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that much storage or bandwidth

I signed on during a brief period when they were giving 400GB of storage for whatever plan now has 200GB. I LOVE having that much space. I back up all my MP3s, photos, and other documents to my web space (among other places). And I still have a about 80% of my space free

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Not that I'm trying to be a corp-whore or anything, but you could try Google hosted applications :-)

The only thing that it doesn't do well is the web page hosting... the mail/chat/etc hosting is great tho.

Heh. I don't actually need any of the mail/chat/etc part -- all I want is the web page hosting.

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I've started using DreamHost as more than just a place to backup my photos. I have to say it isn't going that smoothly.

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Ugh. Well, if it's any consolation, they're not getting any of my money -- I ended up going with the box-in-my-closet solution.

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These domains that failed today were moved from a box-in-my-friend-closet solution to Dreamhosts because the DSL line that they were connected via was proving to be unreliable...

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I'm confused. If you've never been a Dreamhost customer, how do you know about all these problems they've been having?

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a 99.9% uptime guarantee

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a 99.9% uptime guarantee

Just FYI, that's over eight hours of downtime a year.

Dreamhost has had more downtime than that on a single weekend.
So, yeah, only eight hours downtime per year would be "dreamy" for some.

And 40 minutes a month is probably OK for me and for most "recreational" users.

If you want to get the 4th or 5th nine in your reliability, I believe you are now edging out of the realm of sub-ten-dollar per month hosting!
A serious enterprise should expect to pay more substantial costs for serious enterprise level reliability.
Though, many(most) of you know this area far better than I -- and will correct me if I am totally off-base on that assumption.

But cheap peons such as myself still deserve some courtesy and not to have their site down one day every month for <insert-bogus-reason>. But fifteen minutes a week probably won't kill me, especially if it is during off-peak hours.

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andym: And it is only a network uptime guarantee, which means it doesn't cover server uptime.

According to GoDaddy's legal mumbo jumbo, it's both somewhat better than that, and oh so very much worse.
I.e., they do guarantee that your website is accessible, but they specifically don't guarantee email or ftp.


Go Daddy offers a service uptime guarantee for the Services of 99.9% ("Service Uptime") of available time. If Go Daddy fails to maintain this level of service availability, You may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of Your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy , and is exclusive of any applicable taxes. The credit does not apply to service interruptions caused by (i) periodic scheduled maintenance or repairs that Go Daddy may undertake from time to time; (ii) errors caused by You from custom scripting or coding; (iii) outages that do not affect the appearance of the web site but merely affect access to the web site such as FTP and email; (iv) causes beyond the control of Go Daddy or that are not reasonably foreseeable by Go Daddy ; and (v) outages related to the reliability of certain programming environments. Total Service Uptime shall be solely determined by Go Daddy and shall be calculated on a monthly basis.



And if they "fail to provide" the 99.9%, your only compensation is a 5% credit on that month's hosting fee. Woo-hoo, 30 cents!

So, yes, uptime guarantees are pretty much nonsense at the low end of the market.
So you kind of have to go on track record.
And since GoDaddy is now one of the top few largest hosting providers in the world (believe it or not), if (or rather, when) they have a major outage, you WILL hear about it.


Now reverting to our previously scheduled question, here is what I'm looking for in a hosting provider and have yet to find, unfortunately.

Do any of you know of anyone that meets the following requirements?

• Less than $10/month, preferably less than $5.
  
• 100 GB storage, 1 TB bandwidth.
  
• 99.9% uptime
  
• host unlimited domains and subdomains from one account
  
• hundreds of email accounts and email forwards
  
• at least a dozen MySQL databases
  
• PHP4,PHP5, Perl CGI, Java, Python, eventually PHP6
  
• Apache configured to look at local .htaccess files
  
• Apache should have an up-to-date and extensive set of modules
  
• Should suck less than Dreamhost in terms of security and reliability.
  
• ssh/sftp/rsync and cronjobs, and preferably complete shell access
  

Go Daddy fails to provide the last bullet. And that's a rather important bullet, in my opinion!

But so far, everyone else I've found that satisfies that criterion, fails on one of the others.

Help!

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... but the last straw is the notice they recently sent out to their customers saying that we can't use the storage space for network backup purposes. Why allow all that space if you can't use it for anything? (The real answer, of course, is they don't intend to actually allow you to use all of that space.)

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BlueHost doesn't allow SSH/Shell Access by default, but says it will enable shell access for your account if you fax a copy of your driver's license, passport, etc. to them.