They might put you on a nice new server for this deal, but this is what I was put on over a year ago:

• Quad processor Xeon 5150 2.00GHz, 4MB cache per processor
• 4GB RAM and 8GB of swap
• load average: 3.54, 4.64, 3.90

Pingdom has analyzed Site5 and some other hosting companies recently. Here is a graph of its growth compared to other hosts:

As you can see, Site5 is a very slowly growing company that offers a great quaiity of service for a wonderful price.

Also, their domains are only $8.88/year, which isn’t too bad really. You can find $6 other places, but it’s pretty tough and those places can be shady… The plan also comes with unlimited subdomains, which is a feature I’ve really enjoyed (I have over 20). They take very little time to set up. I currently have 5 domains names hosted on my plan with Site5, 3 of which I registered through them. I’ve done speed testing in the past.

The best part is there is no risk, and I know that sounds like bull, but I’m telling the truth. You just cancel within 60 days, and they refund your money. If you want any kind of shared hosting, these are the guys to get it from.

$5 = 750GB Space, 7.5TB per month transfer

This is unbeatable – some of the best hosting ever

I use it for this site. If you need hosting, look no further.

For more technical information, read some of my other posts on Site5 hosting:

Site5 promo code for October

Site5’s Limited-Time 750GB/7.5TB offer!

Site5’s 5 dollar hosting deal gets better again

Site5 Doubles $5 Deal!

Code: HALLOWEEN2007

The Site5 deal just got better. Join now!

Site5 has been great hosting. The site you’re browsing now uses it. I bought this deal when it was 55GB of storage, 5TB of bandwidth, and 55 domain pointers. Now it’s 750GB, 7.5TB, and Unlimited domain pointers. It’s great Linux-based hosting that is Ruby and Rails friendly. They have support for every PHP application out there, as well as a great forum and wiki that can help you with just about any issue you have.

Here are some other posts I’ve made about it:

This one is from when they tripled their deal about a month ago. There is a bandwidth test in there that shows me getting 1.86 MEGABYTES per second transfer from them. They are not a slow host.

This one is from when they doubled the deal.

OK – I’m usually pretty critical in general, but this is the best hosting I’ve ever found, and it’s 3 times better than when I bought it, and it’s still the same price! So, you should click the image above and go sign up. These guys give you great support – I’ve contacted them numerous times and always had my problem solved within just a few minutes. I’ve noticed my site down once, and as soon as I emailed them, it was back up again. This blog is running Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails application, and it’s FAST! I barely ever see the kind of quick response from websites like I see from mine.

Features

• Full Ruby on Rails support. They have updated gems for you to use, but also allow you to keep your own gem repository in your home directory.
• Ready-to-go web applications with one-click installs
• Awesome tech support
• Very extensive wiki and forum where you can find out how to do anything you want with your account
• 165GB of storage!
• 5TB of bandwidth per month – which is great for transferring large files. I’ve never had a problem with the transfer speed, either.
• 165 domain pointers – This allows me to host all my domains with them. They have a great system for buying domains that I’ve used quite a bit too.
• Shell access
• Free setup!
• 60-day money back guarantee – If you don’t like it, you get all your bones back. How cool is that?

Benchmark

I have 16Mbit internet at home, and I decided just now to test the bandwidth of my site. Here are the results:

hank@rofl:/tmp$ wget -O /dev/null http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
--00:50:57--  http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
           => `/dev/null'
Resolving ralree.info... 70.47.124.108
Connecting to ralree.info|70.47.124.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 63,744,460 (61M) [audio/mp4]

100%[====================================>] 63,744,460     1.92M/s    ETA 00:00

00:51:30 (1.86 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [63744460/63744460]

Yes, folks, thats 1.86 MEGABYTES per second.

My Maximum at 16Mbit is 2 Megabytes/second, meaning this completely maxed out my connection.

I used to be a Dreamhost customer, and it sucked. It sucked really bad. I’m so glad I switched. Compare the features to any other plan you can find for $5/month. This is as good as it gets.

110 GB Storage

5 TB of bandwidth allowance per month

110 Domain Pointers

Free Setup

Ruby on Rails Friendly

I am currently using this plan for this blog, and am extremely happy with it after coming over from Dreamhost.

Sign up now!

I found out that it’s using dreamhost nameservers here.

The deal on the site looked to good to be true, and I thought it might be. So far, I haven’t noticed any deviances or misconceptions at all though.

Here’s what it looks like when you log into the Backstage application. This lets you manage your billing, domains, and contact info, and acts as a gateway into your site management systems. Very Nice!

Then, you can go to each site just by clicking its name. Each site has its own SiteAdmin interface which gives you pretty amazing abilities.

You can manage MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin, see all the Ruby and Perl libraries they have installed, mess around with FTP junk, automatically create about 30 applications, manage files, and lots lots more.

Also, there’s a little tool called FlashBack that I get to beta test for them. It auto-saves the state of your directory so if you delete files or whatnot you can restore them easily. Pretty awesome.

Shell access is enabled by default, so you don’t have to mess around with support on that one. I transferred my domain name to them, and they have a flat rate of $8.88/year for domain name registration. That’s fine with me. Also, if you need SSL, even if you can generate your own certificate like I can (CACert), it still costs $15 to install it on the server. Personally, I don’t want to pay for it, so I’m SSL-less right now. Oh well, I don’t need it anyway.

All in all, these guys blow away Dreamhost, which I had for the past year. Dreamhost cost me twice as much, and their server had very slow network performance for me. The fastest I ever saw was 100K/sec, and usually it was around 40K/sec. Unacceptable. Also, as far as I can tell with ps, this shared host is not as overloaded with people as Dreamhost’s. Dreamhost’s MySQL setup is lame (you have to create a ton of subdomains for no apparent reason), whereas Site5 you always use localhost, speeding installations along. I managed to transfer my entire old SVN checkout of Typo over here, and the only trouble I had was trying to remember to cross my T’s and dot my I’s on the FastCGI/Apache environment. It’s too bad I can’t just run mongrel instances and do Apache forwarding like I used to, but as long as it runs, whatever.

Score: 9/10

Site5 has done a wonderful job so far, and I don’t see it going downhill soon. They make a wonderful Rails host, and I’m proud to be a customer.