Much to my surprise (and dismay :eek2: ), I have just been given my termination notice from my current web hosting site (myhosting.com) which I've been with for a couple of years (and was happy with prior to this):
We are sorry to inform you, but your site has been using an over abundance of bandwidth that has adversely affected other customers and our service levels. We therefore have no other option except to cancel your account with us at the end of this month. We will not be able to effectively host your site.
As such, I need to transfer my site to another provider but after doing some initial searching, I've yet to find a provider that people don't have things to complain about and which would give me what I need at a reasonable price. I am currently paying 10$ US but I'm willing to go up to $20 US.

Note that the reason why there is a bit of traffic on my web site is that I use the site primarily to let people download a little freeware software that I wrote and support. If someone were to download everything (the core application and associated files), the total size is about 12 MB.

Unfortunatly, I don't really know how many people are downloading these files or how often but it seems to be increasing gradually (based on the number of "support" questions that I get).

Are there good dependable web hosting providers out there that would be good choices for me?

Also, is there a way for me to guess approximatly how much bandwidth I would need (possibly based on the fact that myhosting.com feel it is too high, or as a guess from the size of my files)?

Finally, I noticed that the Yahoo Groups (which are free), have an area to put files in (up to 20 MB). I couldn't find any information about limitations regarding bandwidth or such. Does anyone know if putting my files in my Yahoo Group (I already use a group there to provide support) would work?

Tia,
-D

To count the # of downloads, try the attached download counter.

Originally posted by dsarrazin
Also, is there a way for me to guess approximatly how much bandwidth I would need (possibly based on the fact that myhosting.com feel it is too high, or as a guess from the size of my files)?


Do you not have any logs of access to your site? Your transfer totals can easily be determined from those. If not, ask myhosting.com for the logs, or a summary thereof. You can then match the traffic against the allowances of other hosts you're considering.

Kevin

Do you not have any logs of access to your site?
Unfortunatly, I had turned off logging a while back (since it was taking a certain amount of disk space on my site, and I had unlimited bandwidth (or so I thought) and thus I wasn't worried about it).

I've since turned logging back on and will be checking the logs out in the next few days. It should give me some idea. If I can prepare a patch for the application this weekend, I'll also put that up and see how much traffic there is when a new version of the application becomes available for download.

-D

Our bronze ($9.99pm) or silver ($14.99pm) packages sound ideal for you
And I'm sure that's a very impartial opinion on your part ;).

Funny thing is, since I put up my original post, I got a couple of emails from people trying to sell their own web hosting solutions to me (plus yours, but you are the first that actually posted it in the thread).

Anyhoo, I should let people know that I automatically dismiss any company that do this.

Right now, the following three companies that have self-advertised to me are: prowebspace.com, dominet.net and wcsweb.net.

I do and would welcome opinions from people who are not part of the companies themselves, of course.

From searching and reading, one of the best one out there appears to be venturesonline.com so they are high on my list at the moment. I still need to try to check the network traffic on my site before deciding on a specific one.

-D

Yes, we are probably biased lol ;)

Scott
ProWebSpace.com

Hi Dsarrazin:
Just curious. Have you tried the download counter that I show as an attachment above? That should work for you even if you do not have access to your logs.

And I appreciate your point. I won't try to sell you on my hosting. You have to make up your own mind. Good luck in your search for a suitable host. :)

Vito

Just curious. Have you tried the download counter that I show as an attachment above?
Thanks for the code. No, I've not tried it for a few reasons.

One of the problem is that MyHosting.com (which used to be called SoftComCa.com) doesn't support perl scripts. I remember seeing instructions from them where I could compile the perl code into an executable which I could then use but I've not had time to investigate that particular venue.

A second problem is that when I checked out the site where you took the script from (http://www.kastle.net -- a cool site with a fair number of other free scripts -- thks!). They actually have removed that particular script for the following reason:One of our users has pointed out a minor flaw in the download manager that we hadn't noticed until now. It appears that the script isn't counting downloads like it should. We will be taking it offline for a little while we decided what to do.
Finally, I would have needed to make a number of small changes to the files you gave me to accomodate the files available for download on my site (and the special file types that I use).

I may still use it if time permits over the weekend, but I may just decide to rely on the logs that I am now capturing instead (since it is easier and quicker for me to do so at this point).

-D

Wow. That must be amazingly bad timing. I didn't actually have or use that script in the past. When I first saw your post, I did a search to find a script for you. And that's the one I came up with. So I downloaded it literally today. I guess they must have removed the script just after I downloaded it. Eerie. :eek:

Well good luck.

Vito

If it's a popular freeware program, you might be able to get someone to sponsor your site, or at least mirror it.

