Hi,

Anyone in here have any experience with carolina.net? They say they offer "UNLIMITED" bandwidth. I even emailed them ans asked them if I could use about 100GB without any extra or hidden fees and they said "yes, as long as it is not adult content".

But then I went to their order page and just for testing pressed order without filling the order form (which also had creditcard info) and it said thank you for your order! It didn't even check to see if i had put in anything or if my creditcard was valid. That made me hold the order!

I would appriciate any comments on this.

Thank you,
Saeed

I don't know if I would worry about that too much. Our order form does the same thing, actually. Rather than try and second-guess how input validation should work for different combinations of nationalities, services, and payment methods, we just rely on customers to be smart enough to fill out the form right. 99% of the time it's not a problem.

However, we *do* handle account setups manually (there are various good reasons for doing so.) If a host was hooking this form up to an automated process, then they sure better do some heavy validation.

Saeed, more than likely they're processing your payment manually after either storing your credit card info onto a database or by having it emailed to them. This avoids any fees associated with either outsourcing their credit card processing to a third-party company or developing an in-house solution.

In Canada, we're not allowed to do this. The "big 5 banks" each have a restriction that, and I quote, "Credit card information cannot and must not be stored on servers connected directly to the Internet at any time. All transactions must be processed by an approved third-party provider." (i.e. for us in Canada to process credit card transactions, we have to jump through the whole merchant account/third-party hoop, and some banks will charge discount rates as high as 5% per transaction because, as one bank rep told me, "Da innerNET, it ees fer da pernahgraFEE". This issue has taken me nearly six months to figure out.)

In other words, they're passing on a savings of sorts by not having instant automated credit card processing.

Originally posted by zolbian
Hi,

They say they offer "UNLIMITED" bandwidth. I even emailed them ans asked them if I could use about 100GB without any extra or hidden fees and they said "yes, as long as it is not adult content".


Hmmm... Thats a BIG fat lie. No-one and I mean no-one can provicde unlimited bandwitdh. There email reply might say so, but use your common sense. There was a host, which said the same thing, and a couple of weeks later shut down. Why? His uplink kicked him off.


Plus, I cant seem to be able to find a TOS on there page.

Zolbian, if you're looking for a host that will take your 50 Gb/mo site still (saw from another thread), you have to know that this is going to be a painful process unless you consider a dedicated server.

The same comment applies to *every* host that 'offers' unlimited monthly plans- STAY AWAY! The true limits of these plans (hidden in the TOS, etc.), are genreally wayyyy lower than hosts who actually list it. I've seen unlimited defined as 2 Gb/mo in one host's TOS.

I think the reason why so many hosts put unlimited in their advertisements is because they do limit it.

Case in point:
We had a virtual account with a host (good host:dreamhost.com) they say unlimited, but in their terms of service it states something like 2GB, well I am happy to say that I have never exceeded this quota, and my site that was with them at the time was very popular, well by my standards anyway, it had well over 15,000 page views per day, and signing up at least 200 people per day for our service. The reasoning I reckon is that most people will never exceed 2GB, and with the hype of putting a limiting statement of 2GB on their advertisement it scares people off, I know when I was looking for a host a few years back I avoided any host that put a limit on my transfer, and always looked for a host that said unlimited. It was my ignorance, I had no idea just how much data can be transfered in 2GB. It's a lot of transfer considering most browsers can cache, and the server also sending out responses like page unchanged, use the cache in the browser, so any site that uses repetitious graphics across many pages will just use the cache instead of valuable bandwidth from the server to reserve up all those images again and again.

Anyway, in 3 years of being with dreamhost I never exceeded my 2GB bandwidth, and that was not only 1 site with 15,000 page views per day but it at one time had over 12 other sites serviing up anywhere between 500 page views and 5,000 page views each.

So, morally is it right or wrong, are they being deceiving or just being marketing gurus?

I think if you get it in email that states from a company rep that you can use over 100GB transfer as long as it's not adult is almost good enough. Any reputable company will honor their employees statements, and thus honor the 100GB per month as long as it's non adult in nature. But there are a lot of companies that will turn around and tell you that the rep had no authorization to make any such statement and will end up charging you. So, if your site is really using 100GB of transfer per month I suggest getting a dedicated server that provides at least 100GB transfer pe rmonth with a reasonable charge for extra. It really is hard to find any host that is willing to give you 100GB of transfer at say $34.95 as it costs them more than that to offer it to you, but if they are large enough then they have no problem because the majority of sites hosted will get what, 10 page views per day, so they use up like 10mb of bandwidth in a month, so the extra bandwidth that they dont use can be allocated to someone else.

I have seen this many times, where a host that I see is offering like 15GB for an account, they are on a server that they are leasing from xxxcomapany that offers the host like 50GB so if they sell just 4 of these accounts they have exceeded their own limits, though they can get more by paying for it, but they are betting on the fact that you wont use anywhere near the amount of 2GB.

