am pretty surprised to hear that. Specifically about the support. I have nothing against them, but a lot of my customers have nothing good to say about their support. Usually they switch over to me for that exact reason.
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+1 here... We get a lot of people who are tired of dealing with the "Big" hosting providers, not just Go Daddy...

We may be a couple bucks more, but our clients, mostly local businesses, prefer to host with a local company with local support... Especially since we own our own servers and aren't simply a reseller like a lot of providers... If something "Breaks", we can actually fix it. We don't wait for our resale provider to fix it...
 
ProTech Support said:
I am pretty surprised to hear that. Specifically about the support. I have nothing against them, but a lot of my customers have nothing good to say about their support. Usually they switch over to me for that exact reason. That is interesting to hear. How long have you been with them?
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+1 On Godaddy Support. I've got 10 sites hosted there. They are very helpful. They've helped me fix problems that were 100% my fault...
 
Ten Yard Fight said:
+1 On Godaddy Support. I've got 10 sites hosted there. They are very helpful. They've helped me fix problems that were 100% my fault...
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I hate dealing with godaddy support. I have a lot of sites hosted there and there are always problems. Their support (email) sends canned responses no matter what you ask. I had one issue where I couldn't ping 3 of my sites and the cPanel just errored out. I sent screencaps of all issues and their response was infuriating along the lines of "please ensure you're connected to the internet, typing the right address", etc. Luckily I have a friend in tier 2 support, but don't bother with email.
 
I have used godaddy, hated the support. Switched to Yahoo, support okay but they block access to .htaccess and most server side stuff.

I recently started using Protech Hosting and I can say that it has been the best bang for my buck, and ever single service request or general request has been answered with outstanding speed.
 
jeubank said:
For the absolute cheapest way of starting a website. As well as having the most control, and best performance.

Put your website on a desktop you are not using. Make it your web server. Even if it is 8 years old - You will get better performance (in terms of running scripts, multiple users, etc) than a shared hosting plan.
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I agree, this is one fof the cheapest and having the most control.

I have setup web server with dynamic IP address for more than 15 years and haven't run across an ISP blocking port 80. But if that's an issue, simply switch ISP or do port redirect. Some ISP does Traffic Control/QOS type but it's slowly being remove due to online backup. if I happen to notice an ISP is blocking port 80 for my client, I will switch them ASAP. Too many application will stop working. It's not worth it. but then again, I've never seen it in the real world

Then there an issue with ISP down means web server down. You need to do a study how often your net is down. If it's down too often then you might want to switch ISP. Don't get me wrong, it's important for the web server to be online but it's more important for me to have access to the net for my online support to work.

Another issue - System failure!. Being a technician I'm hoping you have more than one computer and spare router. If so setup Virtual PC (free since the last time I check). Setup the web server in Virtual PC and back up the 3 files. In the even of system failure, replace the PC, install virtual PC, copy three files then your up and running. Possibly much faster the any restore.

Just imagine the possibility of having your own webserver. If you want blog, install MySQL and Wordpress (free). Some hosting service charge extra. You want PHP, install PHP. Again extra for other hosting. Need old extension like frontpage, no need to search a hosting company, simply install the extension (I don't know why you would do that but you can), want to design website for clients, simply create another site on your webserver wihout additioanl cost. Much easier to troubleshoot. Lots of advatages and bet of all Cheap if not free!
 
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