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.)

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.

* 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.

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

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!

“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.

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.”

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.

She thought for a minute and ventured, “100?”

“Nope,” I replied, coyly… “zero!”

And we both had a laugh.

But I was only laughing on the outside. Inside I was thinking, “I gotta start pounding some pavement, and getting the word out, because clearly, the word isn’t running all over town by itself. It’s much too modest.”

So the next day, Keith, Nam, and I made a concerted effort to start hitting up people we knew and really spreading the word in a contagious way. By the 11th, we had our first official customer, and are proud to be hosting Thymos.org, a northwest-based Asian American Activism organization. Byron Wong, who writes his own blog, the Big WOWO, focusing on Asian American Activism and Intellectualism, was the first of our friends to get his act together and get his site completely transferred over to us. Thank you Byron, and thank you Thymos.

Several other of our friends and family are in the process of transferring their sites, and we are happily awaiting the opportunity to help them along in this process.

I’m sure that, at some point, all of these technical motions will become mundane, but for now we are savoring every moment of each transfer while we plant the seeds and water the roots of PeachyHost. I’m excited to see the list of sites hosting on PeachyHost grow, and proud to be able to deliver honest and open service to them.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to talk about in this post… and that is the principles upon which PeachyHost was founded. “They” (whoever they are) say that brands and names need to be heard a certain number of times before people will remember them in any sort of meaningful way. I’m sure that the mission, vision, and passion behind an organization also has to be voiced multiple times for them to be apparent as well. And I will be the first to say that I rarely read all the small print – so if a company wants to get something across to me, they better hit me with the big.

So with that as a disclamatory preamble, I am resolute in talking about PeachyHost as, not only a wonderful collaboration of friends (and not just Keith, Nam, and myself, but also Byron and anyone else who wants to join in and Peachy-Power their sites), but as a company that is curious to find out how a company that is open and, more importantly, honest, can fare in a society and an age that is becoming more and more technologically and informationally savvy.

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.

PeachyHost is a reaction to slimy business practices, and an attempt to bring honesty to that invisible hand that runs a capitalist market. Because while the best man may not always win… wouldn’t it be nice to hope that he could?

Raise a glass, or pick a peach. But here’s a toast to hoping.