[TriLUG] Advice on cheap hosting

[Steve Litt]

On Monday 16 April 2007 09:38, Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Greetings-
>
> A political group for which I volunteer is looking for a new web hosting
> company. It's a small website, mostly static, and without need of database
> or even probably cgi services. However, I've had enough trouble with
> companies that require me to go through a web interface that having a
> shell is a must.  Here's what I'm looking for:
>
> - Cheap (we have no budget; I pay for the hosting out of my pocket)
> - Linux-based, preferably debian but I don't really care which distro
> - Shell access
> - Must allow postings of political claims as the group's position, and
> therefore not be connected with UNC or any other governmental entity
> (i.e., ibiblio is not an option for this site)
> - Since it's a NC group, would prefer that the hosting company be in NC.
>
> Thanks for any advice-
> Andy

Hi Andy,

Troubleshooters.Com has been on Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com) for about 2 
years. I think I pay about $100 per year, or something like that. 
Troubleshooters.Com uses over 10GB bandwidth per month (and we don't have 
music or videos :-), and according to my stats I'm currently using 1GB of 
disk space (though I suspect most of that is email spam filters I forgot to 
dump -- Troubleshooters.Com itself is only 300MB.

You get 2500 email accounts (yeah, I'm gonna use that many :-) and 50 MySQL 
databases and 50 Postgres databases. The OS is Linux with Apache. You can get 
to the command prompt via ssh.

The one problem with Bluehost is their mailing lists ABSOLUTELY SUCK. It takes 
between 20 minutes and an hour between the time you post a message and the 
time your fellow list members receive it. Doesn't make for a lively 
conversation. I tried to get them to fix this, and they told me they do it to 
save processor time by batching the emails, and they wouldn't change it. This 
was about a year or two ago, so it's possible they've improved it (I moved 
all my mailing lists to other peoples' servers).

Anyway, if you can get by with mailing lists elsewhere, Bluehost is 
spectacular.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/