EP Interactive Values Forum

Web hosting: $300 per month

Electric-Pages has been on the web since January of 1995 with UUNET, the biggest web hosting service.

We pay $300 per month for 30 megabytes of disk space, up to 20 megabytes per hour of download volume, and our own domain name. We're on a pretty heavily loaded Pentium machine running BSDI Unix and the Apache http server; it looks like there are as many as 20 other domain on our machine.

The Pentium is linked via a T-1 line to UUNET's backbone in Virginia. (To this day, we've never laid eyes on the actual machine.) A UUNET robot dings the system every 15 minutes around the clock to make sure everything is up and running, and we've never had any downtime problems.

The hosting service provides almost no sitebuilding service or handholding, although they respond instantly to email for basic tech support. There's an indifferent web log analysis package available for $50 and a very limited set of canned CGI scripts for counters and image maps.

Every week I get email from somebody who wants to host our site for less, but they're usually very small companies with one server and no backup. Since we used to spend at least $300 on Federal Express each month back in the days when Electric-Pages was a paper newsletter, I've always felt that the stick with the higher price for the remarkable speed and reliability.

I'd be interested in learning the range of web hosting fees and whether people get real creative help from their hosting service.