POLL: What are you looking for in an inexpensive webhosting

[vladgur]

Im looking into entering the webhosting arena to earn some money on the side. I lease dedicated servers for my own purposes and have excellent experience with remote administration and security maitenance. Im thinking of offering several levels of hosting: something like:

Level 1: $5/month
------------------------
250mb space
1gb/month bandwidths
5 users/email addresses
Web-based email
Ensim web-interface
PHP/CGI
Frontpage extensions, SSI, Stats, etc
1 Mysql database
Anything else?

Level 2: $10/months
--------------------------
1gb space
5gb/month bandwidth
20 users
10 mysql databases
rest is the same as level 1


Level 3: $15/month
-----------------------------
5gb space
10gb/month bandwidth
50 users
unlimited databases(by request)
Tomcat 4 JSP/Servlet server
rest is the same as level 1

The server will be firewalled and constantly monitored by an intrusion detection package(PSAD).


I will probably implement the trouble ticket system for support, forum for user community, daily backups to a separate server, and network stats and dns/email servers on a a separate server in case something terrible happens to the hosting server.... The hosting server will be a Pentium 4 2.0ghz with 512mb ram and 80gb hard drive. It will be used by 100-200 users at most and the bandwidth will be sufficient to sustain them all.

Tell me what would you think about these plans and anything that you might want to add? I currently host a few mid to low-traffic sites so these would be used as references.

 

[p0ntif]

Give me the ability to exhibit extreme adult material nad I'll be your first customer

 

[yllus]

mod_perl support at Dixiesys prices (along with all of their other features). I will personally get the word out to a number of people who I know would be VERY interested in a service of this kind.

 

[RossMAN]

Ask this question over at WebHostingTalk.com forums and you'll get a lot of good input.

 

[dawks]

Bandwidth man! what good is 5gigs of space with only 10gigs of bandwidth?

 

[stev0]

Originally posted by: DaZ
Bandwidth man! what good is 5gigs of space with only 10gigs of bandwidth?

ditto, bandwidth is what it is all about.

 

[Scarpozzi]

One that can host as much illegal music, videos, and pirated software as possible for the lowest price.

 

[vladgur]

Originally posted by: yllus
mod_perl support at Dixiesys prices (along with all of their other features). I will personally get the word out to a number of people who I know would be VERY interested in a service of this kind.

Whats so special about mod_perl? Unless it exposes some security issues, Id have no problems making it available

 

[vladgur]

Originally posted by: DaZ
Bandwidth man! what good is 5gigs of space with only 10gigs of bandwidth?

You have to be realistic. Dynamic nature of many sites means that just because they have A LOT of contant doesnt mean that all of it will be downloaded. In any case, i think i will probably increase the bandwidths of the highest level to 25 mbits/month. In fact during the introductory promotion period I will increase the bandwidth level for all levels. After a few months or so I will decrease the new sign-ups bandwidths to more realistics level that I will deduce from the actual bandwidth use of the promotional accounts

 

[vladgur]

Originally posted by: p0ntif
Give me the ability to exhibit extreme adult material nad I'll be your first customer

I might consider but I cant promise because adult materials are usually the bandwidth and resource hogs

 

[denali]

shell access either ssh or telnet.

 

[Electric Amish]

FTP access.

None of this web-builder bs.

amish

 

[vladgur]

oops, ofcourse, FTP is a given SSH on other hand I will consider giving to 2nd level + customers

 

[dawks]

With these 'dynamic' pages you talk about, im hosting a forum for my cousin on my system.. running phpBB (VERY dynamic), with about 10 users accessing occasionally througout the day..

The forum is no bigger then 2megs on my harddrive, yet, with 14,000 hits in two days, has moved over 65megs of data. no substantial images.. included (nothing over 20kb)..

Thats over 1gig per month of just 10 people accessing a forum a few times per day.. usually one user connected every 20-25 minutes.. (so the server is idle quite often).

 

[vladgur]

How did 10 users in 2 days managed to move 65 megabytes of text info? That amounts to 3.25 megabytes of textual communication per user per day. I think the entire volume of Anna Karenina takes less than that.

I have a relatively popular site with over 500 registered users with streaming videos(not many people watch them though due to their connection speed) and image galleries. And this months has been relatively slow, yet we managed to get around 110K hits(our peak was 500K hits last december) with around 200 hits per visit(hit could be many things in a dynamic environment where php pages reference other php pages and images). Yet we only used up 800mb of bandwidth.
So unless you are letting people download large files, I doubt you will be able to use beyond 1GB of bandwidth unless your site is super-popular in which case you should be paying more than $5