L1: Hosting

Hi

I have a few questions about your Level 1 hosting.

I have a website that could do about 100-120 GB traffic a month, about 3.5 GB a day.
The site consists of a website, a forum and a live chat.

You say that you provide “PHP4, perl, python, C, C++”, MySql and 120 GB Transfer/month.

Will there be a problem if I use pretty much 110 GB a month, and have a C gateway to connect a flash chat to an IRC server?
I know a lot of hosting companies say they can provide the bandwidth but when you’re close to it you get kicked out… So before I register, I wanted to make sure it’s all good.

Also, how is your up time? I see that in the forums you have one person with 12 websites complaining about down time.

Ps: Your Sales contact form is down at the moment...

Vali

You'd be on the edge wouldn't you?

Not sure what you're talking about with the (CGI?) flash irc bit but I feet the need to relay the fact that they'll frown on persistent connection and shut them down in a hurry if they're found, and if it's in use much at all, it would likely be found.

In use much also begs other questions, I don't believe they'd kick you for using you alloted bandwidth, they're extremely honest when it comes to doing what they say (and beyond usually, tho bandwidth overages have a cost associated).

However if you're seeing that much traffic with forums and chat, odds are you're going to be hitting the processor more than "your fair share". Unfortunately there's currently no hard guidelines to allow you to know about this and prevent it. You just wake up one day and have an email saying your sites been moved to an evaluation server so you can trim your CPU useage befoer you're tossed or moved to dedicated service, your choice.

That's happened to me recently and it's been an excellent experience. I consider wht they've done to accomodate my account that was unfarily sucking resources, to be way above and beyond the call of duty and or terms of service.

Dreamhost is a class outfit but you have to look at your stuff real hard.

I think you'd have a difficult time finding a better shared host for features and integrity.

check this thread for my eval server banter:
http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=22687&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=14&part=

edit: "Also, how is your up time?" about missed that one... I have more than a few sites here (spread across several physical machines) and have not experienced any downtime of significant nature for a year at least (whenever the big DDoS attack happened, been a while). I have noticed, like you, people complaining of downtime, but these complaints seem to coincide with the big promotional sale that's been drawing new customers like flies. So it's either growth issues (which they historically sort pretty quickly) or just the fact that there's an exponential number of n00bs on board that are quicker to freak out, no telling which.

jasonEdited by user919 on 05/03/05 10:01 AM (server time).

Like user919 pointed out, you can use as much bandwidth as you'd like. Anything over the amount that comes with your plan costs money, however. Going over your bandwidth limit can get expensive fast. If you're that close it might not be a terrible idea to go to the next plan up.

But we've never booted anybody for bandwidth usage. (We also don't do that "UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH!!!*" bullhonky some other hosts do. Any host that does that is stupid.)

And also like user919 said, it sounds like it's possible you might use more than your fair share of CPU resources. Shared hosting means, well, sharing, and we have to prevent one customer's site from making things crummy for everyone else. We do our best to work with you, and in most cases, if your site gets a lot of traffic, it's not hard to make money from it and get a dedicated server (which isn't terrifically expensive).


nate.