UPDATE: Read Squish Software’s Response to my post
Squish Software, a new company launched today by Ben Feldman, AriX (creator of iJailBreak), and Jesse. The company focuses on open-source software. This seems to be their mission statement… sort of:
“We never understood why companies put out software that seemed like it was made unintuitive on purpose. We also never understood why companies have always insisted on using proprietary file formats, or why they never made the application as customizable as possible.”
Open-source products are great and I am glad they decided to go this way with their upcoming products. These three tech-savy teens also launched their first product/service called ServeBlast.
ServeBlast “is a group of services designed to put you online, help you stay online, and backup your online presence.” It offers 4 subscription based services that I would like to go over:
- Temporary Hosting
Temporary Hosting is a great solution for “those situations” when your site is going to hit a ton of suspected traffic for one or the other reasons. If your about to launch a product or offer a service and you knew you web host couldn’t hold the bandwidth, but you didn’t want to upgrade just for this one instance… this is where Temporary Hosting comes in. ServeBlast will temporarily host your site for 14 days with a very reliable server.
Pricing: $0.20/GB for your first 400GB of bandwidth when your site is down & $0.35/GB for every GB after 400GB. I think this is a pretty good price and is worth it for “those situations,” even if you’re not sure if your host can or cannot take it.
- Backup Hosting
Backup Hosting is fantastic, but a little expensive. Everyone should back up their websites for a lot of reasons. At this point of time in technology, nothing is really safe without backup. If you’re making a good amount of revenue from your site, 5 minutes of downtime could mean a lot and could hurt your site’s reputation. With Backup Hosting, you are guaranteed 100% uptime. It works like this:
Instead of pointing your domain/s to your day-to-day host’s name servers, point them to ours (ns1.serveblast.com and ns2.serveblast.com) and we’ll redirect to your day-to-day host’s. On the chance that they go down for more than 5 minutes, we will instantly cut that redirection, expand the most recent backup of your site to one of our high-capacity servers, and start hosting you until you feel confident that your day-to-day host is stable again.
I think this is really great, the problem is the price.
Pricing: Base fee: $12.95/month
First 400GB of bandwidth used: $0.20/GB
Every additional GB after 400GB: $0.35/GBA lot of people are going to have trouble paying more for backup than the actual web hosting itself. I only pay 9.99$/month of my Host Monster account, so there is no way I will pay $12.95/month for that once in a while backup! I think they have to rethink their pricing.
- Site Backups
Site Backups is very similar to Backup Hosting. It is designed to make sure your site is safe by backing up your whole site every hour. Again, the problem is the pricing…
Pricing: Automatic Backups costs $14.95/month and comes with 2 GBs of free monthly storage. Each additional 1 GB costs $3/month.
It’s the same sort of deal, the average user is not going to pay more for backup than the actual hosting. maybe someone who pays a ton for their hosting will, but average web hosts charge $10 or less for web hosting.
- Website Hosting (BlastHoster package)
BlastHoster is a good deal and is great for the beginner webmaster. If you want a simple website such as a blog, or personal writing area, you should not have to pay as much as someone who is going to use their host full fletched. BlastHoster gives you a GB of space, 100 GB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited databases and much more. The great part is the pricing.Pricing: $2/Month!
Think about it, it’s like buying a soda…every month. This is a great deal for someone who wants a simple nice website that doesn’t is not going to get a TON of traffic or is not going to need a TON of space. This is by far my favorite thing from ServeBlast and the only one I will consider using.
I think ServeBlast looks very reliable and very nice, but there is one thing I don’t quite understand. WHY IS BACKUP SO EXPENSIVE? Your external HD is not going to be more than the computer, so why is backup hosting more than regular hosting! I must be missing something…
Anyways, the launch of Squish Software seems to be a success and was very exciting. I can’t wait to see what these geniuses come up with over then next year or so. Trust me, ServeBlast is just the start.
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June 28th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Hey Gabe, that hosting plan rocks for $2 a month but what about email in that plan? I am paying 1.95 for mine right now, I’m going to go check that out.
Gabe Jacobs reply on June 28th, 2008 5:52 pm:
“Unlimited email accounts - it’s pretty cool having you@yourdomain.com”
What host do you have for 1.95?
Ryan Ray reply on June 28th, 2008 6:10 pm:
DOH! it’s at freehostia.com it was the best deal around at the time. I’ve been trying to sign up for the blast hosting but it isn’t letting me. Their price and specs are unbelievable, way to get the price down.
Gabe Jacobs reply on June 28th, 2008 6:37 pm:
Why won’t it let you? What do you see?
August 10th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
it looks like a nice site, but it would better with multi language support, for example spanish.. but thanks..
October 31st, 2008 at 7:24 am
I’ve heard some good things about this blog. Remember to balance the pics with the text tho. cheers!
March 25th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Hello Guru, what entice you to post an article. This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.