FTP hosting

[Jump In Well]

Anyone know any good FTP hosting? I'd be most appreciative because all i'm seeing is outrageous prices and i need to know a good deal. Thanks  

[Say]

kq9 uses the service of the company that we have at the link section, although... lol well you know how -good- they are

my suggestion is, go check them out (if you haven't already) they do have some nice prices although they're horrible meanieh and annoying when it comes to back ups and mantainance... otherwise, anyone else around here could give you a much better referal, I guess

[Jump In Well]

thanks, i'll look into that company  

[Say]

no problem


you can always come here and discuss the prices or such, but as I said, that's the one that we decided to go for because after loooooong hours of research online looking out through websites and packages, that one seemed like the "best" option for us.

[Yonkey]

Yeah, when they're online they're really good.  It's just when they go down, they're pretty bad because they never give you any notice about when they do maintenance.  They've also switched the server our account is on three times now.  With every server switch, I have to keep asking them to set certain things again, and I have to re-set up stuff myself as well.  

On the bright side, they're really quick at giving tech support, answering e-mails and fixing problems.  

[Oldbushie]

$12/month for http://www.ourinternet.us/ = website with 1 gig of space and support for tons of things. AND they tell you when they're doing maintenance every time.

[Drunken Chinchilla]

www.lycos.co.uk

I've not actually used them myself (well the paid service anyway) but I've heard they quite decent price wise. Also just google "Web Hosting" and you'll get bazillions of smaller ISP type compaines all vying for your custom and dollarz which im sure will rival some of the bigger ones.

[Jeysie]

Depends on how much space you need.

I've been hosted at ePerfect for a couple years now and have been quite happy. I know several other people who are happy with them as well. They range from 20MB for 5.95/month to 500MB for 15.95/month.

I've recently switched to Dreamhost, however, for expansion reasons. I haven't gotten to have a lot of experience with them yet, but I know several sites on the web that seem quite pleased with them. They range from 2.4GB for 7.95/month to 11GB for 63.95/month.

And, uh, *cough*. No offense, KQ9 folks, but I wouldn't touch your hosting company with a ten-foot-pole. I mean, seriously, you guys must have some incredibly amazing deal to put up with all this downtime crap, I'd have gotten fed up a long time ago.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[dew7]

LOL!!

You like to be blunt and to the point, like me Jeysie.  I am super glad you suggested Mozilla Firefox.  Did you download the new version? 1.0.1 that corrects recently discovered security concers?

[Say]

None of the companies mentioned previously manage to offer us what we need at the prices that we currently pay for it. On a personal website situation, any single decent company with a good deal would do, but obviously KQIX has different demands.

[Jeysie]

Dew: Heh. It's not my intention to be mean or cruel, but I don't sugar-coat things either.

As for Firefox, I have to admit that I personally am an Opera fan-user. I do have Firefox installed, but only for website testing purposes, so I don't really keep up with it other than in a general sense of awareness. That's another thread, though.

Say: I can understand that. Although I have to admit that part of me wonders about what will happen when the game is ready for and being downloaded by everyone, if you're having these kinds of problems now. Especially if you folks get Slashdotted... (Though in all fairness, that kills just about anyone's server.)

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

Say: I can understand that. Although I have to admit that part of me wonders about what will happen when the game is ready for and being downloaded by everyone, if you're having these kinds of problems now. Especially if you folks get Slashdotted... (Though in all fairness, that kills just about anyone's server.)

When the game is ready for release, we will have more than one acccount on more than one web/ftp server.  These accounts must have unmetered or very high monthly bandwidth limits, as well as enough storage to hold the game or huge chunks of it.  Things such as # of e-mail accounts, databases and whatnot are of little or no importance for the game servers.  I should also mention that these kinds of servers aren't that hard to find either.  I just googled and found this place that has a monthly bandwidth limit of 5GB/day (currently, we use around 30 GB/month)!

