Web Hosting

[tj333]

I'm currently looking a web hosting for RPG that should be going live around March. I'm thinking host the document on it, a forum, and some other small stuff.

What I'm getting at is I'm wondering what kind of hosting people around here are using for there sites. Or is it even woth the effort to host my own?
I can and will later on distribute thrue online publishing sites. So my site can to a certain degree come down to only marketing. Does anyone here see any use from their websites in terms of marketing?

Currently I'm looking at textdrive.com with a $400 for lifetime hosting deal on now. Now looking at other places I can get 6-12 years ($5-10 a month) of hosting for that price that look like they would also handle my needs to great degree. Now I don't really know what my needs are.

[tj333]

Slap me up side the head for this (At you own travel expenses.) but I used the search feature and gopt a lot of hosting solutions.

So now the question is down to how much space/bandwidth do people use for their sites.
Does 100 megs and 1GB bandwidth a month cover it? Or do I need more?

[Josh Roby]

Dreamhost.  Dreamhost.  Dreamhost.

Get their smallest package, expand as needed.

[jerry]

So now the question is down to how much space/bandwidth do people use for their sites.
Does 100 megs and 1GB bandwidth a month cover it? Or do I need more?

What's going to be on the site? If you're putting up a 300 megabyte PDF file, and you expect more than 3 people to download it in any given month, 1 GB won't cover it; if you're putting up a 30 kb HTML file, you could get more than 33,000 downloads in a month at 1 GB.

I don't automatically generate monthly statistics for the Gods & Monsters portion of my web site (http://www.godsmonsters.com/), but yesterday's use statistics were 23.03 megabytes for 661 requests. For any normal web site, that's kinda crazy, but for a site with PDF downloads it is less so. Ten PDF downloads accounted for 13% of that total. I also have some extremely high quality PNF files of the covers available.

Code Select Expand

reqs: %bytes: extension
----: ------: ---------
222: 63.70%: .html [Hypertext Markup Language]
  10: 12.84%: .pdf  [Adobe Portable Document Format]
171: 11.75%: [directories]
  55:  6.33%: .gif  [GIF graphics]
  90:  2.33%: .png  [PNG graphics]
  12:  1.45%: .jpg  [JPEG graphics]
  91:  1.01%: .css  [Cascading Style Sheets]
   6:  0.57%: .gz   [Gzip compressed files]
   6:  0.57%:   .rtf.gz
   1:  0.02%: .php  [PHP]
   2:  0.01%: .js   [JavaScript code]


On the other hand, a lot of that is HTML traffic because I get hits from people doing weird searches that happen to hit the game supplements.

creating a giant spider web for outdoors
gods for every day of the week
andrew sherratt teaching
information on psychic powers
images of tane and tangaroa
blowing fire healing matthew
good and evil vs moral choice
planet alveron
average person eats eight spiders (yum!)
increase physical strength with psychic

I get quite few of the "tane and tangaroa" sort--people doing pantheon searches. This searcher didn't get what they were looking for, because I don't have images of either of them. On the other hand, I also get lots of hits from poker and other spam sites, too, though.

At 23 megabytes per day, that's about 700 megabytes a month; if this were the only thing on my site, I'd probably want to either get a hosting provider with very inexpensive overage charges, or with somewhat more than 1 GB per month bandwidth limits.

Jerry

[Owen]

I actually have both TextDrive and DreamHost for two different sites.  My experiences have been good, but they are distinctly different.  TextDrive is more expensive, but they're very responsive and very helpful if you want to set up something non-standard.  Also, they donate some of their profit to Open Source, which was a motivating factor for me.  Dreamhost, on the other hand, is cheaper, still has good service (though I still think TextDrive has the edge), but is not as flexible with custom scripts/backends/CGIs, etc.

[Nathan]

I offer a for gamer, by gamer webhosting service for "next-to-nothing". Lately, I've been picking up some non-profit accounts though.

Check it out here:
http://www.rpgshelf.net/

[tj333]

Thanks Jerry. Thats exactly what I was looking for. You're website seems to be a lot of what I'm going for so that should give me a good idea of what I need.


Nathan: That's certainly one of the better offers that I've seen recently for hosting.

[Keith Sears]

I've been using jatol.com for the past few years, using their smallest package at only $30 a year. It's proven to be a perfect fit so far. PHP and CGI is supported, complete with a MySQL database and 10 email addresses. Tech support has proven to be dilligent and very responsive.

[guildofblades]

If you need a bit more bandwitdh, xwebhost.com gives you 1 gib of web space and 10 gig of bandwidth per month at their lowest plan at $7.50/month. Its very affordable. Scale up as needed.
Though fair warning, customer service is a bit slow at times...

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com