I see people saying, "What have they done for us?"

I'm sorry if I came across as ungrateful, Kristen. I didn't mean to. I know that they've been a lot nicer than other hosts would have been (have been!) in the same situation. But if our overloading their server is due to a bug or configuration error at their end, then I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them to fix it.

While you guys might not see yourselves as a problem account, the fact of the matter is that you do present a number of challenges that 99% of the other websites out there don’t.

And I'm wondering if there's something that can be done to eliminate some of those challenges.

At any time after the initial suspension, we could have terminated your account. At any time, IH could have terminated our account. You violated our TOS and, in turn, caused us to violate theirs. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

Quite true, and that's a huge improvement in our situation from previously. Seriously, thank you for your efforts.

I feel like everyone wants this perfect hosting solution that doesn't cost too much money. I really don't know what to say to that. I’m not sure what you’re looking for actually exists. We did our best. IH did its best. Steven has felt for some time that you guys have outgrown a shared hosting solution. I can't say I disagree with him.

I think that's true of all self-supporting communities, and I've been a member of several. We may have outgrown a shared solution. I know that was the case on another community I'm active in. We did bite the financial bullet, and are on a dedicated server now. I'm not sure what the financial and hardware.resources comparison comes out to, but said community is over 600 members and has had over 150,000 posts since Jan of this year.

I’m sorry that it didn’t work out. I think that, at this point, all I can do is hope that you guys find the host you’re looking for and give you your money back.

I'm really sorry to hear this, Kristen. And again, thanks for your efforts.

I can totally see why it's not worth their while to spend too much energy on just one user.

It's disappointing as hell, and even more frustrating, because it does seem like a config issue -- but if it bothers one out of x users -- there's not likely to be a return on investment for them.

Why do you pay more than we do?

Well, you get more connections per month with a semi-dedicated. So we upgraded, about a month or two before we started hosting you for testing purposes, to an SD account. We've moved a few clients over since and are almost at breakeven now.

Clearly, we need more resources than a typical (non-discussion) site, but what does that mean as far as what's available for us?

I don't know of any intermediate hosting solutions. I mean, clearly a semi-dedicated isn't enough for this site. So the next step is more like a big leap.

I know that was the case on another community I'm active in. We did bite the financial bullet, and are on a dedicated server now.

Was that the one that also got tossed by HR? I remember another community that had to move and got a dedicated. I think they went with Dreamhost.

but if it bothers one out of x users -- there's not likely to be a return on investment for them.

That's the other issue. That we have other users to contend with in a shared environment. If we were alone on the server, they might be willing to tweak configuration settings. But when you have other accounts that are doing fine and one account that's having problems, do you change settings for that one account and possibly disrupt service for all the others?

And actually that brings me to something else I should have mentioned. The fact that you guys built your own board, while very cool, is going to lead to problems for you with hosts. Since you're not using phpBB or UBB or some other commercially available package, you're an unknown quantity. No one knows what your code looks like or how efficient it is. When you run into problems, most webhosts out there are going to assume it's your problem and not theirs. You will never get the benefit of the doubt because of it.

So it's just something to keep in mind as you're hashing out your options.

Well, if we're stuck looking for a new host, how about an idea of what the requirements are? If we all know, maybe we can share the hunting...

I know we need PHP, MySQL, shell access, but do we have any other particular needs? And what about storage and bandwidth -- what size account were we paying for on IH, and what were we actually using? Also, budget? Are we still looking for something around $20/mo-ish?

edit: didn't need to say it twice. Did need to say thanks to ita, Kristen, Tom, Rob, and everyone else who's working to save the collective ass of our merry band yet again.

I know that was the case on another community I'm active in. We did bite the financial bullet, and are on a dedicated server now.

Was that the one that also got tossed by HR? I remember another community that had to move and got a dedicated. I think they went with Dreamhost.

No, that community rose out of a different kind of immolation-AFAIK, hosting issues were not a problem.

We can afford more than $20/month, and it sounds like we'll need it. For the record, we have over $700 in the bank right now.

Here's our bandwidth usage:

DateDomainMegabytesGigabytes Oct 2003buffistas.org 12651.63095912.355108 filk.buffistas.org 9.0448350.008833 spikesbitch.buffistas.org 0.0000000.000000 Oct 2003Total12651.63095912.355108 Sep 2003buffistas.org 16596.14133416.207169 filk.buffistas.org 12.8535500.012552 spikesbitch.buffistas.org 0.0000000.000000 Sep 2003Total16596.14133416.207169 Aug 2003buffistas.org 13409.80626013.095514 filk.buffistas.org 5.5248540.005395 spikesbitch.buffistas.org 0.1174260.000115 Aug 2003Total13409.80626013.095514

Right now, you have 1000 MB Storage; 40 GB Bandwidth; 50 MySQL connections. You're allowed to have up to 25 domains, unlimited subdomains, FTP accounts, MySQL databases, mailing lists, autoresponders, e-mail aliases and forwarders.

So far, I think you've been using less than half that bandwidth every month. You're using about 200 MB of storage.