Erin Dalzell - 17 March 2008 11:31 AM

... Many people don’t purchase web hosting plans based on price, but on service. It truly does depend on what your goals are ... I use DH because it is dirt cheap and meets my meager needs ...

For the past several years, I made my hosting decisions based solely on price.

Which is why I went with the ‘dirt cheap’ plan on DreamHost.

My needs have changed very little over time, my expectations have drastically increased since experiencing DreamHost.
I expect AND need a host with excellent support, speed, reliability, etc. Just like everyone else.
DH let me down on many occasions, even on my itty-bitty personal site.

I may use them again ONLY for image hosting, but not for my site(s).

j25 - 17 March 2008 12:16 PM

I want to be sold on EH, just having a tough time.

EllisLabs has much history doing the “Right Thing” for their customers. Instead of asking here, why not email their sales group and explain your goals and see what they say?

j25 - 17 March 2008 12:16 PM

I want to be sold on EH, just having a tough time.

I am just going to answer by saying we will never fill the needs of everyone, but our focus is not cheap/bulk hosting, and the style of hosting services we provide is not cheap to do by any means.  Our main focuses are performance, stability and security which is what many people are also looking for in their hosting.  I stand behind our choices for pricing and our overall business model, as it seems do our clients.  This is likely why we see an ever increasing number of corporations, large educational institutions, local/state/federal government agencies, and people that just want better rather than just cheap hosting, coming over to us each day.

As a side note, while your individual Gmail account is larger, Gmail limits each email to 20 megabytes in size: Gmail - 20 megabyte size limit. So you are not really going to be attaching a big video file to an email there either.  There are better ways to send/distribute video, or large files then in email in the long run.

Thank you.

Thanks Nevin, and all.

Well, EngineHosting has certainly created a lot of fans

I did not intend to hijack this thread.  I have just been considering hosting with EngineHosting for awhile and have not pulled the trigger do to preliminary cost/benefit concerns.

As someone who currently pays more than $20/mo for hosting with Media Temple, I am not overly price conscious, feature blot wanting, oversold needing customer (if I was, I would be all over the $3.65/mo GoDaddy plan). Just someone who thinks about a purchase before making it. 

I definitely appreciate the thoughts of all who responded.  And, I agree that I would put a premium on top-notch customer support over having an extra 900 email accounts or other “features” I would never need.

And to be completely honest, I do not know exactly how much database or overall storage I would need, but it needs to be enough for an average site.  If I can get by on the $10-$20 Shared EngineHosting plans, I am all for it. That monthly investment should give a small business all it needs, in my opinion.

@Nevin - The video reference was just to show that a 300MB email account is puny by all modern standards, not to allude that Gmail is a good option for video file transfer

For my next site, I will be giving EngineHosting a good hard look and maybe a try.  Thanks all.

Cheers!
Jackson

300MB email account is puny by all modern standards

I don’t think 300MB per email account is puny. In fact, it’s probably average. People compare it to Google or Yahoo or other providers who are dealing with massively high volumes. But your average ISP isn’t dealing with millions of users. They may be dealing with a few thousand users at most, which is a totally different paradigm. But if you get rid of the idea of using your email as secondary file storage and just think of using it for email. 300MB stores a lot of data. For example, my current Google account has just over 600MB of data. BUT!!! That has email coming in from five of my more active email accounts (yes, I have about 12 email accounts).  With that, Google is storing well over 60,000 email messages and attachments.

The point is, a single email account for a high volume email users could take years to use up 300MB of storage. If the average email user gets 30 messages a day, 900 messages a month (which is probably slightly on the high side), without attachments, thats about 11,000 messages a year or about 11MB per year without attachments. 300MB will store close to 250,000 messages, with a variety of attachments between 100kb-2MB.  This all assumes removal of spam on the regular basis.  Plus more people still use POP over IMAP. And while that will eventually change, it does mean that most people are cleaning out the storage space at least once a week or so.

I know people do it, but sending large files via email, regardless if its Google, just isn’t a great idea. Lord knows enough of my clients attempt to do it; but luckily most don’t even have the patience to send a 30MB file, let alone a 100MB file.

I’d be more concern with number of emails, than size of individual accounts.

Plus with the move towards more decentralized services, if you need more than average, you can still get a basic account, have your photos stored at Flickr, your videos at YouTube, and route your email into Google.

j25 - 17 March 2008 05:32 PM

@Nevin - The video reference was just to show that a 300MB email account is puny by all modern standards, not to allude that Gmail is a good option for video file transfer

All I can say still is that if the size of the email accounts was of great issue for our client base we would look at adjusting it, as we have in the past at both the hosting account and email account levels.

In reality a good percentage of clients come to us with already existing email solutions, like in-house Exchange servers, or using Google for Business, in some cases they moved to those solutions after old hosting providers lost all of their email.  So in the end we opted for a “smaller” inbox size which works for a vast majority of our clients, but do extensive intra-day, nightly and weekly on-site and off-site archives, and use proven enterprise technology to power it all.  This along with the ability to restore our full mail server systems in our business continuation data center, quickly, in the event of a major data center issue, like fire/flood/etc. we thing is a better combination.  While unlikely this would affect some place like Gmail, it will most likely affect your average hosting company, many of which have no disaster recovery plans.  Again, our business model is more about our three main focuses, performance, stability and security than anything else.  These are really some of the major reasons I think people chose to use ExpressionEngine for their CMS needs as well.

Thanks

j25 - 17 March 2008 05:32 PM

... I did not intend to hijack this thread.  I have just been considering hosting with EngineHosting for awhile and have not pulled the trigger do to preliminary cost/benefit concerns ...

As the thread-starter, I don’t feel this thread was jacked by you nor anyone else.

It’s good to get input from everyone regarding hosts, period.

Just to add another 2 cents, I’ve used EH for a few months here and there, and I’d be using it right now if I hadn’t picked up a lifetime deal over at (the increasingly confused) Joyent a couple of years back and their new servers hadn’t fixed most of their old problems. Throughout my sites’ time on EH, it was excellent service across the board, and really, really good performance on my admittedly irrelevant, ultra-low-traffic site.