The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I just found this... Incredible deal.

http://www.servage.net/page/hosting_features/

How can this possibly be real?

Like they say in their FAQ, it's a numbers game.

Ignore the "unlimited pop accounts" and "unlimited whatever". Placing limits on such features is basically an arbitrary restriction in order to create different product levels. It all comes out of your data transfer and disk space, so if you have 1000 email addresses vs. 100, it makes no difference.

They bank on few customers using their full disk space and bandwidth allowance. For example, compare your site to a modestly popular site that has a lot of large files to transfer and a consistent audience: Song Fight. Songfight.org uses ~150GB data transfer per month. The entire Song Fight archive is around 10GB. That's like ~20 songs a week for four years (give or take). Do you have as much data to store and send as Song Fight? Do you have as many possible visitors as Song Fight? With this account, you could send out twice as many songs as Song Fight per month, but you couldn't store our entire archive. Are such storage and traffic levels likely for your site? People are greedy-- they tend to grab as much as they can whether they need it or not, and deals like this take advantage of that.

Also, the amount of data transfer is probably set at a particular multiple of the disk space allowance where they can possibly turn a profit of a few cents even if you should use all of both in any given month. At least, that's what I would do if I were them.

Before signing up with an outfit like this, carefully check out their bandwidth and throughput capabilities-- find out what data center they use and who else is using that data center. Find out what type of machine your account will be hosted on. Look them up on the various hosting comparison sites.

They don't seem to offer SSH on their accounts. I'd be reluctant to have an account without SSH.

That said, and if everything checks out, this is a really good deal. I've done a fair amount of research on services like this, and I've had accounts with four or five different companies. This is probably the best offer I've seen for shared hosting, outside of 1and1's "free for three years" deal of a while back.

JB

Perhaps this is an alternative:

http://www.sitelutions.com

Ken