I can't be of any help, dodgy. I just wanted to post some words of encouragement. Hang in there. The toughest part is over. We all appreciate your hard work.

(that last part is my silly assumption. i don't even speak for ME much less the rest of this rascally crew)

I always check for bandwidth and space gotchas myself. How much does extra Gigabytes cost? What if everyone on th eplanet decides to stop by one day - will they throttle your connection, or charge you a fortune for the traffic? :)

Dodgy, I bet you could get by with Textdrive Business Hosting. Though I haven't used them myself I've heard they're very good. Total cost would be a lot less than the cost of a dedicated box.


http://www.textdrive.com/
http://www.textdrive.com/hosting/business

If you want a dedicated box you could do worse than ServerBeach, which is a self-managed hosting company co-located in Rackspace datacenter space. I found them to be fast and reasonably responsive, and the price isn't bad.

Oh dear. I knew I'd heard of EV1 before. That bothers me a little.

I'm just thinking about moving some hosting to 1&1 dodgy. What problems did they give you?

I'll suggest RimuHosting again, although Textdrive looks nice.

To answer your question. I don't think you can do cheaper or better than hosting things yourself. ADSL, fixed IP address & a cheapo/spare computer. Uptime isn't great, but it's OK, and 256Kb/s isn't as bad as it sounds.

People rave about textdrive, but I've had a fair bit of downtime with them. I sort of trust them though (they seem to talk the talk), and they're quite accomodating. That's who I use, and although I'd second the recommendation, I'm not 100% about them yet.

Textdrive looks very expensive for what you get -- shared hosting rather than a true or virtual server. I'm assuming you want root: you'd be mad not to and you're obviously knowledgeable enough.

I've been wanting to look into Rimuhosting -- I run a UML-based server with an obscure outfit that's been very high quality, stable and reliable. It gets probably about as much traffic as Metachat does. Rimuhosting uses Xen which is streets ahead of UML, and they seem to be more experienced with it than anyone else out there. If my guess about your server load is correct, I think you'd be fine with anything from the 29.95/mo package on up.

OTOH if you want to host in the UK, you'd be mad not to go with bytemark.

Rimuhosting does look good. Anyone have any idea how long it takes them to create the server from the time of the order? I'd really want to get going sooner rather than later...

And I'll tell you all about 1&1 later

I'l second what seanyboy says - though 256 is bad - you can do much better than that. ;) The downside of hosting yourself is a) noise unless you have a spare room/closet and/or a server cabinet the constant hum of a machine does get tired. Servers aren't exactly quiet. and b) all hardware problems are your problems.

If you aren't "growing" your websites at abnormal speeds gigabytewise (like some other people I know, ahem) extra disks and that sort of crap won't bother you at all. It'll be more a question if a server breaks, then you must fix it. Depending on what kind of sapre machine you are using this could either become a nightmare of constant repair or no trouble at all.

The upsides are that you are in control, you can fix things with some tape (or even a car sponge!) at any hour of the day - and it's usually cheap as heck.