Just about to launch this new site, officially… but want to run a few tests first. Looks like we’re going with a blue theme?

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Protection, not limitations: I am often asked for specs on the plans. We have to have limitations because things are limited by space on a physical server. I’ll spare you the “unlimited rant” which is here if you really want it. Just remember that as long as you’re using the space legitimately we can always raise these numbers. But we want to do this (at least now when we’re relatively small) in a controlled way so that no one site can detract from the space/bandwidth availability to another site (a protection most hosting companies don’t provide).

Space: 5GB (justification: I haven’t seen a site that needs more than that, even for professional photo/video/music portfolio sites – and we want to be able to guarantee that space for you… if you need more just ask us)

Bandwidth: 25GB (justification: I haven’t seen many sites that needs more than that, even for professional photo/video/music portfolio sites – and we want to be able to guarantee that space for you… if you need more just ask us. One of our sites has needed this, and so we upped their bandwidth to 100GB – for free of course.)

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still works?

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A good friend of mine asked me today about the specs on our plan, and pointed out that 5GB of space wasn’t as much as some other hosting sites will promise for comparable prices. And this is true, I told her – she had done her research in terms of what plans advertised well. BUT, as Keith aptly pointed out, “those jokers will shut you down long before you use that allowance.”

The idea is this: most people don’t use more than 5GB of space, and that is precisely what some other hosting sites bank on when they advertise their specs. And I’ve heard many a horror story of people who approached their quota and were shut down because at the specs that were promised, it’s not actually worth it for the companies.

To make sure I could back this premise up, we did only a quick search and found these:
http://corlan.org/2008/10/13/my-nightmare-monday-thanks-to-godaddy/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-i-dont-owe-godaddy-65_b_129276.html

The second story was picked up by consumerist and discussed here:
http://consumerist.com/5056063/perhaps-you-dont-owe-godaddy-6579

These companies hope to make money on a false sense of “value” since they sell you things they hope you won’t use.

PeachyHost is a reaction to that kind of business model, and we hope to “fight the good fight” so-to-speak, and be straight-up about what you will get for each penny you invest in your company and in your website.

If you need more space than we’ve allotted in our initial plans, then talk to us, and we will work out something fair. If you purchase an initial plan and start to find out six months down the road that you’ve grown and need more of everything – that’s fine too. We will not shut you down when your usage increases. We will simply contact you and figure out what kind of plan would now suit your bigger business.

This is the first of, I’m sure, many iterations of this ideal. But I think it’s important to get across. PeachyHost is not simply trying to provide a affordable alternative to already affordable alternatives. And you should not join up with us just because we are a smaller company that won’t have over-saturated servers.

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Taken from our old “plans” page… it was my rant on unlimited plans…

* By popular demand, PeachyHost is now offering its own “unlimited” plan. But please read on because unlimited plans, the kind that most hosting companies currently offer, with little asterisks by them denoting significant terms-and-conditions, are something that, both as a concept and as a principal, PeachyHost would rather not support because they are neither transparent nor ethically honest (in our opinion), even if they are technically honest (their terms-and-conditions are available). However, we found ourselves having to write long diatribes explaining why most people’s idea of an unlimited plan was actually a misconception.

The bottom line is that now, if you want it, you can have have one with us. Like every other unlimited plan, the physical limits of the universe in general, and the capability of a non-magical server in particular, make an unlimited plan impossible. We will, however, offer you theoretical limitlessness so that, as your needs increase, we can simply increase the space/bandwidth capacities associated with your account – capacities that are really less of a limit on you, and more of a safety net so that your neighbor can’t unwittingly (or, heaven forbid, intentionally) overload the server and make other sites run less efficiently.

At PeachyHost.com, we want every site that signs up with us to have all the space and bandwidth that they need – and that we’ve promised. No site should be beholden to unknown quantities and limitations. If it makes you sleep better to pay more for the name of the plan… be our guest.

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So we’re working on cleaning up the site a little bit and trying to lessen the text… but some of the things I still think are important to have since part of our reasoning for starting-up was to be part of an “ideological movement” (if you want to call it that) within the webhosting industry.

So this was our old home-page text… soon to be replaced with something simpler…

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And maybe we’ll have 2010 peachy-powered sites by the next new year .

Recently got some action up on our twitter page, which is kind of cool. Not really sure what those replies are about, but better than feeling like we’re in a void!

Happy New Year!

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In a conversation with some friends, I was going off on my web-hosting business soap-box and they were asking for specific examples. I told them that they could look up literally any webhosting plan that claimed to be “unlimited” and if they could find their terms and conditions, they would find the small print. What they found on the first random site was this:

“7b.) INODES
The use of more than 50,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 50,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid overusage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension.

