Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Reliable.Net v LunarPages - one person's experience

[richardjyoung]

Hi

I use LunarPages for for a field hockey club web site I co-manage in my spare time. See Witney Men's Hockey Club No problems. Good support. And so much better better value for money than the first ISP I used Streamline.Net.

I now need to find a site for my UK school. The ISP we currently used does not support ASP. We need a Windows based solution

My first instinct was to go with LunarPages. My reservation is the limit on bandwidth ie 3500 GB Bandwidth

We have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth we are going to need in the future. We are just about to start a weekly news video blog and upload some Camtasia created tutorials ie streaming. I worry that in the fullness of time 3500 GB is not going to be enough.

I do not mind buying extra bandwidth but having corresponded with LunarPages there seems to be no package that we can afford to support possible future usage

Since Lunar cannot meet possible future needs, time to look elsewhere.

So much choice. Having read these pages we decided to go with Reliable.Net.

Good news: a very fast site. Sorry Lunar but the response time in terms of moving from screen to screen in the management panel is far faster. I have every reason to expect that once we get our pages up, they will load quickly - even though we are based in the UK

Bad news: There are no clear instructions about how to get started. We cannot get our pages up. And we are experiencing very little support

Moving sites is not to be undertaken lightly. Propagation is always a painful: step one: set up a temporary site. Step two transfer domain name. Step 3 have 72 hours where things go flakey

The issue is this: it can be extraordinarily difficult to ftp your old site to a new host where you have no experience of their processes.

I have done this twice:

With LunarPages, I received an email detailing all the steps I needed to take to get started. Even so my newbie inexperience meant that in ftping we deleted the Frontpage extensions and so could not publish our site from within MS Expression Web

It took longer than I liked to get things sorted but I could email and even ring for free from the UK and after ten days we were up and running

With Reliable.Net I have now got my senior technician questioning my judgement.

Our experience is this:

1. When you sign up, the email you receive gives you the url to log onto the control panel, user id and password, a note to update DNS records and a suggestion you send help a ticket if there are any further questions

2. But how to upload the site? My Senior Technican is pretty IT savvy and has tried and failed. We have logged calls but there is never any reply. Things do happen but there is no email reply so that we are left in the dark

3. We cannot work out how to ftp up our site to the temporary address. We certainly cannot publish from within FrontPage or Expression Web

4. The Knowledge Base is waifer thin. There is no online user forum. The live talk has never worked the three times I have tried, There is no telephone support.

Plus interestingly I cannot find Reliable.Net listed in webhostingchoice.com or webmaster.org

This is not necessarily a bad thing. As usman770 said yesterday (612998 ) " they could be just new and not built a reputation."

My guess is this is an issue of size and resources. Reliable.Net have just launched a very competitive deal - half price for life. To be truthful, the new pricing and $2/£ exchange rate made the offer very attractive.

My guess is that they having to manage a surge of new accounts and may not have in place the personnel to handle set up issues. The limited Knowledge base and no forum are also indicators of newness.

And perhaps I am being unfair to Reliable.Net. There have been several very favourable postings from happy subscribers. I just wish they would keep us in the loop by emailing updates to queries.

Fast site; very good value for money; perhaps it is all down to our ineptitude.

I am giving it another 48 hours before I pull the plug and ask for my money back within the 15 days allowed. I shall post this list on my experience.

Could be I an back next week to LunarPages with my tail between my legs.

Unless, of course, members of the list can suggest another ISP that can meet our school's uncertain future needs:

2000 page web site. About 1Gb of space.
increasing use of video blogs and video tutorials. Want them streamed.
Net 2 & ASP
MS SQL
load WordPress onto the ISP server
Ability to upgrade site as bandwidth needs develop
Loads of freedom in the control panel eg set up FrontPage extensions, subwebs, password protect areas of the site, etc

[Ashley Merrick]

Just a side note i think "3500 GB" would be fine amount of bandwidth for your site, however depeneds on how many users you have in the school. 3500 GB is more bandwidth than you get on most dedticated servers and is what you would get from a maxed out 10mbps line.

[40sixty]

how big are your video files and do you think millions of people will download them?
if not, then your fine with 3500GB.
but do note, make sure your not violating thier TOS.

