Website Hosting Server

[Syka]

Since my google-fu is failing me at everything except finding ARTICLES about what servers to use, I turn to you, Playgrounders.

For my business plan, I wanted to budget in the cost of having server. It would be similar to the set up Giant has (where it's managed by the server company rather than myself, I just kinda stick mystuff on to it). I don't want to use one of those free hosting sites. It will also likely end up being bandwidth intensive after the first year or so, due to the content we will have on the site.

So if someone could point me in the direction of a company where I could get estimates, that would be lovely.

[Zeb The Troll]

This isn't really my thing, but this site (http://www.upperhost.com/) has a 10 Best listing with links. Also, pretty much any domain registration site (like GoDaddy (https://www.godaddy.com/) or Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com/)) will offer web hosting as well.

Hope that's helpful.

[Ashtar]

My dad has his website on i-power (http://www.ipower.com/). Where he has the basic $3.95/mo. deal and that's amply sufficient for his needs.

My guess is on how much you need to support your business. And how fast you need it to be capable of scaling in case of you get slashdotted or dugg.

[Syka]

Ashtar, I'm skeptical of companies offering unlimted space and bandwidth. No offense meant.

Zeb, thanks for those links. I just need an idea of what prices will be like.

Basically, I need to ballpark it and make an educated guess. That's what most of this project is anyway, haha.

If my site could get dugged or slashdotted or any other thing that gets it high traffic, I'm ALL for that. Web is going to be one of our main venues of business.

[Mr. Mud]

Ashtar, I'm skeptical of companies offering unlimted space and bandwidth. No offense meant.

Zeb, thanks for those links. I just need an idea of what prices will be like.

Basically, I need to ballpark it and make an educated guess. That's what most of this project is anyway, haha.

If my site could get dugged or slashdotted or any other thing that gets it high traffic, I'm ALL for that. Web is going to be one of our main venues of business.

GoDaddy, is the best from what I hear.

Make sure you link us to it whenever you finish :smallbiggrin:. What kind of business is it, anyway?

[Syka]

Oh, it'll be a few years before it gets up and running. Or heck, before the company even begins.

Basically it's a film production company, so we need a website. Trailers for our movies and all that, plus a place to send people for info on us. If we're able to make it on the festival circuit, the site will probably end up with a fair amount of traffic. Jury is out on whether or not we will include viral content.

If we go the way of Paranormal Activity, our site would die, lol. We're supposed to plan from the perspective of being successful, so I'd rather our site not crash if we make it over night. ;)

Trust me, if this ends up working out you guys will know. It means I'll be a big famous producer. :smallwink:

[AstralFire]

GoDaddy is good service, but expensive. I'm getting ready to switch over to InMotion from reviews, from a small company I grew this site up with. The biggest price difference between the high quality hosting sites and the low quality ones of similar listed features seems to be that the high quality ones require your money up front for lower end stuff, while the LQ are more likely to take monthly payments for anything. They both tend to average out to similar costs.

You're more immediately looking to spike your bandwidth than I am, however; my site was historically text primary, and its upgrade to a comic format is still considerably less intensive than being a video provider, so I'm not looking for exactly the same things you are. That said, InMotion has extremely few complaints that I've found and offers the entire gamut of hosting packages from geocities+ to high traffic professional, so.

[valadil]

I've been using Dreamhost for a couple years and I'm reasonably happy with them. I pay $10 a month. Last I checked that gave me 300gb of disk and far more bandwidth than I actually needed.

They aren't perfect. I tried setting up a tomcat server and they shut that down real quick. They really expect you to be using php for just about everything. I have a couple pages that use python and I think they support ruby too, but they're largely meant for php.

The thing is, most web programming is done with php. If you're going to install blog or CMS software, quite a bit of it is based on php and uses mysql for storage. If that's what you want, Dreamhost is a perfectly reasonable solution. Feel free to PM me for a referrer code (which should save you some money on signup, although I'm not sure how much).