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Time to rebuild my host spread

It was a bit nostalgic to read back over this thread...
I'm still here! :wave:

Nostalgia indeed!

I've left FWS on one of my "jump links" homepages just to keep it as a reminder in the background.

A lot of time has passed, so it might be good to briefly just update the "last visited" aspects of my results, just to give the hosts involved some credit for still being around, and all four are.

Some observations:
Seraphim, are you still down for new registrations while doing backbone work? That's worth a notice to people in the purpose of this thread. (P.S. For the link to your sales page I got a bit of a fluke "403 forbidden" notice, so check that when you get a min.)

Deeplist, I lost track over the passage of time. Per this study's highlights, do you still host sites by request too, or are you at existing clients only?

The third entry in my winner list has had a couple of branding changes. Folks may recognize brands like "Lifelesspeople" and I think L2P, but they were slowly rebranding over to AgainstSilence.com and that branding looks mostly complete by now.

cWahi had a security breach a couple of years ago, but ... time has passed so I might remove the red tag on them presuming they've done well since. (I'm not up to hard digging to see if they ever had one again.) Meanwhile cWahi's claim to fame was the controversial "Unlimited Downloads*" (Asterisk for "unknown amounts of Unlimited"). This study started as my own caution against overselling that may still be rampant here. It may be amusing to see if the wannabe types are as prevalent or not. But I haven't yet heard of anyone "busting" cWahi, so while the other hosts in the winner circle have "mid level sensible" plans, if you have some big bandwidth material, I'd be interested in an update on someone's experiences there.

For my own use, all my primary info is on Seraphim Labs. One obscure but important little page is on Decker Services, and of course they can see my activity pulling, but neither have they forced me to "log in once X days" which was another problem of my candidate companies. However, no longer having the interest to maintain four mirrors of my test pages, that I *wasn't* pulling from, my accounts from the other two did expire, and that's no penalty. So just the general advice is if you use a webhost, even though you aren't logging in, make an agreement with the host to never kill the account *if reasonable activity is occuring* on page pulls.
 
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New uses for Webhosts

Facebook and Twitter have by now basically emerged as the front line Social Media "Picture & Text" services, with the image hosters following behind.

But if you have a small project that you just want a little more full fledged hosting to, these services are the way I'd go. I have one decent sized project sitting on Seraphim's servers, as well as discarded parts of older stuff and a few misc experiments.
 
Deeplist, I lost track over the passage of time. Per this study's highlights, do you still host sites by request too, or are you at existing clients only?

Due to the amount of bogus nonsense, I removed automated signups some time ago. However, I still provide free hosting, but it's by invitation and/or request only. I don't actively promote it any longer either.
 
I took my site for new signups down entirely. It looked awful, the code was not aging well, and no matter what I did to it I couldn't stop the spam signups.

Though I will still accept new clients if they ask me about it. Hopefully I can turn things around for Seraphim and actually build it back up to where I wanted to be when I started.
 
Due to the amount of bogus nonsense, I removed automated signups some time ago. However, I still provide free hosting, but it's by invitation and/or request only. I don't actively promote it any longer either.

Maybe not, but you're tied with Seraphim on who I'd recommend to "smart clients". I'd appreciate it if you spent a moment and dropped over to DonationCoder.com and signed up and donated a couple bucks (one time only and can really be only a few bucks) because their admin Mouser does a stunning job of weeding out the junk we are seeing here.

Yes, a stray post gets in, but nothing like what we see here. And then because you really have expertise, the members could really benefit from a couple of high powered smart posts I know you are capable of.

Then say every few months a web host request comes in, you're my dead heat tie with Seraphim to provide hosting and in return you know your client isn't an expert but not a junk spammer, aka darn near the best client possible.

To you Seraphim, same message. That's my trilogy lately. A couple of hosts, DonationCoder.com , some Slashdot. "Costs are low" aka you guys play the long game and I am in effect acting a bit as a "pre-filter" so that when you sign up you get the highest signal-noise ratio possible for clients. Those other two hosts are almost as good - just I've worked with you two most.
 
