moav
Hunter of Muffins
One way or another I've had a website hosted by someone for nearly 6 years. I think I paid about $800 a month way back when. Now you can get decent hosting for under $15.00 a month. However, there seems to be a trend of people going to dedicated machines since the costs have gone down so much. You can get a good deal on a dedicated linux or freebsd machine for about $120 - $150 without looking to hard and $79 -$99 deals are becoming pretty common. Our small company decided to switch our 8 hosted websites where we were paying about $210 bucks a month and switch to a dedicated server. Someone was running a special so we got 2 servers for the price of one $179 for 2100 AMD 512 Ram 36 SCSI 100 Gig Burstable bandwidth. So, we aren't to upset with that. However, we spent about 3 days combing through 100+ different hosts till we found this deal. The first day we tried looking to get a dedicated xserve to support the cause and since we already have 2 servers in house running 10.2.4 server we thought that would be the best solution. The problem even though a single processor xserve is really quite reasonable to purchase compared to other products out there when it comes to sun, dell, hp, etc... it seems that everyone is overpricing the hosting on these machines. I found a few dedicated hosted xserve packages with some normal bandwidth numbers at around $299 and then it goes up to $599. There is no way Apple is going to expand on the server market if the hosting companies try to get that much of a premium out of the xserve. I'm not sure if Apple is pushing the software side of things to much and not the hardware. If anyone knows of a good xserve dedicated hosting package under $199 let me know. I am looking for a single processor machine 512 MB ram 20-30 gig drive and 200 - 400 Gigs of bandwidth per month. Hopefully, affinity will pick up a few machines and try them on for size and price them about 10% below that of a windows server plan.
