We’re okay here. The servers are in downtown LA, so there’s no threat of them disappearing. We’re also well out of the way of the current evacuation areas.

More information about the fires:

San Diego County emergency site

We’ve just redesigned the Web site to improve usability and to make things easier to access. We hope you like the changes; let us know if you have any comments.

Ever wondered how Web hosts can offer gigabytes of disk space and bandwidth to its customers?

Let’s assume the host has one server. This server contains a 250GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM, along with 2000GB of bandwidth per month. Since most hosts do not colocate their own equipment and use dedicated servers, let’s assume that all of this only costs the host $150/month.

In order for the host to make a profit on this server, they have to make $150 per month from their clients. Let’s say that their smallest plan gives 2GB of space and 200GB of bandwidth for $4.95/month. Ten clients on this plan would bring the host $49.50 per month, only 33% of the revenue the host needs to break even. This would be a problem if all ten users used everything allocated to them.

The reason why they can offer such rates is that very few people will use all of their allocated resources. Most people will use a tenth of their allocated resources, if that. For a non-overselling host, they will need to charge $15/month at minimum to break even with the above plan, possibly more to make a profit.

Another thing to consider is the anti-abuse provisions in most host’s Terms of Service. This gives hosts the power to cut people off who are affecting other users on the server. The more that hosts oversell, the more users that will be on the server and the greater likelihood of problems–plus, it will be harder to be able to use all that’s allocated to you without running afoul of your host.

With non-overselling hosts, the lower bandwidth and disk space limits tend to regulate sites, instead of the Terms of Service–depending on the kind of site you’re running, of course. You’ll be more likely to run afoul of your non-oversold host’s Terms of Service if you get many visitors and your site uses forums and other scripts than if you just used all the bandwidth and disk space you’re given. In short, you have a better guarantee of the space and bandwidth being there.

With any host, though, it’s best to look at reviews and do research before joining. But non-oversold hosts may be your best bet if you plan on using a significant part of the resources allocated to you.

BTW: Thoughtbug Software’s hosting service offers 99.9% uptime, daily backups (with retention for one week) and no overselling. If you need hosting for your Web site or business, come talk to us!

We have a new logo on the top of the page. It’s a ladybug perched next to the header text. Hope you enjoy it!

Also, it looks like we can get IPv6 working along our normal hosting infrastructure by using a proxy server to proxy IPv6 requests to IPv4 ones. However, this will only IPv6-enable Web services and not mail for the time being. More information will be posted soon.

For the last few days, we’ve been working on IPv6 support on our hosting platform. We got the routing working properly, but the control panel we use (H-Sphere) only supports IPv4 at the present time.

IPv6, for those unfamiliar with it, is a replacement for our current Internet addressing system. An IP address right now is a series of four numbers, separated by dots (for instance, thoughtbug.com is 74.174.201.76). This system only gives us a maximum of around four billion addresses, and even then, some of them can’t be used.

This is a lot, you might say. Actually, we’re set to run out in 2010. Meanwhile, IPv6 has 2^128 IP addresses, a number too big to type here. That’s why it’s so important to prepare to switch to IPv6. Thoughtbug will hopefully be able to provide IPv6 hosting to its clients, once we figure out how to make it work properly with H-Sphere. In fact, we already have an IPv6 tunnel through he.net, and the 2001:470:1f00:3686::/64 network block (ping to 2001:470:1f00:3686::1 and 2001:470:1f00:3686::d should work, but both are development systems).

As always, we’ll let you know when IPv6 (and other features) are available to our hosting customers.

Hello visitors! Right now, we’re offering a 40% discount on the monthly hosting fee. Simply enter promo code wht at checkout to take advantage of this offer!

More information available here.