The Outhouse - The Greatest Comic Book Forum

[syxxpakk]

I need one for my web design students. I'm not confident that the school system will let me use their own server so I'm looking at online web hosting services like BlueHost. Anybody out there that can help?

[Cat-Scratch]

Imageshack perhaps?

As long as it isn't porn.

[syxxpakk]

No, I need something they can upload to daily with a FTP client.

[S.F. Jude Terror]

Well, what kind of things are they doing? Are these dynamic sites that need to make use of a database or something like that?

If it's resource intensive usage, you want something a little beefier, but most likely for what you're doing, an unlimited or near-unlimited account from any of the big places like siteground, hostgator, etc. will do fine, and cost less than $10 a month.

[syxxpakk]

Maybe some minor stuff with databases, although not that much.

Basically they just need to be able to upload a ton of files. Classwork plus class data files, etc.

[Muppetesque]

I ran the My Little Pony boards on Bluehost; they are fine for small scale and were very responsive.

My current website I'm hosting on is Pacific Host. I do not recommend them at all - I've had a number of problems with them and have found them to be very unreliable.

[syxxpakk]

What I need is server space that kids can upload work to. So say I have the server space and I have 17 kids. I would create 17 folders on the server, which would be hopefully password protected, upload data files to that server, and then the students would use an FTP client (FileZila) or upload directly from Dreamweaver their work. The data files plus the work, probably wouldn't go further than 2 gigs for each student. At the end of the semester, I would zip all the stuff up, put it on jump drive or possibly my school network drive (which they can't access, otherwise I'd just have them all use that as their server) and start over again with the next class.

[S.F. Jude Terror]

What I need is server space that kids can upload work to. So say I have the server space and I have 17 kids. I would create 17 folders on the server, which would be hopefully password protected, upload data files to that server, and then the students would use an FTP client (FileZila) or upload directly from Dreamweaver their work. The data files plus the work, probably wouldn't go further than 2 gigs for each student. At the end of the semester, I would zip all the stuff up, put it on jump drive or possibly my school network drive (which they can't access, otherwise I'd just have them all use that as their server) and start over again with the next class.

You have no need for anything but the absolute cheapest web hosting service for this. Let me go check...

[S.F. Jude Terror]

http://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm

Unlimited Space

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited FTP accounts

Pay for 12 months up front and it's $4 a month.


The Outhouse was hosted at Siteground for a while. We had to move because we were a database intensive site (the whole forum and front page run on a database) that had 100 people actively posting on the forum and however many guests.

For that type of site, those unlimited plans are bullshit - they have hidden provisions about using too much processing, so there's no way you could ever get close to using the "unlimited" bandwidth or space.

What they actually hope is to sell these plans to people who want to use it for stuff like you're doing, low intensity, where you really only need, say 10GB of space and 10GB of bandwidth maybe, but they say UNLIMITEDD ZOMG ONLY $4 and it sounds great.

So...

I sound like I'm bashing it, which I am for their business practices (which all of the big name hosts do), but for what you're doing, it's what I'd recommend.

You can find similar packages at other places like Hostgator, Justhost, etc.

[syxxpakk]

For that type of site, those unlimited plans are bullshit - they have hidden provisions about using too much processing, so there's no way you could ever get close to using the "unlimited" bandwidth or space.

So what would the hidden provision for SiteGround be?

[S.F. Jude Terror]

So what would the hidden provision for SiteGround be?

Like any of these sites, they will give you warnings and suspend your account if your site uses too many processing or memory resources. This occurs due to dynamic processing of scripts and database interaction.

But that's not gonna happen from straight transfers like ftp, or the serving of html or images. Basically, it would be very difficult for your students to violate these limits unless they're both designing complicated dynamic scripts and at the same time these scripts are being used by hundreds or thousands of people at once.

In other words, don't worry about it. For what I understand you're doing with it, this will be fine.

Just don't put a forum or cms program on there and then have it become popular.

Remember, the Outhouse lasted for a while on Siteground, at least a year. It was the combination of the Pluck Nurama exodus and my taking over programming here and introducing complex hacks that enhanced the functionality of the phpbb and joomla programs that pushed us over the limit and required us finding a high powered application host like medialayer or rochen.

[syxxpakk]

Alright, sounds good. If I get bitched at by my CTAE supervisor, I'm blaming you.

[S.F. Jude Terror]

Alright, sounds good. If I get bitched at by my CTAE supervisor, I'm blaming you.

Fair enough. This is stuff they're doing in dreamweaver right? You'll be fine. Unlimited space. Unlimited transfer. Unlimited ftp accounts.

[hectorcc]

A while ago I was also looking for a web site host and I finally decided to choose IX webhosting because they had the best offer for my requirements. I am very satisfied with them and I did not regret my choice.