Rhino22

I agree with you, but I think the hosts that have posted in here, namely webair, phatsevers, isprime, and a few others will be here a year from now! That is why in my thread I stated only reputable people, I don't want to take chances with a ere today gone tomorow host.

dubsix

unfortuneatly thats the trend in the industry now with the availability of cheap servers every teenybopper with access to mommy and daddy's credit cards are starting a hosting company and vanishing at the first sign of trouble....

Damn kids make it tough for us legit small shops to get business

mgold

RIGHHHTTTTTT
there is no way in the world just the traffic costs are about $300 and thats for the crapiest traffic in the world

MrJackMeHoff

All the hosts with these prices are oversellers.. If anyone on here actually used what the hosts tells them they do they be thrown off the network.. People dont realize the hosts are showing them fake graphs and ripping them off.. Its rather comical.

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Strife

Another person stuck back in 2002

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MrJackMeHoff

I know this for a fact BTW because I get new people who sign up and say my old host said I used 20 mb so I need 20 mb.. I turn on their shit and everything propogates and the bandwidth shoots up to like a whole 3 mb and stays there.. And um yeah there ya go another lied to customer..

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DutchTeenCash

were paying 400 at www.m3server.com fair price good quality not cogent fast server good support and i think every reliable company can offer this for 400 give or take, the servermatrix etc ones arent for real, not if youre also focussing on outside the US

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dubsix

out of all the unmetereds I've ever sold not one person has been removed from the network for using what they've been sold. I do have some clients that had Servermatrix 20mbits that couldn't push near that because SM was maxed out on their two cogent gig-e's but thats what you get with sub-par transit and rock bottom prices... I can almost match cogent pricing with some decent Level(3) and Global Crossing b/w

dubsix

heh, I've got one of those right now, purchased a 25mbps package and gets everythign up and going, spikes to roughly 6-7mbps but even on 95% he's still below 6mbps said he was using all 20mbps at his previous host... heh

mgold

ok so what is price on true Tier 1 traffic per meg?

Anyone selling this makes there money like this: (article posted on www.thewhir.com)

Scam: here is the biggest scam in the hosting industry in bandwidth resale. When you buy 1 Meg of traffic chances are you will not use a full 1 Meg for the entire month. It is also very likely that you will only use about 40-50%, but you may burst for few a minutes during high traffic peaks. What many hosting companies have done in the past and are still doing today, is take 2 different people that both pay for 1 Mbps and have them share the same Meg of allocated bandwidth. Basically, they are banking on the fact that when you burst the other company will probably not and vice versa. Therefore a hosting company can sell you bandwidth for $50 p/Mbps and sell it to another company at the same price making $100 p/Mbps.

Now many people say who cares? Well here is the reason why you should care. Have you ever typed in a url of a site you know exists, or a link on the site and it brings up ?The page can not be displayed?? Well what just happened is that secession that you just initiated did not have enough bandwidth to display, in hosting terms that is called packet loss. So how would you like for your customer to try to order something from your site and get that page over and over again? Well that is what will happen if both you and another person that shares your bandwidth have high traffic on both of your sites at the same time.

MrJackMeHoff

See its not just me..

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MrJackMeHoff

I think its more of a future problem.. More of these fuckjob hosts (webair/phatservers) whoever will just get more and more greedy and sell more and more people the same bandwidth.. As the prices supposedly get cheaper and cheaper.. You all will suffer in the end and youhave only yourselves to blame.

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MrJackMeHoff

Wow this thread got quiet

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Snake Doctor

yah it did

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dubsix

*dead*

food comes before petty gfy arguements ;)

sjoerdv

Quite simple, if you like to have a 10 Mbit uplink and want to be sure you really have the 10 Mbit and not shared bandwidth as mentioned before you are not going to have this for these extreme low prices. Just call Level3 for example or Interroute or any other good carrier and ask them what they are charging for 100 Mbit. As adulthoster we are having contracts with several carriers, investing in equipent like Juniper routers, foundry switches etc etc...
Any hoster which can make offers at these low prices are scamming. They won't deliver what they promise. Feel free to do business at this level but when you are serious about your business pls look for a serious host. It bothers me everytime to see people wanting to do business online but who are not willing to pay for a descent infrastructure.

Rhino22

are you saying that Phatservers and Webair are scamers? Who would you recommend that is good in your eyes

Snake Doctor

I also recommend doing business with people that speak and write in proper english and know how to spell.

