Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

I've moved the servers over from Powweb.com to my new host at ixwebhosting.com. I now have unlimited space and 2000 gb of bandwidth. My previous hosting runs out at the end of the month. Some posts were lost from the 24th, sorry about that. Only posts made in the hour after I copied the forums were lost. Also, there may be some bugs. Like the Emoticons, but I'll have them fixed. Enjoy the new servers. :)

Yay! Hopefully we'll start seeing fewer pesky errors. :P

Hmm..That explains why I can't see a darn thing but the text boxes.

That would explain why a bunch of my posts vanished...oh well.

same here. Meh, oh well. just do them again.

Would that explain what happened to my Firefox 2.0 post? I just noticed that it was gone. :<

Hi Tom,

I am definitely a big fan of the comic and I always enjoy reading it. :)

I just want to make a few comments about the choice of host for one of my favorite comics.

1) While I have no personal experience with ixwebhosting.com, I did find the following that might be interesting.

http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/IXWebHosting
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=554707
http://www.findhosts.com/sharedwebhosti ... sting.html

2) Generally speaking of the industry as a whole, there is literally no such thing as unlimited resources and many will tell you to do more research if the term unlimited is used to describe disk space/storage or data transfer/bandwidth quotas.(Bandwidth is technically the measurement of transfer speed of a link in megabits per second. It is commonly and incorrectly used to refer to a transfer quota instead of a speed measurement).

The more accepted industry term is unmetered, but this could also be a cause for concern if used with shared webhosting (e.g. not a dedicated server or dedicated environment).

The limits imposed by the physical size of their hard drives will prevent them from allowing you to store an unlimited amount of data on their drives. Limits will be imposed either by quota (more common) or by policy in Terms of Service with restrictions on what you do with the unlimited space.

Restrictions commonly include:

No storage of files that aren't downloadable. (Using it as a remote storage space for temporary files.)
No storage of downloadable content that isn't linked by an HTML document.

Many even restrict what types of websites you can run on the service to keep their bandwidth and disk space utilization lower.

In short, there are limits on how much you can use and how you can use it.

---

If you would like to see more examples of when unlimited is very much limited even by large corporations try the following link:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/78600
http://digg.com/tech_news/Verizon_Unlim ... ur_account
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2 ... mited.html

----

Got to look out for one of my favorite comics. :)

Edit: Forgot to mention the following.

I am a big fan of phpBB, but it does have its flaws and one of those is a flawed registration captcha implementation that has been cracked. (Robots can read it via image analysis techniques rendering it broken.)

The mirror of a former project called PWNtcha located here will show some of what I am talking about.

A modification to one of the better captcha implementations may be needed to prevent spambot registrations. (Just because they haven't been here doesn't mean they won't be here eventually.)

and THAT is it all for this post. :)

Zach-

Did you notice that some of those reviews were not only very old but the rating system was obviously flawed?

They had people that gave great reviews but a 1 star rating. And some that gave horrible reviews with a 5 star rating.

Ive been using ixwebhosting for nearly a year now (11 months) - and have I had problems? Yeah - I had 98.1% uptime - and they gave me a free month of service because of it. They had one major server crash that set me back a bit. But their customer service fixed it in under 24 hours. And that was the whole freakn server was fried by lightning and they brought in all new equipment to replace it.

Now about their "Unlimited Space" - I had tried testing it. At one point i had nearlly 40 GBs on the server (putting up duplicate Anime Fan subs as a test). No problem (took a chunk of bandwidth though since the bandwidth is both up and down stream and not just down). So it put a dent in my 500GBs per month. But it all went up no problem. The "actual" space is over a TeraByte! I don't think Microsoft has over a Terabyte of information ready for download on their main site server.

They also recently upgraded everything- Service, packages (moving the 500GB bandwidth to 2000GB as well as other features), better domain hosting and more. They keep adding more and they keep the price low.

Some people will have problems- thats true with everything but so far you cannot beat the price for what you get- other places don't even offer GBs of space or more than 500GBs of bandwidth. They charge you a lot for it and charge you through the teeth for bandwidth over your allocated amount.

Hi Sage,

I do not particularly pay attention to the * value of the review so much as what was written. Forums such as webhostingtalk.com also provide a good idea of how well a webhosting provider does by allowing people to voice their concerns or praise in a public place.

One of the great parts of this type of system is the fact that dirty laundry doesn't simply go away, but is still there in case a company doesn't change their ways. :)

Yes, yes I know it is more likely that someone will air dirty laundry more than praise. It is important to take what is put there with a grain of salt, but this is where sticking with a trusted review and personal experience can come in.



