Plug Week Day 3 — About Hosting.

The holy grail of hosting is the free host. The all-generous, user friendly (no pun intended) provider of space, bandwidth and functionality. There is one harsh reality, though: Good hosting comes at a price. Whether that is a hefty or reasonable price depends more on the income of the one paying it than anything else.

Interesting and fun facts:

- A big webcomic will burn through more than a terabyte in a month. That’s like a gazillion Libraries of Congress (who the hell came up with that stupid measure anyway?). Brian from 8 Bit Teather has said that he burns more than 600 Gb/month. His is not the biggest webcomic out there.

- The biggest one: Megatokyo. I mean big. He gets nearly 300 000 visitors a day.

- Hosting a successful webcomic can be very costly. You need a whole server devoted to it, ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and a lot of time dedicated to supporting the site technically (Database administration, Forum housekeeping, Site design improvement, etc.). So next time you see those pesky paypal buttons on your favorite webcomic you may want to give them a try. I know of no authors who are swimming in the bucks they make from their comic (I don’t think even Piro makes that much dough and he’s already publishing in dead tree format).

- The little blue Globe with purple lines going round it that you see on some webcomics’ site (and, as of yesterday, below the button links on this one) is an Extreme Tracker You can click on it and go to a page that displays the statistics for that site. It lists unique visitors, referrers and whatnot. I just found out about this a few days ago and I felt so stupid for not knowing. So don’t let it happen to you.

- Keenspace used to be the main provider of hosting for webcomics out there. They helped a lot of budding authors find a home, but they recently closed their doors and stopped accepting new entries. The service they provide has been on and off for some time now. There are other alternatives in free hosting, like Drunk Duck, which is a very fine service, ran by Ronson, who is a nice person to boot and hangs out at the TWC forum.

My hosting comes from the great guys over at Red Naranja (Orange Network)

I designed their site and do general web admin jobs for them (one of which consists on plugging them here, by the way, so check them out to make me look good ;-) ). In exchange, they give me gobs of bandwidth (of which I don’t use that much currently), and excellent tech support. Go pay them a visit, and consider them next time you’re thinking of getting a hosting provider. They have great prices. Also, if you have any comments on their site design, email me about it.

— sergio on April 09, 2003