Am I allowed to explain?
Hi Friends,
Since there have been many threads , I thought I will reply rather than edit my post. Hope it's okay with Chicken.
I have started on Oct 24 ,2001 and I have hosted about 20 sites in the 10MB plan. They occupy 1-2MB and use 2 emails [a catchall and an owner's] and dont push more than 25MB transfer. And the amazing thing is a few of them have done business using static html pages [just the way I have been doing fairly brisk business with static html pages and zero dollars spent on site design]. [I cant give my customer's URL without their permission]
My server uptime last month was 99.5 % and this month it has so far been 100% [touchwood]
The maximum load my server has pushed is 1.2 when I was trying some gimmicks with PERL
The server has 18GB of SCSI harddisk and the pre-paid transfer is 150GB /month. So if I have to be fair to other sites on the shared hosting plan, how much transfer should I allocate for 10Mb?
There are sites like 0catch or netfirms giving 100megs etc free; it is part of their business plans and I dont think free hosting sites are my competition at all. [In fact I dont think any one is my competition, because I am looking at 300+ sites -mostly small business sites- on a long term basis and offer personalized service; there is enough room for all players, as long as they play a fair game]
Besides, I have costs too... Even if I consider the time I spend on my business to be free [which normally goes at 80$ /hour], I have tangible costs in terms of server costs , Internet costs, and other operating costs.
I have signed up a few customers for this plan whose major need was to have ISP independent pop3 and SMTP email [@home refugees]
Lets say Ms.X is an interior designer and wants to put up her brochure online and a few of her project photos on the web; and she wants a corporate image so out she goes and takes a domain msxdesigns.com or whatever and puts up a 5-6 page web-site.. how much is this facility worth for her? Particularly if I can register a domain for her at 7$/year? For less than 2$ a month doesn't she get a huge image boost?
I want to offer the lowest total cost of ownership for small businesses and individual professionals in putting up a starter site. That is my target market...
For all the rest there are power hosts that are also free!
Cheers
Balaji