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Comment by dedward | Hacker News Reader

What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

All of it is going to cost you more than Dreamhost's incredibly cheap prices - which are only possible because of it's police, as the guy stated.

It seems unfair at first - especially to a technical person, it's misleading - but the reality of hosting is that you do need to actually pay for the resources you are going to use - and the internet isn't free. The more your business is worth, the more you should be spending on solid contracts, multiple sourcing and fault tolerance.

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>What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

Yes, but by not stating a limit, while still enforcing one at some point, you are effectively not allowing yourself to be compared with others.

It's cheating. Even a rough "approximate limit" would allow comparisons, but stating nothing is strictly cheating. Would Dreamhost allow me to run 100tb/day? 100pb/day? They don't say they won't... how do their prices compare against someone who would?

With those sorts of numbers (100 tb/day ≈ 10 Gbps, for instance), nobody can offer that amount of traffic under "unlimited" terms. One of the limitations I mentioned is that we won't upgrade infrastructure just to support individual customers, and this would definitely fall under those criteria.

Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.

I'm not sure I can give out exact numbers, but it's far in excess of what any single machine can push out, either practically or technically. Advertising it would be just as misleading as any other specific number. :)

>That's the limit (unless limited further by something else).

>... what any single machine can push out ...

That number wouldn't be very misleading, and could actually be useful - it's effectively the limit on a dumb fileserver. If their code results in a lower boundary, that's their fault, not yours, and not in the least incorrect because it's being restricted by them.

I think what your parent and I are in support of are something that can be guaranteed, regardless of price. If I have contractual obligations to people regarding my webhost's uptime and bandwidth, I want the webhost to give me something more than "It changes a lot, don't use too much".

When the barrier to entry for an internet-based business is so low, I expect ISPs and other service providers to understand this requirement, and provide plans and prices accordingly.

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