Hi,

I have been reading this forum for a few days and have found it very helpful. I am in the process of designing two sites and have some questions regarding hosting.

My Situation:

I have been looking into webexpose.net but am not sure about having to pay for bandwith. I use to have my current site at a place that measured bandwith and I believe they were even measuring how much I uploaded to them. Anyway...I am not sure I understand how to relate the 4 Gig per month to how much traffic that will allow for. One site is my professional site that I will use for my research and classes that I teach. So I will be using it mainly for text files and forms for quizes and studies that I will be offering online. The other is just a personal site that will have pictures and some other miscellaneous stuff.

My questions:

1) I currently use FrontPage and my current host uses Linux servers. I have read that FrontPage works best on NT and with my professional site at least, since I will be getting a bit more advanced...will NT be the better choice? In other words...what advantages does NT have over Linux when running FrontPage?

2) I am currently with a host that offers unlimited bandwith (westhost) so I have no clue how much bandwith I am currently using. My guess is that, since psychology classes are fairly large I could have around a hundred or more students accessing my site each week for information, quizes, and also subjects for studies.

What is the rate of hits..how many hits/page views equal 1GB roughly? I'm trying to gauge how much the site will be using.

3) Other hosts I am considering are: 1-host.com and ready hosting.com There are no reviews of these hosts posted in other forums that I could find so if anyone knows anything about them or has any other places to reccommend I would much appreciate it. I like my current host, but was looking to see what was around for a better fit for the two new sites. I have had to move sites before and its a pain so wanted to learn all I could about what was available. Im also looking to keep cost down to below $20/month for hosting.

I know this was a long post..so thanks in advance for your time :)

LilPhD

1. I think you should be fine on Linux as long as you use FP only, and do not use FTP, etc. to edit your pages. It is my understanding that FP is less likely to get corrupted on NT servers than on unix servers, but as I said, everything should work ok if you do not use FTP to edit your site.

2. Most sites transfer less than 1 GB/month, so you probably won't have to worry about bandwidth too much unless your site is VERY popular or offers large downloads of files. You can calculate bandwidth by looking at the size of your web page and how many times it is accessed in a particular month. For example, if you had a 10K web page, and 10 people accessed it, you would have used 100K of bandwidth.

3. I haven't heard or had experience with these companies, so I can't comment on their service.

I hope this helps!

Brian Farkas

Originally posted by Lil Phd
2) I am currently with a host that offers unlimited bandwith (westhost) so I have no clue how much bandwith I am currently using. My guess is that, since psychology classes are fairly large I could have around a hundred or more students accessing my site each week for information, quizes, and also subjects for studies.

What is the rate of hits..how many hits/page views equal 1GB roughly? I'm trying to gauge how much the site will be using.

Futurama is on, so I'll make this quick :)

Westhost doesn't offer unlimited bandwidth, you just think they do, or they are just pulling your finger. 100 visits a week is not enough to worry about 4 gigs, you'll be fine almost anywhere.

You can figure out the approx. bandwidth your main page would require by adding up the kb's of the page (page's' if framed), and all the graphics called that show up on the page.

If that total is for instance 40kb, and you had 100 visitors that week, you will have used 400kb of transfer. Now, some will probably go past one page of your site, but even so, you'll be fine with just about any host.

Sorry, futurama calls... hope that helped a bit, even though it was long and drawn out and badly explained.

If you do a search on ReadyHosting here on this forum or over at Scriptkeeper http://www.scriptkeeper.com/cgi-bin/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=Web+Hosts+|AMP|+ISPs&number=5&DaysPrune=20&LastLogin= you should pull up a few threads (from memory).

With FP, FP generally works just as well on NT or Linux. It may run fractionally better (in terms of performance and FP extensions being less corrupt etc.) on NT, but either should be OK.

I actually did an investigation of WestHost and in their TOS it actually specifies that their bandwidth is restricted to 3GB/month. Any more and they usually contact you, so if you haven't been contacted you can probably safely assume you're under 3GB/month at the moment.

On the bandwidth issue, you will find that you use even less bandwidth than Brian was suggesting because most modern browsers store local copies of the graphics, so if you have the same logo on every page it will only have to be downloaded once.

Also, a lot of ISP's use local caches to speed up page delivery and that has a similar effect.

I wouldn't get too hung up on it because most hosts don't mind if you go over a bit as long as the average on the server is OK. I know that I don't monitor use until it gets up to 8/10 gb on a regular basis, even with people on 1 GB plans. bandwidth tends to be bought in blocks.

