by Flack » Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:36 pm
I have the Baby Plan at HostGator. It's $5.95/month, but the only way to actually get it that cheap is to buy the max which is 36 months. That works out to $214.20 for three years.
When I signed up it said "unlimited" bandwidth and storage, but they've since changed that to "unmetered," which is in line with AT&T's "unlimited*" plans, where the asterisk means "as long as it falls into their definition of normal use, which they will not define until you cross it."
For what it's worth, this is why I did it.
For more than 10 years, I had a Cox Business Internet account at my residential address. When I signed up it was $69.99/month for 20 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up (20/3). This was at a time when most people were getting slower speeds, and shared (mine was dedicated) with a static IP address. It was a good deal when I signed up and I got my money's worth.
So, for ten years, I was my own web host. I ran my own server at the house. And for a long time, 3 Mbps up was enough. But then I started running WordPress, and then I started running multiple WordPress sites, and then I started publishing podcasts. Each time I posted a new podcast, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,5000 podcatchers would all hit my house at the same time, effectively launching a denial of service attack and making the internet unusable for a few hours.
Being your own sysadmin is great and terrible. It's great because if you want ASP and PHP and PERL and everything else installed, you just do it. And if you want more hard drive space you just add a hard drive. It's great... until a hard drive dies or you lose power or your cable modem goes tits up or any other number of things happen. None of those things are insurmountable but all of them lead to downtime and typically to juggling evening plans.
One day I got a note from Cox letting me know my business plan was being phased out. I was offered $79/month for 25/5 (a slight cost increase and slight bandwidth bump), or for $154/month I could get 100/20. By now, my 20 Mbps down was showing its age. Even the lowest residential accounts around here were running circles around me.
So, I checked into them. For $50/month, I could get 100/10, so that's what I ended up doing. Even with the $5.95/month hosting from HostGator added to that total, it was still way below the $154/month they wanted for the business account. I actually ended up saving even more money, because Cox doesn't include business accounts in their tv/phone/internet bundles, so I was paying full price for a phone and cable TV on top of my business account. By switching back to residential, I was able to get one of their bundles and lower the cost of my cable and phone bill, too.
So, that's how I ended up with HostGator. Their tech support is, by and large, garbage. Every time my website does down -- at least twice a month -- I contact their online support and they act like somehow it's a problem with my site and not their server (even though I have like 5 domains down), an act they maintain until whatever they're rebooting reboots. In the end you get what you pay for. I pay for rock bottom hosting, and that's what I get.
I have the Baby Plan at HostGator. It's $5.95/month, but the only way to actually get it that cheap is to buy the max which is 36 months. That works out to $214.20 for three years.
When I signed up it said "unlimited" bandwidth and storage, but they've since changed that to "unmetered," which is in line with AT&T's "unlimited*" plans, where the asterisk means "as long as it falls into their definition of normal use, which they will not define until you cross it."
For what it's worth, this is why I did it.
For more than 10 years, I had a Cox Business Internet account at my residential address. When I signed up it was $69.99/month for 20 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up (20/3). This was at a time when most people were getting slower speeds, and shared (mine was dedicated) with a static IP address. It was a good deal when I signed up and I got my money's worth.
So, for ten years, I was my own web host. I ran my own server at the house. And for a long time, 3 Mbps up was enough. But then I started running WordPress, and then I started running multiple WordPress sites, and then I started publishing podcasts. Each time I posted a new podcast, somewhere between 1,000 and 1,5000 podcatchers would all hit my house at the same time, effectively launching a denial of service attack and making the internet unusable for a few hours.
Being your own sysadmin is great and terrible. It's great because if you want ASP and PHP and PERL and everything else installed, you just do it. And if you want more hard drive space you just add a hard drive. It's great... until a hard drive dies or you lose power or your cable modem goes tits up or any other number of things happen. None of those things are insurmountable but all of them lead to downtime and typically to juggling evening plans.
One day I got a note from Cox letting me know my business plan was being phased out. I was offered $79/month for 25/5 (a slight cost increase and slight bandwidth bump), or for $154/month I could get 100/20. By now, my 20 Mbps down was showing its age. Even the lowest residential accounts around here were running circles around me.
So, I checked into them. For $50/month, I could get 100/10, so that's what I ended up doing. Even with the $5.95/month hosting from HostGator added to that total, it was still way below the $154/month they wanted for the business account. I actually ended up saving even more money, because Cox doesn't include business accounts in their tv/phone/internet bundles, so I was paying full price for a phone and cable TV on top of my business account. By switching back to residential, I was able to get one of their bundles and lower the cost of my cable and phone bill, too.
So, that's how I ended up with HostGator. Their tech support is, by and large, garbage. Every time my website does down -- at least twice a month -- I contact their online support and they act like somehow it's a problem with my site and not their server (even though I have like 5 domains down), an act they maintain until whatever they're rebooting reboots. In the end you get what you pay for. I pay for rock bottom hosting, and that's what I get.