Also, calling Level3 and asking what they charge for a 100meg drop won't give you any idea of what you should pay for bandwidth.
If you buy 5 gige lines you're going to get a much better rate than someone who buys 100megs.

Its the same as Wal Mart selling me cheese cheaper than I could buy it directly from Kraft for, even if I bought it by the case, and Wal-Mart still makes a profit.

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sjoerdv

Well at least my english is much better than your dutch. And calling level3 will give you a good idea of what the costs are hosts have to pay/invest to offer good quality. I won't advertise myself in this post but we are doing business with some major players. Guess why they don't mind paying a bit extra. And guess why they don't mind my english not be so fluent as yours.
Only wanted to express my ideas. You're getting what you pay for.

Magg

I can get Level(3) at $18/Meg, maybe $15.. direct from L3, just depends on your commits.

So calling and asking about a 100Meg commit is not going to get you anywhere, and you also need to know some reps to get the lower pricing.

sjoerdv

If I would make this offer

Dual XEON 2.1 Ghz
1024 MB ECC RAM
68 GB SCSI HD
10 mbps Transfer
Fully Managed Server

For $399 I would have to find another job to pay my rent. Any other host who can seriously offer this needs to explain to me what I'm doing wrong.

Magg

I was not say that offer was one that I'd make or even saying its a good offer, I'd be very afraid if I was the customer wondering if my server was going to dissapear one night.


My point was that bandwidth depends on commitment level, thats the way it works, so you cant call Level3 and just ask for a 100mb commit price and compare it to your quote. It also depends on location, as pricing is sometimes location specific.


Everyone who wants cheap shit forgets about:

- buying switches
- buying routers
- buying parts for the routers and switches
- space costs
- power costs
- internal networking costs
- initial hardware costs (no matter what you want to believe, a server still does cost ~$700 (for a p4 2.8) if youre buying a real rackmount)
- replacement hardware costs (what if something goes bad, theres gotta be hotspare replacements)
- IP costs (they arnt free either)
- your fully managed service cost (people want money to be available to help customers who are whining)
- software license costs


tons of other shit... you think $399 covers it all? HAHA.

SinSational

unlisted specials

$299.95/month
10Mbps Capped Port (approx. 3000GB of Bandwidth)
1x18GB SCSI (option to add more)
1x1.26GHz (option to add more)
512MB RAM (option to add more)
100% Fully Managed

499.95/month
20Mbps Port Burstable to 100Mbps (approx. 6300GB of Bandwidth)
1x18GB SCSI (option to add more)
1x1.26GHz (option to add more)
512MB RAM (option to add more)
100% Fully Managed

$1499.95/month
100Mbps
1x72GB SCSI (option to add more)
1x2.66GHz (option to add more)
1024MB RAM (option to add more)
100% Fully Managed

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sjoerdv

This is exactly what I ment. BTW add to the list the salary of supportengineers.

sjoerdv

Just woke up here, was on your list already

Snake Doctor

Of course not....but you also said that you could get Level3 for $15 a meg with a big enough commitment.
So let's do the math.

On a 10meg capped line the customer will be able to use max 7 megs. Any more and their site will be too slow during peak times and they'll have to upgrade to another package with a bigger port.
So if they use 7megs (at 95th percentile) and they're paying you $399 then you're getting $57 a meg on bandwidth that you paid $15 for.
That's more than triple your cost....hell its almost quadruple.

As for hardware costs...well if this was your only customer then you'd have major problems....but if you have 100 guys with boxes like this (10 megs capped @$399) then you're taking in 40K a month for one gige commitment which according to your $15 figure before costs you 15K.
That's 35K a month over and above your bandwidth cost to maintain your hardware and pay your techs etc etc.

Doesn't seem too unreasonable to me....unless you only have 5 customers.

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mgold

EXCELLENT
Excatly what I wanted to say but didnt have the time to

dubsix

just like any other business, it's all about volume

BRISK

webair is a fuckjob host?

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mgold

Not possible, even if you commit to 2-3 gull gigs from one provider (not a smart idea) you will not get traffic cheaper then $15 a Meg. Now even though i did not take math in close to 10 years I still believe I can count. $15 per Meg X 100 Megs = $1,500
Plus lets say you have a server in stock and it?s paid for and you are willing not to charge for it (why wouldn't you?). You still have a fully managed option, and if you are truly managing the server you need to pay salary. And then like someone just said you have all these hidden costs if you truly are a hosting company, like power and space and salaries, etc.