The server was fried by lightning...

A computer in a home that wasn't on proper equipment might be fried by lightning, but a server should be in a facility that has no concern over lightning or power outages due to their power infrastructure. Can there be power outages even with a fully redundant power system? Most certainly.

I've seen power outages inside 20 million dollar facilities in Texas, but as of yet I haven't seen a server fried by lightning inside them.

Since you mentioned outdated reviews:

http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/I/ixwebhosting.com/

and..

from October 16th:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=555217

I would also take what certain websites say with a grain of salt. A situation like this could easily be going on:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/we ... y-laundry/



Every provider will have problems at some point or another, but what is important is what problems are you going to run into?

Lets take a look at different kinds of webhosting as a whole.

Shared/virtual:

We see providers such as:

DreamHost.com - $7.95 per month for 200GB disk space and 2000GB data transfer.

IX Web Hosting.com - $12.95 per month for an undefined amount of disk space and 2000GB of data transfer.

Canaca.com - $16.95 per month for 240GB of disk space and 1700GB of data transfer.

Virtual Private Servers/Virtual Dedicated Servers:

SolarVPS.com - $80 per month for 30GB of disk space and 500GB of data transfer.

Dedicated Servers:

EV1Servers.net - $250 per month for 250GB of disk space and 1500GB of data transfer

Tranxactglobal.com/GNAX - $159.99 per month for 160GB of disk space and 2000GB of data transfer.

The point I want to make with this comparison is that the quotas offered by the first three are at a very different price point than the other solutions.

The first three are still subject to the same requirements as the the rest and are still subject to the same limitations as the rest of the industry.

The question comes to mind: How are they selling it so much more cheaply than everyone else? Buying in bulk obviously lowers prices, but to what point?

The obvious answer is that they are overselling. They are selling more space and selling more data transfer than they currently have available.

Done properly overselling isn't so bad as it keeps prices lower for everyone. Lets say that XYZ Phantom Hosting buys their servers from Dell at a very good price and colocates them in a very good facility at a good price.

Their cost per GB of data transfer is somewhere around $0.35 by the time all hardware costs are taken into account. Disk space in their servers is quality due to their attention to RAIDed hard drives to prevent downtime and their use of SATA or SCSI disks which are much faster. Disk space cost is about $0.20 per GB as they also provide NAS backups for all accounts just in case of a complete disaster.

To provide accounts at cost the plans might look like this:

10GB of disk space - $2.50
100GB of data transfer - $35
Total cost: $37.50 per month at cost

By overselling they can reduce this because in most cases people will purchase 20 - 30% more than they need for a cushion. This will add up as more accounts are added to the server to the point where the host can make a calculated decision to sell more than is available on the server and then carefully monitor the situation to ensure that nothing goes wrong.

By overselling the host could push their pricing down as low as they like or even sell more for the same price if they wanted to.

I hope this helps to clarify my point. :)

Kinda Glad you brought that up - My friend has been saying he's been wanting to try stuff with Ruby on Rails. And IXWEB doesn't support Ruby on Rails.

So-- what do you think of that DreamHost? Would you recommend that?

Hi Sage,

I think you've completely missed the point of all this, but hopefully you will get my point too. :)

Would I recommend any host that offers disk space or data transfer quotas that would normally cost hundreds of dollars per month for $10.00 - $20.00 per month? No.

Ruby on Rails in itself is best treated like Tomcat/JSP in that it needs to be handled very very carefully or you'll see issues.

Would I trust Ruby on Rails in a shared environment (not a VPS/VDS) at all? That really depends on the host and how much faith I had in their overall security plan. Ruby on Rails requires shell (SSH) access and I tend to shy away from providers that freely hand it out to everyone due to the problems it can cause.

To specifically answer your question:

No, I would not recommend any host specifically. Ruby on Rails is not something I like in a shared/virtual environment. I'm not all that fond of Ruby on Rails as a whole anyway, but that is another matter entirely.

With that in mind you really should find a host that is extremely focused on Ruby on Rails as it is a niche that takes a bit of knowledge to handle.

Ah i get it - so you would only recommend we pay hundreds of dollars a month on something we don't make hundreds of dollars on. That makes a lot of sense for a hobby you know. Because you know Tom doesn't have a job and would have to rely on donations or ads while really he doesn't want to do something like that.

And buying a server with another person usually leads to trouble when one doesnt come through with the money.

