Unlimited bandwidth, more disk space, price changes

We’re making a number of changes to our service:

• All Web hosting plans now include unlimited bandwidth
• Web hosting disk space has been doubled, to at least 10 GB
• Hosting price change for some customers with older accounts
• “Domain name only” prices reduced to as low as $10.95

The rest of this post has more details.

Unlimited bandwidth

We’re pleased to announce that all of our Web hosting plans now include unlimited bandwidth. We no longer charge any extra fees for bandwidth usage, no matter how high it is.

As it happens, the previous limits were high enough that we almost never charged bandwidth fees anyway. But we still think our customers will appreciate knowing they’ll never be hit with a fee for something they can’t control.

One thing we should mention is that “unlimited” refers to billing. Like “unlimited minutes” on a cell phone plan or “unlimited mileage” in a rental car, it doesn’t mean “infinite”; that would be impossible. (We actually prefer the term “unmetered”, but the industry seems to have settled on “unlimited”, unfortunately.)

We do have restrictions on the maximum speed of the data our customers send, just as we always have, and that still imposes a physical limit on how much it’s possible to transfer. That limit is more than ten times what we used to charge extra for, and 99.99% of our customers will never reach it, but we want to be clear about it (instead of vague about it like most of our competitors). You can find more details on our bandwidth policy page if you’re interested.

Double the disk space

All of our standard hosting plans now include twice as much disk space. That means “Silver” hosting is increased from 5 GB to 10 GB, “Gold” hosting from 10 GB to 20 GB, and “Platinum” hosting from 25 GB to 50 GB.

The increase is automatic and effective immediately — all our hosting customers are already benefiting from this.

Hosting price change for some customers with older accounts

Our standard monthly price for “Silver” hosting accounts opened over the last year or so has been $6.95 when paid annually, $7.95 paid monthly. This price isn’t changing.

However, some customers with older “Silver” accounts have remained at a previous price until now ($6.25 annually or $6.95 monthly). Effective November 1, those prices will increase to the current $6.95 / $7.95 rate. We’ll notify affected customers directly.

If you’ve prepaid for hosting, the price change won’t take effect until your prepayment is used up. In addition, prices for “Gold” and “Platinum” accounts will not change. And if customers choose to switch from monthly billing to annual payment, the price will remain $6.95.

You might be wondering why we’d change our prices in the current economy. We’re not doing so lightly. Our last price increase was at the beginning of 2004, and like any business, we change our prices every so often to account for inflation. We did that last year for new customers, but we’ve delayed it by almost a year for longtime customers.

When adjusted for inflation, the price is still less than it was the last time we changed our prices nearly six years ago. And we offer much more for the money: If you’ve been with us for a while, you’re getting about 100 times the disk space, 1000 times the bandwidth, and 20 times the number of mailboxes.

Most of our competitors now require annual prepayments and don’t offer prorated refunds if you cancel. And many now charge domain name fees, WHOIS privacy fees, fees for using statistics, fees for backups, fees if you prefer U.S.-based tech support instead of Indian-based support (really!), and so on.

We don’t want to do business that way. We want to continue our philosophy of no hidden charges, of high quality support, and of allowing customers to pay monthly if they wish, with no commitments. We hope and believe that our hosting service remains a good value, and we’ll do everything we can to keep it that way.

Domain name prices reduced

Our Web hosting plans always include a free domain name — but separately, we also offer additional domain names, or domain names without hosting. We’ve lowered our prices significantly on those domain names.

Our most expensive “domain name only” price is now $16.95 per year, dropping as low as $10.95 per year if you pay for multiple years in advance.

These prices include the ICANN fee and WHOIS privacy, making our prices less expensive than even GoDaddy for many common domain name purchases. For example, we’re almost always less expensive if you use WHOIS privacy — but we’re also less expensive for many purchases without WHOIS privacy, such as any “.org” domain name registered for two or more years. Most importantly, you’ll always receive our not-outsourced, not-on-commission, helpful support.

Thank you

We appreciate the business of every one of our customers. We’ve been offering Web hosting services for ten years this month, and we wouldn’t be here without your business. Thanks!