I’m not getting anything for this, but it could be a fairly good deal, so I thought I might put out the word. The web hosting service I use for this blog is Surpass Hosting. I signed on to this host 2 years ago when my old host went into the “too much trouble” mode that all web hosts seem to reach at some point. At the time, Surpass was having a 2-for-1 promotion, where if you signed up during the promotion, you got two accounts for the price of one. If you only have one domain, then it isn’t that great. But if you have several, like me, and especially if you’re hitting high bandwidth, then the deal is very good. I signed up, and have been more or less satisfied with the service. There were two periods where I almost felt like leaving, but it never passed that threshold.

In the second half of June, they’re reviving the promotion for the first time since I signed on. The lowest-cost shared hosting deal is their “Power” plan, which has these specs:

$6 per month ($65 for a one-year contract)
5GB hard disk space
200GB monthly data transfer
10 add-on domains
Unlimited email, subdomain, and FTP accounts, and unlimited SQL databases

You always have to take the “unlimited” claims carefully; there are limits in that you can only use up a certain percentage of the server resources. Too many active scripts on your site could get you into trouble, but you have to do a pretty heavy amount of activity to get there.

“Shared hosting,” by the way, means that your web site is one of a few hundred that inhabit the same server computer at the web host’s facility. It’s usually enough for a regular person’s web site, like a blog or something else casual. However, there are more chances for one or more other users on the same server to behave badly and negatively impact your site’s uptime and performance. The next step up is “Virtual” or “VPS” hosting, which also divides a single server among many accounts (often up to two or three dozen), but each gets a bigger share and each account resembles a private server in some ways. These accounts can be more expensive (starting at around $50/mo.), but allow greater access to site resources. Then you have “Dedicated” hosting, where you get a server machine all to yourself, with the CPU and hard drive dedicated to serving your site, with no one elbowing in on the resources. These are the most expensive, ranging from a hundred to several thousand dollars a month, depending on the package and the bandwidth you get.

As for the other specs: “transfer” means how much data can be uploaded by you/downloaded by visitors each month. My blog is pretty active (around 30,000 unique visitors/mo.), and I have several multi-MB files that get downloaded a hundred times each or so every month; my transfer amounts to about 30GB/mo., and is growing. “Add-on domains” means that in addition to the domain that dominates your account (mine is blogd.com), you can also have other domains run from the same account. Each one inhabits a subdomain, but appears to the world as an independent domain. For example, I have the domain “xpat.org” settled within my “blogd.com” account. Its real address is “xpat.blogd.com,” a subdomain, but if “xpat.org” is directly accessed, it’ll act like its own domain–just not at the moment, though, as I currently have it sleeping, and it redirects to this blog’s main page.

As I mentioned, Surpass is OK as web hosts go, but like all hosts, it has had its rough spots. Soon after I signed on in 2004, a string of hurricanes hitting Florida showed up a lack in their backup facilities, but that got resolved. And late last year/early this year, I had enough site slowdown and script failure problems to almost make me move, but I stayed on and that got resolved. Both are good signs–the bad sign is when the problems don’t get resolved, and your host shows little interest in doing anything about it. But even with Surpass, you gotta keep on their butts about it. Eventually, my latest problems were solved when they moved me onto a new server; the problems arose from another account on the shared server being a CPU hog.

One of the better points about Surpass is the rather quick response time to support ticket requests; they tend to answer in a few minutes, and often the solution is not far behind. But as with any host, different people have different experiences, and there is never any guarantee that any host won’t go south at any given time.

As usual, you can find user experiences and a variety of good advice on Web Hosting Talk forums.

Ah, and the tech support just got back to me: they upgraded my account. When I signed up, ten bucks a month got me 7GB of hard disk space and 75GB traffic; under the present deal, the same amount gets you 10GB and 400GB. So I asked if they’d up me to the present levels, and they did. Fair enough, but apparently you gotta ask in order to get it….