Consumer alert!

I stumbled across the apc-online.com hosting company while researching my competition today.

They offer 200MB storage and 6000MB transfer for A$25.95 (US$14) a month. Pretty good until you look closely at the transfer limit, which is actually a daily limit of 193MB x 31.

There is a small link buried in the Glossary page which leads to the Optional Items page (apc-online.com/hosting/addons.shtml). Additional data transfer is A$9.50 (US$5) per 100MB monthly.

This could mean one of two things:
1) They charge additional bandwidth at A$95.00 (US$50) per GB calculated in 100MB increments.
2) They are charging A$9.50 (US$5) for each DAY you exceed 193MB.

The first possibility is certainly overpriced, but the second is deception at its worse.

Consumer alert over!

Took a look... sounds like a GOTCHA to me if they charge $95/G ($9.50/100MB) -- even given that the amounts are in Australian dollars.

I'm always really suspicious of *any* host that doesn't clearly state the cost of bandwidth overages right on the main features page for the hosting plan.

Well personally, I like host Rocket. THey offer 200 MB of sotrage and 10 GB transfer. I can't remember what it cost if you go over but I don't think it's too bad. (www.hostrocket.com)

HostRocket (I have a site there) told me recently in an e-mail that (I guote):

"We currently charge $10/gb. This will be soon dropping dramatically."

Considering the whopping amount of bandwidth HR provides as standard, it's a pretty darned good deal.

Here's a neat way of getting bandwidth a bit cheaper:

1. Buy two hosting plans with large bandwidth allocations with fixed IP addresses and use one as a mirror site of the other.

2. Use "round robin" DNS to share the load between the two servers.

I haven't tried it, but it would seem to be viable.
That way you could get two 10GB plans for the usual $20 - $40 each and get 20GB of bandwidth out of it.

I am sure there must be some reason why it wouldn't work.

Some web hosts may forbid this, but its certainly not mentioned in our TOS or any of the other hosts I am friendly with.

Iam sure that some DNS guru will now post an explanation of why it won't work!

Gordon

I'm not even gonna touch that one. I'll let someone else have the fun.

it would work.
but you need you host to know what your doing... they may not like the idea.

Yes,
The DNS host would need to set it up, but *if* you used a seperate DNS service that provides "round robin" (like zoneedit.com) and two seperate hosts they would be unlikely to ever notice.

I certainly wouldn't!

Gordon

APC-Online can do it because they're a reseller for HostWay http://www.hostway.com - IP block check reveals the info.

Hmmm....... I wonder what APC magazine (Australia) has to say about it..... :D

my former host gave me 500 megs of space and 20 gigs of transfers for only 15 a month. i stayed for a very short while and moved out. reason is you get what you paid for, crappy service.

Amen teck :)

True enough, teck.

Still, with the diving costs of hard drives, storage really should get cheaper. I don't have any hard stats on hand for how the cost of bandwidth has behaved over the last few years (has anyone got these numbers?), but my *impression* is that it, too, has been going down consistently.

Obviously there are other factors, too; but it would seem that decent hosting should cost significantly less today than it did a year or two ago.