So here is how you can sell it for this price:
- Cap your 100 Mbps client to about 50 Mbps
- Make sure to throw them on Cogent or HE line but allow them one shared IP from a different provider on the upstream side where it will point to Level3 or something like that
- Use one of your old workstations as a server

Once again when something seems too good to be true it usually is. But here is the kicker if you don?t care that you are being scammed what do you care?

mgold

First of all any client that is capped to 10 Begs will not have any problems untill about 9 or so.
Second you are forgetting the cost of Hardware and Managed that was included in that same $399

Snake Doctor

You're assuming that someones traffic graph will be a straight line across...it doesn't work that way.
If you average 5 you need a capacity of 10 in order to handle the spikes, or else your site will be slow/unreachable during peak times.
Which is why I say with 10megs capped you'll get about 7 out of it....if you're doing more than 7 you'll have to take the cap off the line to handle the traffic spikes and then that's a whole new hosting plan.

Also, I didn't forget about hardware and tech support costs....I said very plainly that on a gige commitment you would have 35K a month (scratch that....did the math wrong....its 25K)over and above your bandwidth cost to pay for hardware, techs salaries, and profit.
Plus in the math I did for the gige commitment I didn't even mention that the people buying 10 will only do 7....I simply dividied the gig line into 10MB increments for 100 customers paying $400 each.
Since each will only be using around 7 (some will only use 2 or 3) you can probably sell this package to more than 100 people without increasing your bandwidth commitment with the provider and still have a stable healthy network.

:2cents:

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mgold

Yes but here is the point
if you cap someone to 10 Megs and sell that same 10 Megs to someone else banking on the fact that no one will use all that traffic you can sell for that price. But what happens if they do use all that traffic, do you really want your galaries getting 404s or slow as my grandmas fiero?

sjoerdv

Your calculation doesn't work this way. With only a level3 contract/commitment you can't run a company. So you need several carriers to offer redundancy. This means several commitments. That way your total costs on bandwidth is probably higher than $15 per mbit. Furthermore you need good equipment for BGP routing. You can buy a good refurnished M40 on Ebay for around $19.000. You probably need at least two of them if you want to offer redundancy. Than you need to hire a cage in a good datacentre. I'm not sure what we pay now but it will cost around $200 per footprint per month. Now we have to buy a cabinet (Good Rittal will cost around $800). One cabinet per footprint. Oh btw, lets don't forget the managed switched we need a LOT of them. They will cost probably around $350 per piece. Did I mention the loadbalancers?? Only $5000 per piece for acceptible ones.
Need I have to mention the spare parts for all the equipment you need to have?? Oh and I forgot the annual $5000 for Ripe. You need it for the ip's.

Ok we bought it all, hired engineers and now we start selling $2.95 hosting accounts.

I probably forgot a lot but feel free to add....

Snake Doctor

I didn't say to double sell the network....that would be ridiculous.

I was pointing out that you could sell a "little" more than you have....maybe 20% or so.....of course this means you need to keep an eye on things but you should do that anyways.

Also, for the people in here boo-hooing about their hardware costs....I don't give a fuck.
You don't have overhead that anyone else in the business doesn't have.

Its the same shit when I buy a car and the salesman starts saying they can't sell the car for this much because they have this overhead and that overhead.....I'm the customer, I don't give a fuck, I just want the best deal.

That being said....to some degree you do get what you pay for, which is why you should do thorough research on a company before sending them money....check out their network, talk to their existing and former customers etc etc.
But I'm not going to pay more money for the same service if I don't have to.

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Magg

Dont forget that for EVERY gigabit youre pushing you need to get ANOTHER $20-$30K (THOUSAND) PIC for your router.

Magg

Oh, and also do you guys know that a router takes up lik 1-2 racks of space, so calculate that into cost too

SinSational

we don't cap at 50Mbps
primary provider is Verio
lol, we don't use old workstations as servers

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Magg

I think its fun having datacenter discussions here on gfy

Phil21

This is a funny thread..

All I can say, is the $399 for 10meg price point 2 years ago, was a huge gamble. Today, it's definitely profitable IF you have a decent sized customer base.

