This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 14:48:37 -0700 From: nbs <nbs@sonic.net> To: David Christensen <dpchrist@inreach.com> Cc: svlug@lists.svlug.org Subject: Re: [svlug] looking for web hosting and e-mail provider On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 02:19:26PM -0700, David Christensen wrote: > svlug@lists.svlug.org: > > I have a domain name and am looking for a web hosting and e-mail > provider. My wish list is as follows: <snip> I'm not sure if _all_ of the specifics are there, but Sonic.net up in Santa Rosa is top-notch. They've got huge pipes, tons of redundancy, and run Linux servers. > 1. Provider uses open-source technology to provide services. Linux and Apache. :) > 2. Provider does not impose any non- open-source technology on myself > or my users or visitors. I'm not even quite sure what this means. :^/ > 3. Real-time status of all services available via public web page. > 4. Uptime statistics for all services available via public web page. They maintain a MOTD regarding any issues, fixes, upcoming changes, etc.: http://www.sonic.net/motd/ They have live public (system-wide) and private (account-based) stats here: http://www.sonic.net/stats/ > 5. Guarantee of at least 99.9% uptime for each service. > 6. Monthly statement certifying uptime. > 7. Automatic credit for any downtime. > 21. Provider to reinstall my content within 1 hour of service resumption > if their web server malfunctions or fails. Dunno about these. :^/ > 8. Perl 5.6. They have 5.005_03 on their shell servers. I'm not sure what they have on their webservers. > 9. Perl::CGI and Perl::DBI. I'm positive about the former. Almost certain about the latter. > 10. MySQL (while this may or may not be "open-source", I want it). Yes. I believe it costs a little more to get access. ( http://www.sonic.net/sales/addon/mysql-info.shtml ) > 11. ssh. > 12. scp. Are you crazy!? :) Of course! > 13. ssh-CVS client. Not sure. Contact sales@sonic.net or support@sonic.net and ask. > 14. At least one e-mail account (in addition to administrator account). > 15. At least 100 MB mailbox. > 16. At least 10 MB web space. > 17. At least 64 kbps web transfer rate. > 18. At most 250 ms web transfer latency. > 19. At least 1 GB/month web transfer total. Their "business account" level includes: 1 dialup account, 4 additional email-only accounts 160MB space (web, mailbox, $HOME) 1GB/month per account or hosting service See their account comparison chart: http://www.sonic.net/sales/comparative/index.shtml > 20. Daily or more frequent data backup. They have a live backup snapshot system running, which is pretty cool. Accidentally clobber a file? Go into a magic hidden directory and pull out a copy from an hour ago, or yesterday. http://www.sonic.net/support/docs/backupdoc.html Like I said, Sonic's quite cool. They're very homegrown, having been formed by Geeks Like Us (tm). An article about "mom-and-pop" ISPs in the New York Times used them as an example: http://www.sonic.net/whatsnew/nytimes/ They won Sonoma County's best ISP in Jan. 2002 (admittedly probably not hard to do <hee hee hee>): http://www.sonic.net/whatsnew/sbm012002.shtml The history of Sonic.net (starting at Santa Rosa Jr. College back in 1991) is here: http://www.sonic.net/sonic_history.shtml -bill! nbs@sonic.net Sonic.net user, even though I live way the hell out here near Sacramento :) ...I knew I wouldn't be able to find such a reliable and friendly ISP. Having seen what's out here, I was dead-on. ;) (Well, Omsoft is good, but I only use them for DSL) ===