Should I go with Communitech? - I need advice from you all?

Hello FX. As you've heard, Communitech does have it's problems, but no web host is perfect.

If you host with Communitech you must know that their tech support is a tad (lack for a better term) sketchy and their response time is poor.

However, the features for the money are about the best you can get. Their control panel is one of a kind!

I would suggest that you look around a little to see what your options are.

If you don't mind spending the money, check out burst.net. Their support is excellent. They even provide ICQ support from 8 am to around 10:30 pm. E-mail them, you might get a good deal!

Also, if you can't spare the cash, check out dids.com. They are a new host but they are on the right track. I feel that Chad Simper (owner) knows exactly what he is doing. I am confident in him.

Good luck to you in your search! If you need any help at all, please feel free to contact me by e-mail.

I'd only go with them if you don't plan on having a very successful site, meaning 2+ gig of bandwidth a month. If you use a good bit of bandwidth and other resources they seem to have an arbitrary policy of deleting accounts they fill take up too many system resources, it's in their contract. Therefore, their advertising is misleading and contradicts their contract terms. In my opinion, they are snake oil salesmen/saleswomen and they can not be trusted with something as important as my web site.

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Isn't it time you started making money with your site!
http://www.birminghamnet.com/cgi-bin/links/pages/WebmasterResources/MakingMoney

Sorry to add to this fray ... but I must also suggest to stay away from Communitech if you feel your site will become sucessful. Well, unless you LIKE moving your site after it is suddenly shut off.

I won't go into details, I have documented them in my earlier posts... but I believe that there is a trend here.

Matt

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1-On-1 Free Basketball Game - Wanna Play?
http://basketball-game.com

Not pointing the finger at anybody, but in most of the cases when CT has shut a site down, there were definetly two sides to the story. Only fault with Ct is they are pretty quick to shut down without warning. Most of the cases involved material such as MP3 or porno. A few were from sites that had cgi scripts running that were hogging resources.

JP, the owner of this site is hosted on CT, but is planning on moving for the reason that popular forums do use a lot of system resources and he wants to move before it becomes an issue with CT.

Successful is a very misleading term. Success can't be measured in # of hits per month. One of my clients who I might add is hosted on CT, only gets 150+ hits a month, but makes more money from those 150 than what most of us only dream about.

If your friend is reselling it to you, where else can you get 350MB of space, PHP3, MySQL, java chatroom, forum software, shopping cart, 25 subdomains, 100 POP3's, run from anywhere CGI, connected to Internet with redundent DS3 lines and the list goes on for $14.95 per month.

They do have their problems and sometimes;) are a little slow to respond, but they usually get things fixed. Most of the people in their support forum that complain about this and that not working are the same people over and over. Some remind me of a little dog yippin' and yappin' just to hear himself bark.

Climbing down off his soapbox,

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Dan
http://cds-computers.com

FX,
I have no problems from CT due to CGI usage, I am just moving all my sites to a dedicated server to accomodate future expansion.
JP

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The Webmaster Promotion and Resource Center.
http://www.what-next.com

JP,

Who did you decide to go with for a dedicated server?

I think I might consider a dedicated server too.

I have to recommend Communitech. I have a site hosted there that uses about 15 gigs of transfer a month. The only time they have disabled anything on my account is when one of my ranking scripts was going haywire, but they sent me an email informing me this and everything was fine. I've shopped around and can't seem to find any better deal than Communitech.

Personally, I'd go with www.interland.net Out of all the host I've looked at they've got a toll free phone number you can call and get an answer to any pre sales question you have. They actually said no, to many of my questions and I really appreciated that because I know exactly what they allow and don't allow. This way I don't have to worry about my account being shut down for some mysterious arbitrary reason.

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Isn't it time you started making money with your site!
http://www.birminghamnet.com/cgi-bin/links/pages/WebmasterResources/MakingMoney

Well I am being offered this deal by Joseph Bannon for free - I think it is a 123hostme.com server.
JP

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The Webmaster Promotion and Resource Center.
http://www.what-next.com

I have heard about Comminutech shutting down accounts that use a lot of resources and bandwidth.

I suspect that this will be the case with most companies.

Does any of you have a long running
succesful website that is being run on another host?

If so, please could you tell me the host and how much bandwidth your site uses?

