[nylug-talk] [SPAM warning] I found a cool hosting facility <$10/month gives you 500GB Online storage.

[Gary Mort]

Brandorr wrote:
> On 10/25/07, Alex Pilosov <alex at pilosoft.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Brian Gupta wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> It is a virtual server that has FTP/SFP/IMAP/Web, etc access. (I am in
>>> the process of loading all my email into the thing. It is very cool. (I
>>> signed up for a ten year contract for $5.95/month, the price is hard to
>>> beat).
>>>
>>> Signup here, and I get a tiny kickback.
>>> http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?355817
>>>       
>> Very nice to post spam about just another virtual hosting company with
>> shell access.
>>
>> Note that its only 5.95 a month if prepaid 10 years in advance...(say what?)
>>
>> Otherwise, it is 10.95 a month (month to month) plus 50$ setup. Hardly
>> anything to write home about.
>>
>> This is not a virtual server. You don't get root. This is a plain vanilla
>> virtual hosting account.
>>
>> I wish I could understand how companies like dreamhost manage to fool
>> people into thinking their services are the best evar.
>>
>> -alex
>>     
>
> Basically for ~$700 I got 500GB of online disk.  Considering what all
> the X-Drives, S3s and Googles are charging for online storage, I am
> very happy with this price...


However, their Terms and Conditions state that the disk space can only 
be used for web-accessible data or website related storage(such as email).

I suspect how much they enforce that decision is based on the total 
usage on whatever server/disk your on is.

Also from checking various forums, Dreamhost seems to oversell their 
service.  Basically they give you X amount of bandwidth, but to actually 
USE that amount of bandwidth in a month, for example for hosting photos, 
you would need to have X/Y(average size of photo) connections a month to 
download the photos.  They only allow you about 6 connections a second 
on heavily loaded servers(per others experience), which makes it 
impossible to actually use the "bandwidth" you have been given for many 
uses(you could host gigagantic streaming media files that get low hourly 
traffic, but lots of photos will cause problems).

Now, all of that is by the by.  I'm used to shared hosters overselling 
their accounts.  I'm used to them claiming more than they can really 
deliver. 

However, I will note that some brief Googling led me to find that for 
those people who did cause server drain(while still being within the 
terms of service), Dreamhost would cancel the account rather abrubtly 
and then take a lot of wrangling to get your data back from them. 

Finally, to get the data back, for one individual they zipped up his 
files into 3 large files that he had to download, and it was a 
multi-file archive so you needed all 3 files to unzip it.

So let's say you DO use your full disk space, all 500G of it.  And they 
lock your account out.  Now you will need to find another host that will 
allow you at least 100G and possibly up to 500G of transfer in a month 
so you can download the data from Dreamhost to the new host.  Than you 
will need between 500G and 1T of disk space in order to unzip that archive.

All in all, Dreamhost has it's benefits, and if you go into it knowing 
the problems and are ready to face them, it's great.  Just don't expect 
the terms of service to be honored realistically.