The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose “Mail”, then “Default Address”, “Set Default Address”, and then type in: :fail: No such user here

8.) Bandwidth Usage
You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. This allowance varies depending on the hosting package you purchase. Should your account pass the allocated amount we reserve the right to suspend the account until the start of the next allocation, suspend the account until more bandwidth is purchased at an additional fee, suspend the account until you upgrade to a higher level of package, terminate the account and/or charge you an additional fee for the overages. Unused transfer in one month cannot be carried over to the next month.”

First – with regards to the INODES – not a very friendly term for laymen. I’m pretty techy myself, and that terms means little to me. What is more important is their definition of what uses one of these INODE allocations: Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode. Seriously? An EMAIL?! Now, maybe you can find a better place to look, but one source wrote that the average size of an email was around 7-11kb. Let’s round that up to their high end and use 11kb. Supposing you use all your nodes on emails, even if you had 50,000, you would only be using 550,000kb, or 550MB. Roughly 1/2 of a gig. So it’s possible that, even with their unlimited plan, you could be shut down for using half a gig of space! Absurd.

With respect to the second caveat that I mentioned, you have to read no further than the first sentence: You are allocated a monthly bandwidth allowance. Really? But… I thought the plan was unlimited?! (Keep in mind, that both of these stipulations were small print for their quote-unquote unlimited plans…

Just saying.

This is the kind of BS you won’t get with PeachyHost. We’re not out to trick anyone which is why we push our “PeachyPlan” first and foremost… this plan doesn’t promise miracles, but we will give our word to work with each customer to make sure that your bandwidth needs are not just met, but exceeded.

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So, I made a quick mention of this on our plans page, but we have finally added an option for an unlimited plan – not because our normal peachy plan wasn’t the same thing as what other companies are calling an unlimited plan, but because we were just tired of feeling like we were defending ourselves just so that we could be more honest with people. The main idea being this: we don’t want to use seductive words and huge (but, in the end, either poorly defined, or flat-out misleading) words to trick people into signing up. That’s neither nice, nor do we find it to be very easy on our consciences.

In talking to a lot of other people who are in the webhosting industry, it is not a secret that the majority of businesses are able to capitalize on over-promising: selling plans under the guise that people won’t know any better and just sign up for whatever SEEMS to be the best VALUE, even if their NEEDS never use any of that potential.

Here was my rant:

“By popular demand, PeachyHost is now offering its own “unlimited” plan. But please read on because unlimited plans, the kind that most hosting companies currently offer, with little asterisks by them denoting significant terms-and-conditions, are something that, both as a concept and as a principal, PeachyHost would rather not support because they are neither transparent nor ethically honest (in our opinion), even if they are technically honest (their terms-and-conditions are available). However, we found ourselves having to write long diatribes explaining why most people’s idea of an unlimited plan was actually a misconception.

The bottom line is that now, if you want it, you can have have one with us. Like every other unlimited plan, the physical limits of the universe in general, and the capability of a non-magical server in particular, make an unlimited plan impossible. We will, however, offer you theoretical limitlessness so that, as your needs increase, we can simply increase the space/bandwidth capacities associated with your account – capacities that are really less of a limit on you, and more of a safety net so that your neighbor can’t unwittingly (or, heaven forbid, intentionally) overload the server and make other sites run less efficiently.

At PeachyHost.com, we want every site that signs up with us to have all the space and bandwidth that they need – and that we’ve promised. No site should be beholden to unknown quantities and limitations. If it makes you sleep better to pay more for the name of the plan… be our guest.”

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And the number of PeachyPowered sites has grown to 5! Big props to my partner Keith for being the man and getting connected with four out of those five new customers. We’ve been in contact with a lot of people about making the switch and I’m hoping that that number keeps growing as people’s commitments to other hosting companies runs out. I think that the word is out about what’s in the fine print that goes along with “unlimited accounts”, and I’ve been surprised by the number of people I’ve talked to who have already known about that… and have been eager to find a business, like ours, that is more open about what’s going on behind the scenes. So that’s been really nice.

Anyway – I’m thinking of redoing the website soon… and changing it from a one page deal, to something where you can navigate around a little bit. If anyone has any ideas about what pages to add, I’m welcoming any feedback – but for now, I think it would be nice to have a list of websites that are currently hosted on PeachyHost with links to them and a little tagline so that people can check out what sites on PeachyHost are doing. I’m also thinking that, as we expand our plans, we’ll want a dedicated page to talk about those… and of course we’ll still need a homepage. I wonder if I can eventually move this blog over to the main site… although we think that it’s a good idea to also have ways of communicating that are not connected to the site – just to increase the options people have for contacting us.

That’s about it for now – but things are exciting, and I’m very happy to welcome all the new sites to PeachyHost.

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