The reason I ask is that there is no point in me dropping Communitech, at least with them I know the Good and the Bad sides and I know people who are hosting with them.

Which is not the same with the other hosts like Burst and Powersurge.

JP you said you would be moving this website from Communitech. However, are you sure you know much about the people you are moving it to. They too can end up cutting off a succesful site. At least with comminitech you know what to expect and you can plan for it.

Jp, has this forum giving you any problems with Comminitech due to it's CGI usage?

LOL ! my website is hosted by Communitech too, although i seldom ask for technical support from them, but recently i've request a technical support, i've put in all the infos about the email problem i've It has been MORE THAN 72 HRS. I didn't EVEN receive a reply regarding this problem. After that, Saturday, i request a support again. 1 of their staff Mel who receive my ticket, was going to solve the problem, but the problems are not solved yet, she test email around 3- 4 times and didnt even reply me about the situation. After awhile, I EMAIL THEM AGAIN requesting support, Mel again receive my email and she reply telling me that during the holiday weekend, they're short of staff. Well....? She test email my problem, didnt even email me whether the situation is solve, i can forget it. But Oh my ! after more than 102 HRS the problem is not even SOLVE yet ! Another thing i wanna say is, 350 webspace are not guarantee yours ! I heard tons of people complaining about their site hosted on CT's server ran out of disk space and when they check their disk ussage on PCP or telnet, it says they only use "example" 20 mb ONLY . Lastly CTs lack of promise, Ryan (CT staff) told me on a certain date on icq that CT will launch their website. There're still tons of COMPLAINTS about CT. I think JP will be able to tell you.

Good Luck !

I'm a CT user, and I swear by them. I did plenty of research, and they seemed the best. Their tech support has never been bad for me, always replying in under 24 hours (usualy closer to 3) with a helpful response. I highly recommend them.

I'd like to know what the owners of webhostdir.com think regarding to their host.

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Ok, it's kinda different .. they're dedicated but anyway
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Well Mike, we are hosted by Communitech, but as you say we do use a dedicated server so anything regarding uptime cannot be compared with their shared server offerings.

We schedule an automatic reboot every night to make sure Windows NT does not run out of system resources (I hate NT for that, but love it for ease of use and I have programmed in NT for a long time), and once in a while a program has fallen over and stopped the server finishing the shutdown. So, although the web sites were still running, we could not log in remotely to administer the server, so we had to call in support then, but otherwise we barely have to call them. Their support response is pretty reasonable comparing with the majority of hosts that I am aware of.

When the old server crashed terribly (blue screen of death that many NT users are only too familiar with!) due to an unusual hardware problem, they were there for us and started moving all of our sites on the server to a brand new system for us while we slept. They even left messages on our answering machine and emailed us regularly to tell us their progress and had resolved pretty much everything by the time we were in the office again, so when we really needed them, they were there for us and that is important.

Of course, I can only comment on the services that I have personally received, anything else would just be gossip, and of course only 1 person's experiences can not tell you how everyone is treated in general, and of course they know we are a web host rating company so that might have something to do with it, but never-the-less, they still sorted it all out, what could have been a really nasty problem for us.

Good luck in your search for the right host, whether or not you choose Communitech.

Best regards,

Nick Hobbs
Web Host Directory

Nick,

Thank you for your reply.

I absolutely agree with you. Your experiences are way different from mine with CommuniTech naturally but I too think that their support and will to enhance their service is still CT's first priority and that's what makes CT "MY number one".

(CT client since 09/98)

Mike (and other CT users),

I have a quick check to see how CT currently is: Tell them you heard a rumor that they had past problems with a person gaining access to CT accounts. See what they say.

NOTE: This is NOT an actual rumor, it is FACT. I was one of the accounts and that was 2 WEEKS after at least one other account... and they denied to me any knowledge that anyone was doing it. Then I found the other account after the LEACH mentioned it.

If you want the full details, read my previous message: http://www.webmaster-forums.com/cgi-bin/bigtalker/discussion.cgi?forum=10&discussion=60

It IS possible that they have changed, but I still feel that they should have put out a system wide message telling people to safeguard their accounts!