We list how much GB you get with an account, and we are doing the same thing, betting on the fact that we'll get more customers that use 250mb of transfer per month than those that will ue 15GB transfer per month.

Thats my two jelly beans in a jar.

Bbox

I would be quite cautious about relying just on the rep's e-mail. On more than one occasion I have gotten sales rep e-mails confirming a feature only to find out that in fact the statement was not accurate. I agree with Chicken and I would bet that once you transfer your site you will run into problems. No TOS also bothers me a bit.

The unlimited advertising is simply a company trying to compete with some of the larger companies who started it. Simply the ultimate extension of our plan offers more hype which plays on the law of averages. Most customers just assume bigger is better...

But be ware. If there is one user, who uses way too much bandwidth, then the entire server might go offline, and in the process your site go down. Just remember, your not the only one on that server.

I emailed them like 5 times and in each and every email i re-phrased the same question and every single time I got the same answer. That is why I thought I check with you guys and see if anyone here have had any experience with them.

Also I'm not so very happy/comfortable with processing payments manually. Specially after all the creditcard stealing on the net.


Saeed

Originally posted by zolbian
I even emailed them ans asked them if I could use about 100GB without any extra or hidden fees and they said "yes, as long as it is not adult content".


I wouldn't put much stock in this. It is a very well-known fact that there is no way a host can truly provide unlimited service. And although I couldn't find their Terms of Service, I'm willing to bet they have one, and I'm willing to bet that it has the following two statements (or something similar to these):

"_Name of Host_ reserves the right to refuse service, or cancel existing accounts without reason or warning. In the event of non-payment, breach of this agreement, or for any other reason within the sole discretion of _Name of Host_, _Name of Host_ shall have the right to immediately, without need for advanced notice, terminate the client's hosting account by refunding the remaining payment balance, minus one week, except for blatant violations of these Terms of Service, which will result in forfeiture of all monies paid."

and

"This agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties hereto."

The first statement basically means they can terminate your service at any time. This is something that just about every host has in their Terms of Service. Good hosts will probably never use this provision. Bad hosts use it constantly. The second statement is legalese to say "it doesn't matter what we told you, if it's not in our Terms of Service it doesn't matter".

So even if they told you by e-mail you can use 100 GB a month, I can virtually guarantee you that your account will be terminated long before you reach that point, and their Terms of Service will let them do it.

To put it into a bit of perspective, the average web hosting company pays (on average) about $3 per GB of bandwidth. That's what it costs them (you can do the math - let's say a T1 line costs $1000 per month. A T1 line can handle *at capacity* 500 GB of bandwidth. That's $2 per GB when the line is at capacity. Since no host in their right mind runs a T1 line maxed out 24/7/365, the likelihood of them pushing 500 GB out that line each month is absolute nil. So you can assume that they'll really push closer to 300 GB - and that's about $3 per GB.) And some hosts, like those on the Alabanza network, pay a lot more (last time I talked with Alabanza they were selling bandwidth at $10 per GB, but you could get it as low as $5 per GB if you bought a lot of it).

There's no way any host is going to let you have 100 GB (or even 50 GB really) on a plan that costs $9.95 per month when it's going to cost the host around $300 per month for that same plan just for the bandwidth.

As for your other question, regarding the order form, I wouldn't be too concerned. As someone else pointed out, web hosts get customers from all over the world. Addresses and phone numbers can be totally bizarre to those of us living in the U.S., and credit card numbers can also vary (from 15 to 17 digits depending on the card), so a lot of hosts will not do any validation with the signup form and will instead personally validate it when they go to set up the account.

Good luck in your search,

Jason

Originally posted by zolbian

Also I'm not so very happy/comfortable with processing payments manually. Specially after all the creditcard stealing on the net.


Fact: the consumer is automatically assumed to be "in the right" on any and all disputes of "card not present" transactions. And the maximum a customer can be held liable for if a transaction is in dispute is $50 (I think this is the same for both Canada and the US, despite the exchange rate).

While I agree that the holding of credit card numbers is a security risk, it is the merchant who chooses to process any transactions without the card being present that assumes the risk, not the cardholder him/herself.

Originally posted by zolbian
I emailed them like 5 times and in each and every email i re-phrased the same question and every single time I got the same answer. That is why I thought I check with you guys and see if anyone here have had any experience with them.

Also I'm not so very happy/comfortable with processing payments manually. Specially after all the creditcard stealing on the net.


Saeed


Actually, I believe manual setup is much better. Just imagine, if a company had an automatic setup program. Some clever hacker came along and inserted a few unix commands into their order form which then gave that person full root access. Then the server has just been compromised, and voila. Not only can that hacker get to your credit card (if they put it on their server), but they can also delete all of your files, or worse, bring down the entire server.

So all in all, I think you'd be safer with a manual setup company. Any anways, those companies which have automatic setup get your credit card anyway. They see it in the transaction with their processor.