On the Front page issue, I have just donated free hosting for a FP FAQ site because of all the questions I get asked about it.

Some of the problems experienced on Linux/Apache with FP are:

dates of files being set as the date they were uploaded not the date they were authored which causes FP to republish the whole site every time one file is changed.

Problems excluding system directories from the publishing program like /stats .

However there are lots of people using FP with Linux web hosting so it obviously isn't that much of a problem.

Gordon

I'll add to something Gordon said on this point:

Problems excluding system directories from the publishing program like /stats .

That is a known porblem with FP. I've got one customer who uses it still FP has caused a few problems. It has corrupted his 5 forums twice, and the second time he hadn't even published again.

His control panel directory is wiped out anytime he publishes and must be recreated. He also has to move his usage stats directory above the www level, as he also has to do with his forums, then move them back after publishing. If he forgets, sayonara.:karate: They are corrupted or gone.

In short, FP is a real pain in the neck, though I have a much lower opinion of it.

Hey Duster , what we did with the DI panel to keep from being wiped out all the time is this. We aliased /serversecure to just above their web dir /home/user/serversecure and put the control panel there. So there is no physical http://www.site.dom/serversecure but it calls the same in the web. Just a thought. :)

agreed, Frontpage is a pain in he... you name it.

Thanks, jaguar, I might do that for him. He'll still have to move his forums, but at least he won't lose the control panel. Then again, if he has to recreate it each time, maybe he'll finally dump FP and get better tools as I've suggested. heh heh heh heh

Using frontpage will eat into your bandwidth allowance, as most hosts just read the HTTP logs to see how much you've used. Frontpage uses HTTP, so will get logged as bandwidth.

You'd have to do a whole lot of updating for this to even show up on the map though..,

Depends on a number of factors:

1) If you update locally and sync vs updating live
2) How busy your site is (bigger ratio)

Its also a security loop hole, but thats a different matter.

Thanks everyone for the reply!

Duster, what other web publishing tools would you recommend? I'm always looking for new things to learn :) I mainly use FP because its easy. I taught myself HTML a few years back and FP is just much quicker than writing HTML. I have been meaning to looking into alternative methods, but just havn't gotten to it yet.

Thanks again!

Dreamweaver. Or, for free tools, 1st Page 2000 is an excellent editor. And of course, there's always Notepad. :)

Annette,
Dreamweaver (www.macromedia.com) and 1st page (www.evrsoft.com) are my choices too.
If you can't spend abt $250 for dreamweaver (just like me), download 1st page. Or you may get it on some magazine cover CDs. It's too good for a free tool.
I have never liked FP. Lousy and monopolous (if that's a word).

Wing.

Something inbetween 1st Page and notepad is Arachnophilia ( http://arachnoid.com ), a free program.

Hope this isn't advertising,
But I have just given free hosting to someone who is putting together a FrontPage FAQ.
In return he is giving me help with FrontPage issues.

You can see the site at:

http://newbee.hostroute.co.uk/

Although it still has a long way to go.

Gordon

Another option is HTML-Kit, which can be found at http://www.chami.com/html-kit/ . It is also Free. I use FP2000 and HTML Kit and NotePad. Depends on how I am feeling ;)

For pure HTML editing, you'll find me with either Allaire HomeSite or EditPlus http://www.editplus.com - check out EditPlus. Very good proggie :)

As for more WYSIWYG designing (particularly when trying to get annoying tables aligned) DreamWeaver is my tool of choice.

I'm with BC on this one. Allaire HomeSite is the bee's knees as far as PC HTML editors go - powerful, customizable and pretty easy to learn. I highly recommend, though, that if you do get HomeSite you turn off the Design WYSIWYG portion of the program - it, frankly, stinks.

For the Mac, BBEdit is the industry standard.. and yes, Dreamweaver is still the best drag-and-drop program available.

Neil

Ewwwwwwwwwww @ HomeSite's 'attempt' at WYSIWYG. It hogs the CPU - I just open DW and HS at the same time and watch them roll along like two kids fighting in the sandpit....

Dreamweaver Kicks Butt!

I downloaded Dreamweaver the other day and havn't had too much time to play with it, but it does look exceptionally cool! I'm a little rusty with some HTML and need to learn more how to work Dreamweaver, but it looks like it will be worth it!

There is an academic discount which is great! Since I'm a grad student its much cheaper and Macromedia has a course builder program that looks like its worth a try.

Thanks for the great advice :D

I have been looking around a bit and has anyone had any experience with 123hostme.com or Hostway.com ?

Have you done a search of the forums? I think there was a bit on Hostway ;)