So basically all you can do is type about the servers but cant offer and decent advice except to in a nutshell say "lol your hosting sucks you should spend 200 dollars a month instead of 12!"

Your point is you don't have a point. You just wanna talk about servers but not in a helpful sense. You want to make it looks like using a shared host is a bad idea even though its the only thing he can afford... How does that sound to you? Would you rather pay 200 dollars for a bag of 12 apples or would you rather pay .50 cents for each apple?

Hi Sage,



The examples I put in my earlier post were meant to show what the resource quotas sold by the virtual/shared providers were compared with other offerings within the industry that offer similar quotas.

I never meant to seem like I was recommending a dedicated server over virtual hosting for any website hosted at the shared providers.



Why is advertising suddenly a dirty word?

Text based advertising from Google or Yahoo is considered by many to be responsible advertising. It can be customized to blend in with the site design quite nicely and can be put to the side where it merely compliments content on the site instead of becoming the content on the site.

If advertising isn't your thing then that is fine too.



I am almost certain there is no need for a server of your own in a sense of a virtual private server or a dedicated server. Lets take a quick look at the bandwidth a site of this kind might use and then find something.

The front page seems to range between 600 - 800KB per page load. That is a bit on the large side for a normal web page, but this is a comic so lets work with that.

800KB * 1000 views == 800MB.

Lets assume that every image is downloaded on each page load just for the sake of math.

Can I estimate how many people view this comic? Not reliably, but I can pull numbers out of thin air that seem right.

Lets say there are 50,000 page views per month on the main page.

50 * 800MB = 40GB.

The quotas that are being purchased just don't seem to match up to what the website might need.

Using 50GB - 100GB is still considerable bandwidth, but it is most certainly manageable.

Can you find decent bandwidth within a budget of $10 - $20 per month that can meet the quotas required?

That depends on what features you require/want and if you're willing to approach buying a webhosting account from a provider that doesn't oversell to an extreme amount.



This has happened more times than I can count and I completely agree. :)



I am trying to be helpful, but it is sometimes difficult to be helpful. :)

Using a shared provider is an excellent solution and sometimes I even recommend people buy reseller accounts over a virtual private server because it fits their situation.

My point isn't that shared providers as a whole are bad, but that shared providers that oversell so much are bad.

Realistic quotas that are oversold just to reduce prices are completely okay with me. I just don't think that offering as in resources as a dedicated server is responsible overselling and I have tried to make that point clear.

In the end it is always up to you and this information's sole purpose is to offer information so you can make an informed choice.



Unfortunately webhosting can't very accurately be compared to apples, but I will certainly give it a try. :)

Lets say you're walking down a street of Apple sellers and each has a very nice stand with helpful people to tell you about their apples. You are walking along and you decide to take notes of each sellers' prices. You start on the left side of the street and start taking down prices of how many apples are in each box for how many dollars.

At the end of the street on the right side you see an amazing deal of 200 apples for $0.50 when everyone else offers them for $50.00.

In this example the reason the example doesn't quite work is because no matter what the apple merchant still has to give you a set number of apples and is still out the same amount of apples.

A better example would be an all you can eat apple buffet. Lets say the resturant buys their apples for $50 per 200 apples.

You pay $20 to come in and eat all the apples you can while you are there.

They expect most to eat less than $20 worth of apples while they are there so they can offer you as much as you want (unmetered) for a lower price.

The decision you have to make is: Would you buy from a provider that sells something like 200 apples for $0.50, one that sells the apples for 200 for $50.00, or the one that restircts you on where/how you can eat the applies but gives you all can eat for $20.00?

I do mean to be helpful and I want to answer any questions I can. I do apologize if I sound a bit short at times, but its been a hectic week. ;)

No you just sound like a blubbering kid trying to make sense out of paying a ton of money when making money as if there were some easy way to fix everything.

Im not going to pick apart your post and make comments about each little sentence as you seem to enjoy doing as if it lets you completely answer everything. You didnt answer anything you just let the same old thing drop out of your mouth like a drooling dog.

If you have a solution for a problem then say it - dont think talking about a nonexistent problem is going to help.

See if you had just posted "Dont use that host- do this instead and you can pay for it by doing this" -- that might be helpful. Instead you practically spam the board.

Oh and for a rough estimate- My comic has had over 8 million hits in the past year-- thats roughly 65K-68K per month- Tom gets probably double/tripple that- and growing twice as fast-- he had been pushing 300GBs to its limit on some months so you can do your math again and see how much that would cost...

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure all this arguing belongs to the ranting board or PM's.