Erica Douglas - Simpli hosting - owner of a webhosting company (for last 5 years). Here to answer questions.
Q: Can I use Google WiFi to host my website for free?
A: Yes and no - depends on what ports Google blocks. If not, you can do it, if it is a personal site, etc. Upstream bandwidth will hurt. Some free hosting companies - i.e. addyour.net (free web hosting, pick your subdomain), pbwiki.com (free wiki), wordpress.com (free blogs).
Q: Why host at all?
A: Hosting companies have high (multi gigabit) bandwidth. Reliable power. Cooling. Controlled environment.
Q: What should be the cost for colo with low bandwidth requirements?
A: Depends on size of server (rack space) - space in colo environment costs money. Office space in San Jose costs $1.26 sq/ft. Market post tower (MAE West) - $22 sq/ft. Recommend 1U or 2U case. Can convert typical desktop to this case for one-time fee of $200. Will save a lot of money to convert vs. keeping desktop space.
1U = $35/mo
2U = $60 - 70/mo
desktop = $110/mo
Simpli prices are are 1U + 100Gb for $79/mo.
Q: What does 100Gb of transfer mean per month?
A: Two ways to measure bandwidth - in terms of data/mo, or bandwidth (1Mbit - 95th percentile). Server is connected 100Mbit out to Internet, can burst up to that. For 95th percentile, they measure bandwidth every 5 minutes, chop of the 5% highest usage points, then bill on that. All hosting providers are billed 95th percentile style for the bandwidth that they buy. For gigabytes transferred, on the other hand, the ISP just calculates data transferred per month. ISPs, as a rule of thumb, is that 200GB/mo is 1Mbit of 95th percentile billing.
Q: What if I am pushing a lot of data to my colo server?
A: Read contract carefully, there could be hidden fees. Some will only charge for downstream (upstream gives them peering leverage), others will charge.
VPS - Virtual Private Server. This is a hosting offering that is taking advantage of virtualization, anything from a FreeBSD jail to a Solaris zone, up to Xen or VMWare. This is still fairly expensive, because you need to back each image with real RAM. So, if you give each VM 512Mb of RAM, then hosting 24 customers requires a box with 12Gb of memory (i.e. not cheap).
Q: Is there an objective site that reviews webhosting company?
A: Not really. News.com has reviews (but they take money). Webhostingtalk.com, but it is a form, and not super-awesome. Looks like there is an opening here for somebody to start something. Possibly a wiki?
If you are looking for a cheap jail, try: linode.com, or jvds.com.
-Andy.
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