Re: Hosting allowances economies of scale

At 10:59 AM 10/01/2008, you wrote:


>As I'm sure most people are aware, as has been the case for some 
>time, many large hosting companies, including now NetSol, are giving 
>gargantuan allowances for disk space, bandwidth, DNS services and 
>mailboxes for paltry sums.  It's gotten obscene as of late.   See:
>
>https://www.networksolutions.com/web-hosting/package-comparison.jsp
>
>For example, for $17.95/mo (paid annually), they give 500GB (that's 
>gigs) of storage, which is more than all of my servers combined even 
>have, 5 Terabytes of traffic (that's 10 times as much as rackspace 
>would give me for a $400/mo managed server and far more than I have 
>enough bandwidth to accomodate for even one user),

I have seen similar offers and I assumed that the deal went something 
like this:
There is one 100 mbit ethernet interface on a server which all 
websites hosted on
that machine share (100 sites, 1000 sites?).  While the sites weren't 
charged additional
(or were limited to 5 Terabytes), its impossible for the sum of all 
the websites to exceed
the capacity of the single 100 mbit fastethernet, say about 7 
Terabytes. I suspect there
are also terms in the terms of service that prohibit certain types of 
websites and activities
that tend to use large amounts of bandwidth. They are betting that 
most sites will only
use a tiny fraction of 5 Terrabytes. With this setup its technically 
possible to achieve
5 Terrabytes (if all the other websites are light hitters) but in 
practice unlikely that the
total of all websites on the server will.

>  2,500 mailboxes, and pretty much all the trimmings (php, MySQL, stats, etc).

Again I suspect only a few site will avail themselves of large 
quantities and if they do they will be scrutinized closely and 
terminated if the slightest infraction of the terms of service can be 
found. Its an advertising game they know people tend to assume bigger 
(larger) limits are better but if they
offer 10 times what a customer will use or 100 times it doesn't matter.


>For my part, I've not seen anything remotely resembling these 
>economies in terms of my costs.  Am I a sucker for using 10k and 15k 
>RPM SCSI/SAS RAID level 1 disk subsystems?  They don't even make SAS 
>drives with more than 300MB, and they're not cheap.  Colo fees are 
>going up, not down and even bandwidth pricing at the colos haven't 
>gone down significantly.
>
>Obviously the customers I'm keeping mostly understand the difference 
>in dealing with me as opposed to a huge hosting company, but the 
>vast differences in pricing is getting hard for them to ignore, 
>especially in these times.
>
>How do you deal with this squeeze?

I am up front with my customers that I am not the cheapest
provider in terms of bandwidth or disk space, but I am local
you can talk to me or come visit me in person and within reason
I will try to accommodate you anyway I can.

Lyle Evans
Blacksburg.Net 


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