Get 10 Terabytes of Disk Space for $1!
Want to get yourself 10 terabytes of disk space and bandwidth? If you believe that is even possible - you have some web hosting homework to do. FXTS.net are the ones offering the plan in question, and I really hope this is a fake web site or joke by the people behind it.
Lets let this be a time to review Mitch’s golden rules when it comes to shopping for a new or replacement web hosting account. Feel free to copy this - share it with others, bookmark it for a reminder or write it on the back of your hand. Whatever will help you remember not to be a sucker when it comes to “too good to be true” web hosting deals.
- There is NO SUCH THING as “unlimited” in web hosting. Everything has a limit and there is no magical servers that can hold unmeasurable amounts of data.
- If the web site looks like it designed by a paraplegic cross-eyed homeless man… stay away.
- 99.9% uptime is meaningless. It might sound nice, but 99.9% of the time it is sales jargon and nothing else.
- Always make sure you have multiple ways of contacting the web host in question, just in case they decide to shut down shop in a month and take your money and run.
Have any other golden rules to share for those people out there who might be looking for a new web host? Leave a comment and lets all help educate the general public on this issue.
Related Reading:
+ WebHostingTalk.com Thread on the 10 Terabyte Web Host
Related Hosting Posts & Podcasts:
Oh my gosh what a fraud!
Actually, fxts.net is not a fraud. We had contracted with JaguarPC to offer our service, which was a big mistake. JaguarPC was not a good partner with which to try to do something like this.
Today, we just relaunched our $1 hosting service, with much smaller specs. We plan to increase the specs back to 10 Terabytes each of bandwidth and disk space once we finish building our server cluster. We have moved to HostGator, having already purchased one server with them.
What started on a reseller account at JaguarPC grew too fast for JaguarPC to want to handle (we tried numerous times to upgrade to a clustered server solution at JaguarPC, and they basically told us to go screw ourselves as they were too lazy to help us upgrade). This, combined with a major DDoS attack, forced our service down for about five days. We spent this time moving to our new server at HostGator and reconfiguring the service. We have already begun to transfer old user accounts, and have already refunded most of the users who had accounts on the old server.
Again, after our cluster is fully up and running, the 10 Terabyte plan will be back.
Regards,
Daniel B, founder of fxts.net
That’s pretty amusing to say the least… Per the comment from Daniel, somehow HostGator is going to allow you to offer such a plan under a reseller account? I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t know any hosting company that is going to allow you to host 10TB worth of anything for $1. The cheapest I’ve seen a provider go on even 1TB is around $150/mo and that was because they are actually setup in a cluster for Backup space with approx. 200TB.
However, I’m really glad someone is going out there and trying to take full advantage of the “promised” resources provided under their oversold hosting accounts. Maybe this will inspire the majority of hosting companies out there *NOT* to oversell, or at least make it impossible to do what fxts.net is doing with their reseller plans. While I feel bad for JaguarPC and HostGator having to deal with your “requirements”, I don’t believe in overselling hosting and wish them the best of luck dealing with you as a customer.
Just my 2 cents.
fxts.net is not hosted on a reseller plan. We are on a dedicated server, purchased from HostGator, hosted in The Planet’s Houston DC. I had already stated this above. We did indeed start with a reseller plan at JaguarPC, and when we attempted to upgrade to dedicated servers with JaguarPC, we were told to screw off.
Once again, we are working on building a cluster with additional servers purchased from HostGator, which will be up and running by February.
Frankly, I see the posts from you and others (at forums) as jealousy. You wish you could offer what we do, but you can’t. It’s as simple as that.
Regards,
Daniel B., founder of fxts.net
Glad to hear that you’re expanding to at least a few servers. However, the point still stands that you couldn’t possibly allow people to use a full 1TB of disk space unless you had some huge disk arrays, which I’m pretty sure that in your case you do not. You have Lunarpages ads on your site, and are giving away free hosting (or charging like $1/mo which after taxes is nothing). I don’t see enough of a revenue opportunity for you to possibly afford anything more than a $50/mo server. Maybe I’m wrong and you’re taking on a huge loss, but I don’t think you have the resources to handle what you are trying to offer.
Your comment about others being “jealous” is just plain childish. If you took the time to view my website, you’d realize that I have no intention of competing against you. My company sells hosting at a premium and offers customers premium service. You seem to offer no service and offer it for free. To each his own!
First of all, as stated numerous times on numerous forums, the fxts.net service is (initially) subsidized by various other (profitable, mind you) Web hosting ventures our team runs. Collectively, our team manages the accounts of over 50,000 paid and free Web hosting users, excluding fxts.net. We have the ability to pour many thousands of dollars into fxts.net before having to see a profit.
You are right, we are moving to a base free service on fxts.net. You are also right in that we need a disk array to be able to offer 10 TB of disk space per user, and that is exactly what we are setting up. In terms of technology, you do seem to be bright.
However, in terms of business strategy, you are not so bright. You make several fatal assumptions, which I do not have the time to point out to you. However, your logic is flawed, and as such, so is your portrayal of our business strategy and likely outcome.
