My friend was looking around for webhosts and he found some pretty crazy deals... like $10/year with 200MB of hard drive space, $15/year, $5/year, etc...

How can webhosts sell this stuff so cheap? I mean, $10 a year is less than a buck a month and I don't see how they could survive on anything that low. You'd have to have thousands of websites in order to make it.

What's their trick? Low bandwidth costs? Cheap servers? Just not smart? ;)

There is no trick, hosts like that are just not smart. They haven't laid out a business plan. A year from now, they'll be going under and it won't be a surprise why.

don't see how they could survive

They dont!!

i guess they try to OVERSELL + they have no idea "what if" and in hosting business if you dont plan and price correctly as per what resources you have..you die sooner or later and poor customers pay for it.

So it's not a commandment but a rule of law that almost always applies.

The reason hosts offer cheap hosting is that they think that all the big hosting companies host thousands of websites.

So they use this logic, to become a big hosting company they must host thousands of websites.

This is where it gets tricky.

I had a personal site and a couple of sites I had designed for friends and local business people. I found a host like was like $5/month. They didn't offer much so I had to change my sites from ASP to PHP which took time, and they were down, and they were slow, and they had horrible support, etc. It just all adds up to the old term; you get what you pay for.

I would rather now pay 20+ a month for a host that can accomodate my scripts, offer support, have near 100% uptime, and not take minutes to load.

Support costs money. I found a host off of this board that has an 800#, email, LiveHelpDesk, a ticket system, and just recently they posted thier Nextel Private I.D. #'s which is perfect for me. But I'm paying for it.

I urge all of you to go with a host that is not the cheapest, and I urge those that offer $15/year, please stop or justify how this is cost-effective (that's if it's not on a cable modem and mom's paying the bills).

Sorry for my rant, but this is my first post and I wanted it to mean something.

Originally posted by Venkman
Sorry for my rant, but this is my first post and I wanted it to mean something.

No need to apologise at all (and welcome to WHT). There seems to be a slow shift back to people paying for their hosting, rather than the recent race to the bottom on the barrel for dirt cheap products. It's heartening for those of us that have stuck to our guns and maintained realistic pricing over the past 6-12 months.

Maybe it's taken a few burnings for people to work out that price isn't everything and a bit of 'peace of mind' goes a long way :)

Greg Moore

I agree with Sardar, it's the whole quality vs. quantity issue. Be aware of the terms of agreement, many will terminate you if you hit the "use an excess of average use" clause i.e. Warez sites. Like everything it's the wording. Also many claim unlimited bandwith. This usually means that the pipe the information is pumped out of is rather limited, and with an excess amount of people subjected to involuntary speed caps :)

Here's an out of the way analogy: It's like if you go to a bar and are guaranteed as much beer as you want until 6am for only $2. Now the only catch is that you have to drink the beer through a 100 foot crazy straw.

It is magic, Elfin Magic, those Keebler Elves are into everything!

You lease 5 Rackshack servers for approximately $550/month. You sell 5,000 accounts at $10/year, collecting $50,000. You provide no support. You pay for two months servers, get cut off after three. Total Revenues $50,000. Total costs $1,100. Profit $48,900. Time in jail-none because you are a minor.

This is directly from the Shaun and Timmah school of web management.

go with a host offering prices like that and don't expect them to be around for very long! that's a receipe for overloaed servers! :eek:

Originally posted by Incognito
You lease 5 Rackshack servers for approximately $550/month. You sell 5,000 accounts at $10/year, collecting $50,000. You provide no support. You pay for two months servers, get cut off after three. Total Revenues $50,000. Total costs $1,100. Profit $48,900. Time in jail-none because you are a minor.

This is directly from the Shaun and Timmah school of web management.

ouch, is that what he did, burned a ton of people without any reguards to anything. SOB, makes the rest of us that work hard seem like cr*p.

well the good news is that minors can be held liable in certain cases

Mike

Originally posted by Venkman

Snip

That has to be the best first post I have ever read. Well said m8 :)