[thelist] Cheap cold fusion hosting?

[Madhu Menon]

At 04:13 AM 3/19/2002, ted serbinski wrote:

>I'm looking for very cheap and reliable web hosting, with Cold Fusion
>support (and PHP if possible). Also, very fast would be great too (but
>not as necessary right now).

Ted,

IMHO, your requirements conflict with each other. You want reliable, fast,
*and* cheap? You may get lucky, but the odds are against you. This reminds
me of that old software projects adage: "Cheap, fast, or good: pick any two".

I'm reminded of something I posted about hosting to another list, which I
shall now present as a tip here.

<tip type="Choosing a hosting company" author="Madhu Menon">

Some simple truths about hosting with *any* company:

1) You get what you pay for. You don't realistically expect 24 hour service
or 99.99% uptime for $5 per month, do you? It won't happen. It would simply
cost the hosting company too much to provide those services. If you can't
afford any downtime for your site, find a more reliable hosting provider.

2) The lower your hosting costs, the more like that your hosting company is
putting hundreds, if not more, sites on the same server. This *will* affect
performance. If you've got resource-heavy apps e.g., all your pages are
dynamically generated, look for a hosting provider who can support this
level of usage. This *will* mean paying more.

3) "Unlimited [anything]" isn't. It's as simple as that. An "unlimited
traffic" deal sounds so appealing, but it's not necessarily better than "3
GB/ month". Look carefully at the terms of your hosting agreement. There
will almost always be a clause saying you can have unlimited traffic
"within reasonable limits" or "as long as it doesn't exceed normal resource
consumption". If your site gets 50000 page views per day (e.g., you got
mentioned on Slashdot), you *will* be booted. Bandwidth isn't free, and
neither is CPU power or RAM.

4) Don't judge responsiveness of a company's tech support by how fast their
sales reps respond before the sale. I made this mistake once, and suffered
hell for it. The sales guy is out to impress you, to get your business. The
tech support guy probably has a few hundred emails to answer before yours.
Before choosing a host, ask about their level of support, how many support
staff they have, and their qualifications.

</tip>

Regards,

Madhu

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Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net

Weblog: http://madman.weblogs.com