Our provider is slowing falling apart. People are calling me telling me they are getting file not found when visiting our site, we aren't getting soem of our emails, and, get this, somewhere on their servers is a 2 year old copy of our website, complete with old files, iold bulletin boards, and scrpits that work, including a two year old order form with two year old prices, two year old notes on our bulletin boards, etc. And the site functions as if it is current... How frustrating.. To top it off, they now say they can't find the problem and want us to pay them an hourly rate to find it.
So, I'm desperate for a new provider.

We need:
150meg
unlimited monthly throughput (due to the bulletin boards)
full cgi support (formmail, counters, etc.)
ftp and site admin
6 emails
full setup

Know anyone who can provide this?
I'm really looking for ace technicians and good support. I've been fighting this for 5 years now. I'm getting tired.
Thanks,

Ted

I would STRONGLY recommend against going with any host that offers unlimited quantities of limited resources. This would refer to those things such as disk space and transfer.

You can find more information at http://www.unlimband.com

I agree 100%.

You say you are looking for ace technicians and good support, due to being messed around in the past.

The fact is that you do get what you pay for, and if you go unlimited, chances are you will be messed around again.

You don't need unlimited transfer. Bulletin boards do NOT take a lot of transfer. I have some customers with semi-popular bulletin boards (100-200 posts daily) and popular sites using at most 15gb transfer.

Thanks for your inputs. Although I write my html, etc. I really don't know much of what goes on on your side of things.
I was told that bandwidth was an instantaneous transfer capability, while
monthly transfer is not referred to as bandwidth, but asthe total throughput.
I have had quite a few offer tremendous deals, but then found the total monthy bill would increase as much as 20 times due to the penalty for the amount of total transfer I normally run.
I have had quite a bit of hard sales jobs done on me while doing my search, as you can imagine.
I really appreciate the good info I'm reading here, especially the link to the site dealing with exposing the false unlimited bandwidth advertising, etc.

Thanks again.

Ted

A generally guide to how much transfer you use would be helpful.

Have you thought of a managed dedicated server? They're pretty cheap nowdays, though your milage may vary with the bottom end of the price market

Greg Moore

'I was told that bandwidth was an instantaneous transfer capability, while monthly transfer is not referred to as bandwidth, but asthe total throughput.'

This is correct, though it can be confusing sometimes whether a host is referring to data transfer or bandwidth.

Unlimited bandwidth, actually means they don't limit it, but it will still be limited by the network capability (so really, it is limited).

Unlimited data transfer is the one to really watch out for, as hosts do have to pay for the amount of data transfer.

Here's what I just pulled from my cobalt site admin:

Report Generated 2002/07/13 07:29

Period Covered 2002/07/12 08:25 - 2002/07/13 06:46

Number of Computers Requesting Content 2102

HTML Page Requests 24749 (40.1%)

Bad Requests 913 (1.4%)

Total Requests 61698

Distinct Files Served 2831

Bytes Transferred 1030403171

Thanks,

Ted

Originally posted by tweber
Period Covered 2002/07/12 08:25 - 2002/07/13 06:46

Bytes Transferred 1030403171

1030403171 Byte = 0.959638 Gigabyte (GB)

times 30 for an average month: 28.78914 Gigabytes

Of course that might be out by a long way depending if that one day was a busy one or a slow one. Do you have a monthly average?

There are quite a few hosts here that offer 30 gig packages, though in your place I'd be wary of any that offer it for under $25-30 a month, and possibly look a little higher than that.

If your site is still growing you might run out of transfer pretty quite though.

Greg Moore