Matt

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1-On-1 Free Basketball Game - Wanna Play?
http://basketball-game.com

CT is a good host if you aren't demanding with features and run a small website. However, it is becoming apparent that CT won't cut it for my site, http://goKewl.com, so I will be moving soon. They DO NOT offer unlimited bandwidth, and that is something you will only find out when you host with them and start reading their forums. So if I had a small, simple website CT would be great for me.

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Gil Hildebrand, Jr.
goKewl.com

I don't know where you're getting this information from Gil, but this is what Gabriel said himself.

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Right now, the limit as to our TOS is a T1 per day (17 GB/day), which goes to about 510GB per month. For those of you that understand bandwidth, you know this is an incredible amount of data transfer..

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Sorry Webmaster, but the term ROFL is my response to Gabriels claim! I am happy for you that your site survived the bloodbath that when I and others were cutout... and I hope that you continue - maybe the fact that you are posting here may be your saving grace... your questions may make them realize that you are posting publically and cutting you off would just add to our fray... lol

BTW - did you ask Gabriel about the person that gained access to accounts previously? I would be highly interested in the response.

Matt

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1-On-1 Free Basketball Game - Wanna Play?
http://basketball-game.com

My site uses over 15 gigs of bandwidth a month without any complaint from CT. I think that's good enough for me.

No I haven't asked Gabriel. I wouldn't want to deter him from his work.

don't use CT I would suggest HIWAY.net

cheers

They offer the full bandwidth of a T1 as their "unlimited transfer"?

OK, it's math 'n' economics time. A conservative estimate as to the cost of a T1 is $800. While I'm sure a T1 costs much more, they have larger lines (DS-3) with more capacity, and costs go down with volume. They're charging about $40 per month (I'm sure it's less). That leaves $760 unaccounted for. Hmmmm...

It is true that not all users use their full bandwidth, and companies take that into account. Say that 95% of their customers used no bandwidth WHATSOEVER (obviously not the case) and the remaining 5% used their entire allowance. Given 100 customers, T1 cost of $800/month, and account cost of $40/month:

Total revenue: 40 * 100 = 4,000
Cost of bandwidth: 5 * 800 = 4,000

So if only 5% of their customers use the offerred bandwidth, and the rest use nothing at all, they can only just pay for their bandwidth. That leaves payroll, office space, server hardware, and so much more.

Conclusion: CommuniTech either can't do basic arithmetic and as a result is losing huge amounts of money, OR they are blatantly lying and they do not allow their customers that much bandwidth. Either way, RUN from that host. Fast!

Anti -

I know of three Star Wars sites that pull over 80 gigs a month alone in bandwidth. They have multimedia, etc. but it only accounts for a small percentage of their bandwidth.

One site pulls around 80 gigs, another 200+ gigs, and the third almost 500 gigs!

BTW all of them are on dedicated servers. Each of those sites are pulling between 15,000-90,000 visitors a day.

Just my two cents.

What are the star wars sites?

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Winweb.pcisd.com, The first Non Web-based control panel

Hi,

your estimated 95% of sites using no bandwidth at all is quite low.

When I choosed my (first) provider I had the opportunity to have a look to their logs and ... surprise.
There were about 500 sites on each of their servers.
~498 were only touched from one domain (I assume it was the owner).
~1 had about 100MB/month.
And the rest had over 500MB/month (but far below a Gig).

If we consider that there are more web-users, but much more web-hosts I think the rate is about the same.

Keeping in mind that slashdot.org was served via ISDN and had millions of hits ... well ... I think to go over 1GB/month you'll have to serve mp3/porn/warez. And I don't think ANY host will allow this.

just my thoughts.

ciao
Anti

Anti,

Try again. My website (1-On-1 Free Basketball Game) serves a current average of 10 gigs of traffic a month. At one time we were over 12 gigs monthly! We don't have ANY downloads, porn, MP3's, videos or other bandwidth heavy objects. We just have alot of traffic... we have over 7000 players and display over 275,000 pageviews monthly.

My point is this: You DON'T have to have a porn/warez/mp3 or even shareware download site to push a bunch of bandwidth...

Matt
PS. I won't repeat my feelings concerning CT... I believe they have been well stated already.

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1-On-1 Free Basketball Game - Wanna Play?
http://basketball-game.com

The web sites are:

http://www.jedinet.com/
http://www.starwarz.com/
http://www.theforce.net/

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Chase Y.
Radius Design