I took my site for new signups down entirely. It looked awful, the code was not aging well, and no matter what I did to it I couldn't stop the spam signups.

Though I will still accept new clients if they ask me about it. Hopefully I can turn things around for Seraphim and actually build it back up to where I wanted to be when I started.

Echoing what I said on DC, so change your business strategy. It's fine to be selective. Some theorists think "selective = attractive"!
:)

So smash up something that at least resolves, 2003 style, and tweak the wording to go like "Do you deserve my service?". (Trust me, way better than "Access Forbidden"!)
 
All four of my winners ... are still online. That means the scientists can squabble over my methods but my results are 100% perfect. I've worked with you two the most.

(I know that Trel (if he's still there) over at AgainstSilence is sharp too, I just never got around to working with him. And I'm dying to see someone put cWahi's "Unlimited Bandwidth" to the test with a game mod or something!)

To me there's totally a need for "Pre-Filtering" to prevent what burned both of you out. I'm mildly interested if anyone else wanted to run a "second generation" of this study under my basic rules. Then what results is the scaling side. You guys (all four) would be Gold/Platinum tier, but potential clients don't "deserve you" until they survive the lower level. (And then, a whole new bunch of fake hosts get exposed, win win.)

I'm starting to keep an eye on this thread for a few months, so this post will show up as a "new post". So I offer/challenge anyone who wants to follow my basic metrics and run the "second generation" of this study. You'll test about seventeen applicants, and it's as simple as making a test page that they keep running with no games. (No log-on every 30 days etc.) Into 2014-2015 that will produce 4-5 more winners.
 
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And I'm dying to see someone put cWahi's "Unlimited Bandwidth" to the test with a game mod or something!)

I would love to do it! Have a few dedicated gbit connections laying around. Their bandwidth is going to run out long before mine does. I'd put money on that. ;) Unfortunately, their TOS makes it difficult.
 
I would love to do it! Have a few dedicated gbit connections laying around. Their bandwidth is going to run out long before mine does. I'd put money on that. ;) Unfortunately, their TOS makes it difficult.

Well I haven't looked into their TOS in a good while, but I think the other half of "fairness" is that it's not just a "dumb test", but that it's truly useful info for a purpose. I imagine one of the greatest cases could be something like some kind of important medical file that everyone should have, so it gets 10,000 downloads. But a Linux distro is probably up there, though I haven't checked in a while if they have file size limits yet.

We've gone around a few times on all the times people here keep offering "unlimited" bandwidth. I think they're just being aggressive and implying that they have portions of burst capacity that they can share on a limited basis.
 
Its still a lie- no such thing as unlimited.

Strictly speaking I could probably get away with advertising unlimited bandwidth though. With on order of a terabyte at my command these days, the odds of the server actually using up that much bandwidth without being long dead from the constant traffic a slim to none.

Still doesn't make it right, and as a matter of policy I still refuse to do it.
 
Hey Seraphim and Deeplist/Charles D would you both wander over to DonationCoder.com? I have a smart client that I think at least one of you might be able to help.

Regards,

--Tao
 
Ok. What do I do once I'm there? Make a donation?

One day years from now if you decide the forum is useful to you, sure! But the admin Mouser over there is really good and it's *absolutely not required!* The theme of the site is broadly software and somewhat left-leaning political and Amendment Rights politics. Then as needs arise people requisition cute little one-off scripts to do things that they can't program themselves, or program use advice. I found it useful ages ago so I made a small donation, maybe something like $20 and it's "1 time for life" (unless you find yourself with lots of extra money to donate again! Heh.)

My comment here was far more simple:
See this thread over there:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=37943.msg355094#msg355094

From User "MilesAhead", whom is both a veteran there and I myself have worked on a couple of things with, posted a thread asking about free hosting if you already have a .tk domain.
 
Hi Charles,

That potential client says he wants to try to start out simple and needs
ftp site
userid
pw
port#

- can you help?
 
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