One note I’d like to leave: any customer who wishes to pay $1 per month is being moved back to our 10 TB plan, though this is not yet advertised again on our homepage.
Regards,
Daniel B., founder of fxts.net
Wow you two went after it didn’t you? I can see both sides but Daniel you have to be able to see that your origional offer leaves room for people to scratch their heads.
Daniel:
I’d love to see some actual disk usage/capacity information for the server(s) that host that 10TB for $1 plan. I bet they don’t even have a TB, let alone 10.
Alexander, again - you do not understand the technology of a cluster, so please do not try to argue that point. It makes you look stupid. Secondly, there are indeed 1 TB hard disk drives.
Regards,
Daniel B., founder of fxts.net
Daniel:
I don’t understand the technology of a cluster? WOW. You obviously don’t know me… What kind of “cluster” do you have, a 3PAR, a ZFS based system? From the looks of your site, you probably have a single cPanel server with a few drives in Raid 0/1 at ThePlanet.
Just for future reference, if you really did have a cluster capable of handling the account specs you want to provide, take some pictures and give more information as to how your cluster operates. Because at the present time, you’re clearly lying.
With your last post, you’re simply trying to hide the fact that you don’t have anywhere near your advertised disk space to allocate out to customers. And the reason for that? You’re not making bank on $1/mo hosting plans, and even though you’ve been called out on it- you don’t want to admit that you have less than your advertised specs for fear of the lack of signups. Best of luck to you Daniel B. !
Hello,
After being sent this from someone all I have to say is wow. I run a company which manages clusters, yes real clusters with multiple servers behind real F5 load balancers and uses real clustered file serving. I’d love to hear about your “cluster” and what type of technology you are deploying. We have spent well over 200k in our clusters and storage, pretty impressive for a company only being created on August 28th of 2007 you sure have grown a lot since then.
Which clustered storage solution are you using? Surely you are using one that is scalable as you add more disks?
The better question is, what file system are you running?
And the better question is, with all this massive and impressive growth what color is your Ferrari?
Face it - you’re jealous.
Daniel:
For running a massive cluster, your lack of information astonishes me. You refuse to give any sort of verifiable information about your “cluster” which makes me think that its a single server at ThePlanet which was my initial observation of your operation. And BTW, your “cluster” appears to be down. Did you suck down too much power and bandwidth? Or did your “cluster” get owned? =]
So much for the 99.9% uptime. This is unfortunate. I just signed up for an account earlier tonight and about an hour later the site went down and appears to remain down for several hours now. I was really looking forward to my free 10TB of disk space and 10TB of bandwidth. I would contact them via email about the outage, but since they only offer email support (single point of failure), that is down too.
I suppose I can’t complain too much though, the service is FREE after all. I was really looking forward to transferring all my hosting over to these guys, but now, I’m not not so certain. I’m a bit hesitant now as my first impressions with them are negative, mostly because of the reliability issue im currently looking at.
As the saying goes, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
xmisery, the free hosting service provides 2 GB of space and 100 GB of bandwidth - NOT 10 Terabytes. Right now, the HTTP (Apache) server is down, but our email is still up. If you did indeed send us an email, a reply has now been sent by a member of our team.
As for the service itself, we just sent out this message to our users, which I will also post here:
—————-
Hello,
We are writing to give you an important notice about the fxts.net Web hosting service. After sustaining multiple hack attacks within the past 3 days, we are finding it necessary to shut down our service, at least for a short while. We recommend that all users visit http://70.85.132.82:2082/ immediately to retrieve data from our server.
If you are looking for another free Web host that has no ads, we invite you to try our sister service, xxxxxxxx: http://www.xxxxxxxx.com .
We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Please keep an eye on http://www.fxts.net to know when our service is launched again.
Regards,
The fxts.net Team
—————-
We are still coming under extremely heavy DDoS attacks and came to the conclusion this afternoon that it is not fair to subject our users (even if they are not paying for the service) to such poor uptime. We were not able to finish building the cluster, which I can now speak about…
Our cluster design puts MySQL, DNS, mail, spam filtering, etc (basically every service) on its own server. Storage is provided via a storage area network. As I said above (and have said numerous times), we were slowed in implementing this cluster due to previous problems we came upon. As of the present moment in time, we had not finished the build-out of our cluster, and did not think dedicated firewall appliances would be necessary for such a small service (looks like we were wrong there).
We are going to have to put the fxts.net service on hold as we re-tool our infrastructure to better support the evil intent of some retractors to our mission (i.e. the DDoS attackers).
In the interim, please do stay tuned to fxts.net to be updated - we will be posting updates on our progress.
As for the many negative comments posted here - again, I do not understand them. We do not have to explain a single thing about what we are doing to you, a bunch of random folks off the street. The only people to whom it matters what we do is our users, and they will be informed more than, and ahead of, everyone else.
Regards,
Daniel B., founder of fxts.net
Well I just signed up with them lets see what happens