Maybe you could even just point your users to downloads.com or somewhere to download it, if you're not logging the downloads or anything anyway.

Just as an answer to an earlier question, Yahoo! Groups does have a download limit, although they never specify what it is.

A friend of mine has posted some files on there once (adds up to about 20MB total), and it exceeded the bandwidth pretty quickly for the day, so I'm assuming they don't give that much data transfer.

Thanks for the suggestions.

The software that I wrote actually is sorta mirrored by the company that owns the information that I use (with their permission) in the software itself. Unfortunatly, their ftp site has not been reliable at all over the years. I'll check to see if I cannot find some other related places but this is a very small niche market and doesn't have loads of resources, unfortunatly.

Regarding downloads.com, I just checked and they don't appear to let me actually store files there, only links to existing sites?

-D

Originally posted by prowebspace
edited
WHT Rule #1:

"Participants may not use the forum to publish or discuss any information regarding their product or services, or future (possible) products or services, or any product or services they are, or have been, associated with. This includes, but not limit to suggesting your own services, or services of partners or family."

Might want to review those. :rolleyes:

Just as an answer to an earlier question, Yahoo! Groups does have a download limit, although they never specify what it is. I figured as much. I assume that the free version of GeoCities.com also has some similar kind of bandwidth limit (since they also have non-free options/packages which do state limits for those which varies depending on the packages -- dunno how good these are, though?).

-D

www.alwayswebhosting.com seems to have had some positive feedback...

When I asked myhosting.com if they could give me an idea of what bandwidth I was using so that I could take that into account when looking for a new web hosting provider, this is the reply that I got:The bandwidth is in regards to your site effecting the server that it resides on. By nature of shared hosting, your site is using excessive resources, which include CPU and RAM, which impacts our service levels and other customers.

We do not have statistics per se, other than to say that in relation to server availability and reliability, your site contributed to lower server availability and server reliability.
Not much for me to go on.

I just hope that whatever new provider I find, I won't have the same kinda problem.

-Denis

I am a customer of Hosting Matters, they may be able to provide you with the services you want for relatively inexpensive price.

I have also heard good reviews of Wizards Hosting (wizardshosting.com).

As with any business, there will always be someone who has a bad experience. This is unforetunate, but it's pretty hard to please everyone. When you hear the first bad review, don't take it too seriously, when you hear several, I'd start to listen. Always know your source, and try to find someone who is pretty objective.

Originally posted by dsarrazin
I assume that the free version of GeoCities.com also has some similar kind of bandwidth limit (since they also have non-free options/packages which do state limits for those which varies depending on the packages -- dunno how good these are, though?).

Yup, the free version of geocities definitely has a bandwidth limit.

http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info/c3.html?.refer=hm_edit

The above URL lists all the various geocities plans and their data transfer limits.

To tell you the truth, though, I think it's a lot lower than the bandwidth they claim to give. I used to host a free site with them that's around 12 MB overall. It was almost all text, though, and extremely unlikely that any visitors would download/read all the files. Anyway, I averaged about 40-60 visitors/day, and my bandwidth was regularly exceeded. (They claim to give 3GB transfer/month). I now maintain a similar-sized site, with much more graphics and more visitors, hosted on another website, and it has rarely exceeded 1-2 GB. I suppose it's possible that they changed the data transfer limits recently, but I'm not sure.

I haven't had any experience with their paid services, but based on my experience with their free service - if you're looking for higher bandwidth allowances, geocities may not be the place to go.

Originally posted by Site5-Matt

WHT Rule #1:

"Participants may not use the forum to publish or discuss any information regarding their product or services, or future (possible) products or services, or any product or services they are, or have been, associated with. This includes, but not limit to suggesting your own services, or services of partners or family."

Might want to review those. :rolleyes:




Apologies all round, I was not aware of this - sorry :)

Scott

Originally posted by dsarrazin
Regarding downloads.com, I just checked and they don't appear to let me actually store files there, only links to existing sites?

I was thinking that download.com was one of the freeware/shareware lists that actually archives your software on their site. I guess not.

Tucows (http://www.tucows.com) does though. I'm pretty sure.

you should be making your freeware avail for downloads at cnet.com and providing the cnet download link on your site instead of allowing pple to download directly from your server ... almost all the popular sharewares/freeware developers do that ... try it ;)

Originally posted by lcw
you should be making your freeware avail for downloads at cnet.com and providing the cnet download link on your site instead of allowing pple to download directly from your server ... almost all the popular sharewares/freeware developers do that ... try it ;)

I think we just established that CNet's download.com doesn't actually archive your files. Those that seem to be archived there, I'm sure have special arrangements.