Bluehost
Bluehost continues to baffle me. A month ago, I offered to pay, as per their website, for more bandwidth as our Storynory podcast now exceeds the monthly 250 gig allowance of transfer. They wrote back saying that I couldn’t buy bandwidth, as they made a loss on selling it. They explained that our website would go down before the end of the month and wished me to “have a good day.” I spent a weekend transferring all our audio to the internet archive, and recently have put the latest episodes on Libsyn. Now Bluehost writes to me and customers saying:
Dear Bluehost Customer!
We are writing you today to tell about some good news regarding your
Bluehost account. Starting May 1st Bluehost will be offering 15 Gigs
of disk space, and 400 Gigs of data transfer. As always when these
upgrades occur you aren’t charged a thing.
Well this is a generous offer, but I still can’t quite understand how they can’t afford to sell us more bandwidth but they can afford to give us more. The speed of downloads from Bluehost is certainly better than the alternatives we’ve been using. The internet is a strange and wonderful place. I don’t want to be ungrateful, so thank you Bluehost.
Meanwhile Libsyn -who provide unlimited transfer - have announced that 45 million people listen to podcasts hosted on their services:
We think it’s safe to say more then 45 million people listened to and watched podcasts off the Libsyn network in the first quarter of 2006. That is approximately a 200% increase from Q4 2005 (about 25 million).
That’s a Hell of a lot of low-cost bandwidth.
26. April 2006 at 12:52
Hugh, you might wish to consider DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com). I’ve been using them since switching there in early Feb, with no complaints at all so far. The plan I’m on gives me a terabyte of bandwidth per month and 20 gigs of storage. More than ample for $7.95 a month. And it increments each week at no extra cost.
Mind you, I don’t host my podcasts there: for that, I’ve been using Libsyn since July 2005. Great service.
26. April 2006 at 12:57
Thanks Neville, 1 tb or 1000 gigs of bandwidith is just huge. I don’t really understand the economics of webhosting, but it’s clearly getting very competitive. Bluehost and Dreamhost are slugging it out. Podcasting and its thirst for bandwidth must be costing them real money.
I like Libsyn in many ways, and certainly feel comfortable with their ethos, but I do find the downloads a bit slow. Dreamhost sounds like it’s worth a try. For now, I’m backing up all audio on the free internet archive, just in case one or other of these webhosts can’t stand the heat of this competition.