Question about Webhosting services

[AERo]

First of all, what are some good webhosting services?
(Service, downtime and price wise)

Secondly, what are the specs needed for a dedicated webserver?
I see a bunch of these Quad core servers with 8GB or more or RAM, but I don't see the necessity for such a beast.
However, I don't know what kind of resources are needed to run a webserver, so I can't conclusively say that such beasts are a waste

Lastly, how do I calculate my the needed bandwidth for a webserver?

[chrisk]

Can't answer all your questions, but I use Godaddy as when I looked around last year, they seemed to provide a good all-around package for the price. My site has never seen any downtime in over the year and a bit I have been with them.

If you decide to go with them, Pm me as I get all their promo emails with discounts. You should be able to find their coupon codes easily enough yourself, but I can probably save you some time.

ie. 20% off orders $80 or more with code gda245z this weekend.

[JD]

Yeah I setup a website for a former teacher with GoDaddy. Bought the .ca domain and cheapest hosting through them. So far no major issues, one day it seemed like the MySQL database was down for a couple hours, but everything was fine after.

Was simple to do, maybe a bit more expensive, but convenience is worth it

And you won't really know your bandwidth needs until your site is live. If it becomes a very active site, and you have a ton of multimedia content, then your bandwidth needs will be rather high.

[enaberif]

godaddy sucks.

Hostgator is where its at.

[Rison]

I second hostgator - have been with them for 3-4 years now.. very little downtime (and they actually tell you when maintenance happens)
easy setup and maintenance, great prices too.

As for setting up your own server, a PIII 500 w/ 512M ram would be more than enough to run Apache, it's what the users do with the server that counts. If you have multiple SQL databases and massive forum connections, you would have to ramp up the disk access speed and ram.

[victor]

Originally Posted by AERo

First of all, what are some good webhosting services?
(Service, downtime and price wise)

What kind of hosting you are looking for? Shared, VPS, Dedicated? Prices can vary from free up to few hundreds a month. Hostgator is pretty popular with reasonable prices, if you need a shared hosting.

Secondly, what are the specs needed for a dedicated webserver?
I see a bunch of these Quad core servers with 8GB or more or RAM, but I don't see the necessity for such a beast.
However, I don't know what kind of resources are needed to run a webserver, so I can't conclusively say that such beasts are a waste

You wanna put your own server at a datacentre? It wont be cheap. 8Gig quad core server could run hundreds websites.

The lowest limit to run a webserver is 64K . But you can host with it only a pretty simple website - plain html, no php, no mysql.

Lastly, how do I calculate my the needed bandwidth for a webserver?

To calculate bandwidth you need to run a website for a month. And then you will know how much traffic it will eat.
Really, it depends on size of a website and number of visitors.

[victor]

Originally Posted by enaberif

godaddy sucks.
Hostgator is where its at.

Originally Posted by Rison

I second hostgator -

Any shared hosting has drawbacks. Like you cannot control who's you neighbour. It could be some p0rn site and then you have a chance that your website's IP address, which you share with others, is on some blacklist and your clients cannot access your reputable site. A fresh example of that situation with Hostgator is here.

[belinik]

it depend on your needs and what kind of stuff you are running on

forum, blog etc have a good chance it will use massive resource if the code is not optimized.... and any traffic will probably gets you locked.

I would suggest you take a look at some discussion forum for web hosting(i am not sure the rules on this forum about linking to other forum).... I personally have been using a host call downtownhost for the past 2 years and they have some kickass support crew(I get a response from a tech in 4am within 2 minute and they actually know what they are doing... but it comes with a price.

bottom line..... get rid of unlimited or unrelistic package... if you think it's too good to be true.... avoid it.... in web hosting you get what you paid for.

[supaflyx3]

Go with carat if you don't need much, i run a few sites on carat VPS's and they're reliable. If you need a dedi, go with kimisufi or OVH, they start at around $30.

[grinder]

sitegound has a Joomla special... 10 bucks per year!