chipotle | (no subject)

I'm wrestling with a few things right now, but one of them's relatively mundane. I may still have the opportunity to get a managed web hosting site -- about 1G of storage, 10G of bandwidth a month, 10 domains, a 100Mbps internet connection on a multiple-provider meshed network, on FreeBSD-based dual Xeon servers and a pretty full compliment of software (Apache/PHP, MySQL, the Textpattern content management system, Postfix and IMAP both with SSL, WebDAV support). This isn't quite as good as I'd first read it (I thought the storage was 10G as well), but it's the equivalent of the $25/month I'd pay for most commercial web hosting with that storage and with far more available services and bandwidth. The normal price for this will, in fact, be $25/month, but the special opportunity is to try to get it for a one-time price of $199. The person behind it is essentially trying to raise money by creating a small "founders' circle" rather than going the conventional VC route.

The question, of course, is just what would I do with this? I could move ranea.org if I wanted to, although I don't have any particular reason to do so. (In fact, doing so would likely necessitate me moving "Barking" off Movable Type.) I could actually set up the coyotecoast.com address that I bought a while ago. I could look into other potential project ideas I've had that I haven't pursued -- although I'm reticent to commit to them, and $200 would definitely feel like a serious commitment. The main one I'm thinking of is the online magazine I've threatened to attempt for years.

Or, I could ignore the opportunity and see if I can keep on weaseling space out of friends if I come up with such a project. I won't say that doesn't have a certain base appeal.

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I'm of the "if you don't need it, don't get it" philosophy. That $25/month may come in handy sometime. My sites are all hosted on free servers/with friends; they're low traffic and there's no need to upgrade to anything. If I start using significant bandwidth, then I'll reconsider.

I'm using hosting from lunarpages, and they offer a similar package to the one you mentioned for $7.95 per month. It's 800MB instead of 1GB, but the bandwidth is 40GB per month on a 2GB network connection. The reason I looked into them was that they were getting good reviews on service, and I haven't had any complaints at all with them since signing on. They also offer another plan for $22.95 per month that's 1.2Gb and 80GB per month bandwidth.

Where I host, $25 a month would get you 6GB of space and 90 GB of bandwidth. If that's what they are going to offer, they might not be in business for long unless they intend to offer some serious value atop that. I myself paid $70 for a year of a reseller account and have 500mb/10G for myself and handed out a 200mb/3G account to a friend, and have 2 more left.

From a cursory look around the managed hosting universe, $25 a month for those features seems pretty rare.

I have seen places that will give you your own server, with better storage and bandwidth, and say "go at it" for about that much a month -- which I could do, from a technical standpoint. I haven't seen many places which will allow 10 domains -- not parked domains pointing at the same web pages, but separate domains -- and unlimited subdomains, and haven't seen many that seem to have put the same level of thought into things that the TextDrive folks have, paying attention to things like enabling the Zend optimizer and Apache's mod_deflate for pretty serious bandwidth compression on text files (over 90%), WebDAV mounting of your hosting space as an iDisk, 20 MySQL databases, free server-wide SSL certificates available, and so on.

TextDrive definitely won't be the cheapest hosting service on the market -- but I'm pretty sure they've done their homework. And, while I just sort of glossed over "Textpattern" in my message, my suspicion is that that's going to be their main selling point: this is designed to be very serious competition to Six Apart's TypePad. Since the only justification I'd have for going with any hosting service that isn't the mooch-from-friends type would be content management, this isn't something I'd sneeze at.

...but at any rate, the price isn't what's giving me pause, at least not if I made it into the one-time fee category. Despite my lack of permanent employment, that'd be the sacrifice of less than a day's worth of pay from the current contract. If I put it to good use, I'd feel it had paid for itself adequately enough after a year. No, the question is, what would be putting it to good use?

Part of me suspects that if I ponied up the money now, I'd damn well find a use for it. It's sort of like having an annual pass to Disney World: before you have the pass, you wouldn't go often enough to justify it, but after you buy it, you'll end up there an awful lot because you don't want to feel like you've wasted the money. :)

Well, I just checked the server, and it appears to be running mod_deflate, offer shared ssl, they don't limit MySQL DB's, and offer 45 addon domains (which seem to be different from Parked domains, they are listed seperately in the control panel) for the $25 account, and I installed MT 2.6 on it fine myself.