The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Coloc or Web Hosting?

Hi all. Me and a friend are currently running a little side-buisiness server up websites on a server at a colocation site.

I've recently been looking into cheaper options, and was astonished to find some prices that seem to good to be true. One place offers a package for $10/mo with just about everything I can think of... ws03 hosting, email, SSL, Perl, SQL Server, 24 hr support, daily backup, a handfull of third-party components, and they even supposedly let you register your own COM objects.

I can't figure out how they can do all that for $10. Any ideas?

Also, are there any good reasons for sticking with the coloc I can't think of? All of our web apps should work fine at this place. Might there be privacy issues or something?

Jesse
Saturday, April 17, 2004

Well something has to give, no one wants to give great service and quick turn around time to anything if you only pay them $10 a month.

Your source and data are at risk of being mishandled if you don't manage it yourself.

Li-fan Chen
Saturday, April 17, 2004

I've also had bad experiences with a particular web hosting company that shall go un-named. Suffice it to say, 99% uptime meant 1% downtime, and if you do the math, 1% is 8 hours a month.

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, April 17, 2004

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ <-- lots to learn here

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, April 17, 2004

Sweet, thanks for the link.

Yeah, I'm torn on this issue. I'd like to have the control, but I don't want the responsibility ;-)

Jesse
Saturday, April 17, 2004

I have seen some problems with PHP and web hosting. PHP tends to have frequent upgrades that actually change the paramters of functions. So every few months without warning the web host will upgrade PHP and the client's PHP applications will start breaking.

At least if you control your own server *you* can decide when to upgrade it. Hopefully after testing!

Matthew Lock
Saturday, April 17, 2004

The cheaper options are probably "shared" systems where they literally host hundreds or thousands of sites on one machine. This makes the assumption that each customer will individually require very few resources. If you ever start using more bandwidth, RAM, or CPU than most, you'll be forced to upgrade to a more expensive plan, or dropped entirely.

This happened to us - our "shared" site started using up quite a bit of bandwidth, but instead of dealing with the problem, say by offering us a more expensive but more capable service plan, the host told us we were "crashing their server" (with just plain static HTML???) and took our site down.

On the good side we've had a great time with dinix.com, which has fully dedicated systems for $100-$200/month. As long as you know how to install & operate the software you need, it's a nicer option.

Dan Maas
Saturday, April 17, 2004