As mentioned earlier, KQIX has different demands than personal or standard websites.  There are certain things we need specifically for the public KQIX site, other things needed for the private team site, and as I mentioned above, the servers holding the game have their own needs as well.

[Jeysie]

Heh. I personally would consider reliability of uptime to be highly important to *any* type of website. But you seem to have other issues that trump that issue. (shrug) No skin off my nose, obviously.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

I used to think so, but I think most sites just make up their uptime figure.  You can't really tell if they're telling the truth until you sign up yourself (or know someone that's been using the same server for a while).  Even the people we're using right now say they guarentee 99.98% uptime monthly.  If you assume a month has 30 days, that means out of the 720 hours in a month, the server should be up for 719.856 of them, or cannot be down for more than 9 minutes.

Interestingly, they have this in their terms of service:

23.1.5 Network Uptime and Server Uptime Guarantees. midPhase Services, Inc. will guarantee 99.999% Network Availability and 99.98% server availability. This, however, does not cover outages due to:

* Server Hardware Failure

* User error or intentional user service interruption (e.g. if you shut your own server down, we are not responsible for the down time.)

* Crashes caused by software that is not expressly specified by midPhase as supported software. In short, if you cause a hardware crash midPhase Services, Inc. is not responsible for the downtime caused.

So hardware failures aren't counted as part of "uptime", when they're almost always what causes them to happen in the first place.

[Say]

As usual this is just a bunch of "what if's" with no direction, whoever who is not pleased and have a better option just provide a new webhosting company that could beat what we may have and just discuss how much money would you be willing to pay and that's it, other than that, sad to say, we gotta work with what we have. I bet there are tons of different companies out there who may be better, but yes, also with different costs, so, all concerns are fair and make sense, but I'd love to see the heck is gonna put more than words on it

[Jeysie]

(shrug) Hard to say without knowing exactly what you folks need.

But Dreamhost currently is offering a package of 7.7GB space/192GB bandwidth/month for 15.95/month. I don't know if that's more or less than what you pay now, or is sufficient for your needs, but I would consider any extra cost worth extra reliability. And I pay for my webspace for nothing more than pure fun, whereas you folks have a full-fledged project going on. (Not to mention I'm currently paying 15.95/month now for 500MB of webspace, which is why I switched from ePerfect. And as those of you who know me well know, I'm not rich.)

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

That would be sufficient for the public KQIX site, but not the private one (it requires a static IP).  We purchased it annually so we're paying $9.95/month plus $47.40/year for the static IP.  If we switch to Dreamhost, the annual cost is still $9.95/month, but unique IP would cost $59.40/year plus the cost of a 3rd party certificate.

From Dreamhost's FAQ:

Customers not on our Level 4 plan will need to purchase a unique ip add-on ($4.95/month), pay a one-time setup fee of $10 in order to use a secure server, and will need to purchase a secure certificate on their own from a party authorized to issue them.

[Jeysie]

Ahh. Hmm. I didn't realize you used a secure server. I mean, isn't that sort of thing usually used by companies for e-commerce... secure logins for credit card input, bank accounts, and processing and whatnot? I would think that HTTPS logins would be overkill in most other situations.

The extra $12 sounds like it would be a good deal, otherwise.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

SSL isn't just used for e-commerce.  It's a layer of security that people use when dealing with sensitive information (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail).  Besides keeping data secure, it also remains hidden from search engine spiders.

Unfortunately, with Dreamhost, it's not just $12.  You have to pay an additional fee for the secure certificate, so it's actually more like $22 + at least $100/year.  The one they mention is GeoTrust which retail $159/year. MidPhase provided us with a self-signed certificate for free.

But you're right that SSL is overkill for the average person (i.e. the creator of this thread) looking for web hosting.

[Jeysie]

You don't need a secure server to prevent search engine spidering.

As for the rest of it... well, I guess I must apologize and say I *don't* know what to tell you. The adage "You get what you pay for" is truest when it comes to technology. If you want premium-level options for cheap-level cost, you probably won't find less crappy offerings.

Peace & Luv, Liz