No matter what I do, I keep finding myself thinking about webhosting.

Netcraft does a monthly survey of hosts with the top uptime, and mentioned that DataPipe is usually on top. I’ve found that, at least for what I do, any “real” data center has just about 100% uptime. I have never not been able to reach my server. You’re either with a notoriously bad host (for example, when Web Host “Plus” bought out Dinix, they took the servers offline for a few days with no notice… that’s noticeable downtime), or you’re with a reputable host where downtime just doesn’t really happen.

So 0.00% downtime, as opposed to 0.01%, isn’t a huge deal for me. (That doesn’t mean it’s not impressive.) But what impressed me about DataPipe is that I clicked their link and their webpage just appeared. No loading in the slightest. I browsed their site, and there was never any waiting. I might as well have had the page cached on my computer, except I know it’s not cached anywhere.

Their data center is in New Jersey, but they clearly have excellent peering. I’m getting 20ms pings. They don’t (directly, at least) offer dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, or shared hosting.

One of my big concerns is that I wonder about long-term viability. The market’s full of hosts. A lot of them are “kiddie hosts,” inexperienced people just reselling space often with poor quality. That’s room for competition. But the problem is that there are hosts selling the moon: 200 GB of disk space and 3 terabytes of bandwidth for $5 a month? That’s ludicrous: that’s more than I get with my dedicated server! They can get away with it because no one uses that much, but it concerns more “honest” hosts–you’d have to charge ten times as much if everyone actually used it! But for hosts that offer, say, 1GB of space and 10 GB of transfer–a ‘realistic’ amount–they’re left vulnerable to people thinking they’re getting a better deal.

I realized the other day that, while a lot of people offer VPS (virtual private server: several people share a server, but software ‘partitions’ give each of them their own server software-wise, with root access and separation from other users), I’m really not aware of any good ones. It’s also hard to find any that offer significant amounts of disk space, or any that are particularly cheap.