[johnny-l]

Originally Posted by richardjyoung

My reservation is the limit on bandwidth ie 3500 GB Bandwidth. We have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth we are going to need in the future.

3500 is a HUGE amount. 3500gb bw is more than a 10mbit fully utilized line (i guess it would cost around 300$/mo), and should you really need 3500gb bw/mo you really need a very powerful server to handle all the load, because bandwith by itself it's not the only component of running a website.
You have to "serve" all this files, and this has an impact on Disk i/o, ram, cpu, needed.

So forget about this on a shared hosting. Even if they offer xxxxGB bandwidth they will terminate your account way before you can reach that limit, because you'll go over other limits like for cpu resources.. ecc

The first error of a newbie is to overestimate their bandwidth requirements ...

3500gb it's definitely NOT a small amount of bw, i help managing a website with 10.000 unique visitors a day, a lot of video and games hosted, a big vbullettin forum with 300 to 500 people connected as an average and the monthly bandwidth consuption stays around 1500gb.

draw your conclusions.

My Senior Technican is pretty IT savvy and has tried and failed.

no offence meant, but : definitely not. it seems like you guys totally lacks even the basics

FrontPage

...

Plus interestingly I cannot find Reliable.Net listed in webhostingchoice.com or webmaster.org

maybe because you can't even remember your provider name ... reliable.net doesn't bring me to a hosting company...

[richardjyoung]

Some fair points johnny-l - but my Senior Technician is good ie maintains a 300pc network

And apologies to all concerned for some factual inaccuracies which I sholuld have checked before posting

a) Reliable.Net should read reliablesite.net
b) Lunarpages offer 400 GB/Month not 3500!

So let me recast the question: is 400Gb/month a 'reasonable' amount of bandwidth? My guess is that we are looking to upload a dozen 5mb files, a week. This may grow over time. Say 200 views maximum a day.

[usera]

I think you will find in most situations you will exceed your cpu allowed limits than your actual bandwidth in most situations with shared hosting so I wouldn't be too worried about bandwidth especially 3500 GB/Month from lunarpages. It just means you don't have to worried about bandwidth limits unlike other hosts which has lower limits.

[ImageLeet]

Originally Posted by richardjyoung

So let me recast the question: is 400Gb/month a 'reasonable' amount of bandwidth? My guess is that we are looking to upload a dozen 5mb files, a week. This may grow over time. Say 200 views maximum a day.

dozen 5MB files a week would require alot of hits to use 400 GB, you will most probably cross the CPU limit allocated

[Xboxking]

I think 400gb would be more than enough. And that's just for a month.

I suppose you need to decide how popular your site is going to be. As you mention it is a school site, so I'm guessing the people mainly accessing that will be, those interested in your school (or choosing to go to it etc), those in your local area that know about the school and the students/teachers than go to the school.

Even if you had a video blog that was watched/downloaded at 50mb a file... 8000 people would have to download it to reach your limit - for that month.

At any rate really, when you start wanting bandwidth such as over 1000gb, or more, chances are to use that your site would be quite popular and would then more than likely require a dedicated server. I would think.

Hope that helps.

[RSNET-John]

Richard,

I have looked over the tickets you have submitted with us, they have all been answered promptly. If you are still having issues please update the tickets by either replying by e-mail or visiting the support site (http://support.reliablesite.net ). Our Live Support functionality has caused more trouble than good, and we are in the progress of replacing it with better software. If you need ticket numbers, please let me know and I'll private message them to you.

If you need to speak to someone live, Radic is available both by AIM and MSN throughout most of the week, and you should be able to catch him throughout the weekend.

AIM: ReliableSite
MSN: sales@reliablesite.net

Also, our knowledge base contains a good amount of information, including "Getting Started" videos with setting up your account, ftp, etc.

Let me know if I can help you directly.

[richardjyoung]

A series of emails has sorted my uploading issue and I have made some suggestions as to how the risk of misunderstanding instructions can be reduced.

One of the best tests of an ISP is wehn things go worng and how long it takes to put them right.

I shall continue with my reliablesite.net account as well as the two with LunarPages and post on my experience in about three months time.

[RSNET-John]

I'm glad everything got resolved quickly, the support guys are great. I appologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Looking forward to a long business relationship with you!