Ask any of our customers with this plan if they can or cannot push 10meg.. They can, and we even allow uncapped usage on these, overage based on 95th percentile.

I think some people simply do not realize the scale that many hosts are at these days. Also keep in mind not all traffic goes out transit links, if you're anywhere near competent. I can't divulge our peer:transit ratios, but I think a lot of the much smaller hosts would be amazed at how much traffic you can peer off settlement free once you get to a certain point (without sacrificing performance, most of the time it's actually an improvement).

Really it comes down to hardware pricing, datacenter (space/power/cooling), and people costs. The bandwidth costs are somewhere around 10-20% of a 10mbit sale. Sure, the profit isn't amazing for each machine, but aggregated into 50+ the numbers really start to make a lot of sense.

I can't speak for other hosts, but we don't "oversell". We carefully manage growth so that no trunk ports are ever contesting for bandwidth. We also maintain more than double our *bandwidth commitments* (not actual usage, which is of course less) in internet facing transit capacity. We could have every person burst to 5 times their commit on a given aggregation switch, and we'd still have plenty of headroom. This plan allows us to grow WITH our customers, instead of disrupting their business to play musical ethernet ports.


Plus, when you get to a certain size, and have enough technical ability large carriers will cut "special deals", which I also won't get into. However, you need to have an actual engineering staff who knows wtf their doing and has a good network of colleagues at other companies for these deals to even present themselves to you. The game definitely gets interesting at a certain level.

Again, bandwidth on a 10mbit plan is a very small part of the overall cost matrix. People by far is the largest, and equipment/maintenance of said equipment is the second largest. Equipment costs can be somewhat defrayed if you buy in enough volume (say, commit to delivery of 200 servers/mo) from a large manuf. like Dell or HP and have the credit to get a major lease signed. I know hosts (not us, we don't push enough volume, since this isn't our business focus) who can lease dual xeons for less than $43/mo each...

Still think the model is unworkable? I used to say the same thing, when we were much smaller. However, as you gain experience and knowledge of how things work, the numbers definitely start to make sense.

I'm not saying we're the greatest ever, but we work hard at it, and are improving every day. The most least profitable plans for us are the tiny little commit folks (1-2mbit), since there is almost zero margin in them as bandwidth pricing scales much better than hardware/staffing..

Just some food for thought.

-Phil

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GoNe

Hit me up you might have a customer ;) 146-501-762


Btw I may not be able to respond until the 26th or so.. beacuse of yeah christmas need to be a little with the family..

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sjoerdv

Interesting thought but in practice things are a bit different. Still I like your input in this discussion. We are hosting for 7 years now from Europe and are constantly facing changes in the market. It's difficult to offer quality and cheap prices at the same time. It's fun however to see a discussion like this on GFY.

dubsix

wow... I wouldn't throw my site on a $199 unmeterd box

Snake Doctor

Phil, if you'd respond to your email....you have a potential customer waiting.

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stev0

These guys are fast and the tech support rocks... I've got most of my stuff hosted with serverprovider now.

nowayout

Server: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
Primary HDD: 120 GB Drive
Secondary HDD: None
Drive Controller: IDE
RAM: 1024 MB RAM
Number of ips: 5 IP Addresses
Bandwidth: 3200 GB Bandwidth
Uplink Port Speed: 10 Mbps Uplink
Operating System: Red Hat 8 or Fedora
Fully Managed
Control Panel: add $25 per month
99.9% Uptime
Uses No Cogent (Best bandwith)
Number of servers: 1


Total Initial Charge: $200
Setup Fee: $0

SinisterStudios

There is no way you could be getting that setup for that price, unless the company is not reputable. Also why is the world would anyone want to go with the lowest priced server comapny for all their business's??? You do know you get what you pay for and if you rely on these server for you living youd be a fool to buy only on price. I just really dont understand people

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bigdog

that is some cheap ass bandwith

Sparks

10MBPS $295 per month
tier-1 network
Awesome support
ICQ 260-844-610
[email protected]

Snake Doctor

Bwahahahahaah,......what the fuck was I smoking back then? You can pretty much get a 100mbps server now for that price.

These old hosting threads crack me the fuck up.

Here's a blast from the past with an even older hosting conversation I had, when we were giddy about paying $1/per gig. (That would be about $300 per mbps in today's terms)

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