Need Some Web Space?

Here's something I posted to the mailing lists OFB hosts:

Hi everyone,
I'm usually hesitant to advertise any of my services on the mailing lists I host (I do not want it to seem like I am hosting them to sell stuff), but I did do a little pitch in 2004 and I hope no one minds if I do the exact same thing in 2008. Here's what the deal is. As some of you know, I do web hosting almost solely as a courtesy to my web design clients — I do not advertise on the web, etc. However, I am looking to upgrade my server and to make it cost effective, I would like to sell a few more accounts. As I did last time, what I would like to do is offer accounts that are larger than my normal plans but with a major caveat. I explained it thusly in 2004:

The real catch would be that it wouldn't really be supported. I have a vested interest in keeping it up (OfB and my web design clients would be on it), but unfortunately I can't provide 24×7 support. I would help if something went wrong with the server, but I'd rather promise no support and provide something than promise support and be unable to. If something happened like your site was completely down, then I'd get it working. Hopefully that makes sense.

Now, just to be clear, the server is watched 24×7, I just am not personally around to provide support 24×7. On the upside, you're otherwise getting what I like to call an over engineered account. Your account is backed up off site every week, with five backups kept in the off site archive (rotated). Moreover, I never oversell servers: no one wants to be the last person to show up on an airplane when it is overbooked and most everyone showed up, and likewise it is not fair to web hosting customers to oversell the server. I will be moving less than 25 clients on to the server to start, and expect to keep the amount of users under 50 in the future — far less than the hundreds that go on a typical web server. In addition, the server is in a fully redundant data center with multiple tier 1 connections offering a total throughput of more than 120Gb/s. Over the current server's run, we have achieved significantly better than 99.999% reliability.

This deal will only will happen if I get at least five people to take the offer (e.g. enough to make the server upgrade happen). The account costs $10/month paid annually.

You get everything my $10 Pine Account offers:
- 20,000 MB transfers
- 4 MySQL databases
- 10 subdomains or parked domains
- 2 FTP accounts
- CPanel and Fantastico

But, instead of my normal 300 MB of disk space, this account will come with 1 gig of space. Also, instead of 40 POP/IMAP accounts, you would get unlimited (whatever you can fit in your disk space). While you may not resell parts of that space, you may resell entire accounts if you wish and then provide tech support to your clients. If you are interested in being a reseller, I'll provide a reseller control panel for working with your accounts.

The standard web hosting fine print (AUP/TOS): http://www.serverforest.com/aup-tos.html

Let me know if you are interested. Also, if this plan doesn't meet your needs, let me know what would.

Thanks for bearing with my little sales pitch. For your amusement, my previous self-serving promotion from 2004 is included down below.

-Tim

The server will be, like the old one, an Red Hat Enterprise Linux server (great for its stability and security). It will also feature at least a Xeon 3040 for its CPU.

100 Megs of space
5 GB of transfers
cPanel Control Panel
Unlimited e-mail addresses within that 100 meg block
SSH Access
FTP Access
1 MySQL DB
Several domains and several subdomains (how many do you need?)

Interested? Let me know.