Just going to throw my two cents in since it applies to me. I used CI host way back about 2 or so years ago for a while, it was one of their specials. Unfortunately my site flopped, didn't need it and gave up, but it was very good for what they offer.
Now, running two more sites each with a growing online community I started out small, with a 100 mb and 1gb bandwidth server... cost like 3 bucks a month. That held for about about a month or two. Then we grew.. had to upgrade. I got 250 megs and 5 gb transfer, for 9 dollars a month. Not bad... but at this time we grew incredibly fast and within a month I was already pumping out 4 gigs of bandwidth.
Well, that host (which will remain unnamed) made you prepay, but fortunate for me they had a 90-day money back garantee. So, I was refunded my money and moved both of my sites to CI host as I know about their service and have had great sucess for it in the past. I get 3 gigs of storage, telnet access, and "unlimited" bandwidth. Their servers are fast for the most part, the uptime is usually great, and as for technical service... I think you guys were emailing rather than doing the live chat.
They have a 24/7 live CS staff in a chat room you can talk to, and the few times I've had troubles I have been helped greatly in a fairly short time. Like when setting up one of my sites they somehow didn't have my login info for MySQL setup... I went in the chat, told them my problem, and they had my login made within 3 minutes, and my board was online in another 10.
They also have a 30-day waranty if you aren't happy, so that's always a plus.
Anyway, the thing that gets me is their "unlimited" bandwidth. Now I talked to them about it, they say you are unmonitored up until 20 gigs a month, after that you are monitored and MAY be billed. Well, let me show you the details on why they might bill you... it was found in my policy that was emailed to me and can also be found on their site:
In reply to:
Abuse of Unlimited Traffic
C I Host's customers are privileged to be offered unlimited traffic for their web sites. The intention of C I Host is to provide a large space to serve web documents, not an off site storage area for electronic files. All (90%) of your web pages (html) must be 'linked' with files (.GIF, .JPEG, etc.) stored on C I Host's server. Web sites that are found to contain either/or no html documents, a large number of unlinked files are subject to warning, suspension or cancellation at the discretion of C I Host management. Any customer who violates C I Host's Policies in abusing either space/site transfer will be notified and given 2 days to remedy the problem. If the problem is not resolved within the allotted period, the client will be billed for the overages.
To maintain the integrity of our shared hosting service the following limitations apply:
Sites with banners, graphics or cgi scripts running from their domain used on other domains. Sites with picture galleries (This is any site where 50% of the files transferred is graphics) Sites offering download files or archives. (This is any site where 50% or more of there monthly traffic is from file downloads). Sites using more than 30% of system resources for longer than 60 seconds. Sites running multimedia files (QuickTime, Real Audio, Real Video, MP3).
For those that do not qualify for the unlimited service, traffic will go unmonitored until you reach 20 GB per month. Thereafter, normal data transfer cost of $20.00/1GB/month will be billed to your account. If you want to pre-pay for bandwidth overages, you will be billed $10.00/1GB/month.
So... if I read this correctly, as long as you are hosting a valid content rich website, all (most) of your graphics are located within HTML documents, and you aren't hosting CGI or images to be used on sites pulling a bunch of traffic, and aren't consuming more th an 30% of the server's resources (which I think would be hard to do.. but I may be wrong) then you are entitled to their unlimited bandwidth.
I think what they are saying is once you hit 20gb, it sends off a flag. They then will check to see if you are hosting a ton of images and they are being used to be linked elsewhere, etc.. if so, they charge you. But if you are just pulling a lot of hits and you have mostly webpages/content, you are within the unlimited restriction and ok.
Now, granted all decisions are up to them, so they could obviously say your site is doing this or that and just try to bill you anyway, but I would think as it is written as long as the visits to your site/board are legit and you aren't storing a bunch of files for remote access, you're ok. That's just my opinion.
As for my site, I'm hoping I can get through most of the year on this plan, but we'll see. I've only been with CI for 2 weeks and looks like the site is on pace for about 12-15 gigs a month, 90% of which comes from the forums. Obviously if I start getting much over 20 I will probably need to upgrade to some sort of dedicated type server, but I'd really like to make it close to a year with my shared plan to get my money's worth []
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I'd recomend them 100% They aren't the cheapest around, but all their terms and conditions are clearly laid out, and I really do think you "get what you pay for" in web hosting. Take it for what its worth.
