Chip,

You also had some good points.

It does come down to what you need the bandwidth for, what you are willing to do on your own, and what you able to manage.

I remember my early days I would call my "hosting" company every day to adjust my bandwidth and I left everything in their hands. DOS, ip-tables, and routing issues were beyond me. Of course, they charged a higher price for the bandwidth.

Most of our sites we manage is for main stream e-commerce sites and banks/financial companies. Needless to say the system and cost are built for a more special need. We still use a datacenter and have a few pipes in our cabs but we still maintain 24/7/365 NOC staff to make sure that when our sites or our clients get hit with a DOS that we can jump on it before the network comes down or a client gets hit with a $5,000 bandwidth fee. Not to mention if you have a BGP issues at 3am you have to have someone fix that ASAP or the whole network caves.

Okay..more geek talk to make a point.

Porn is porn.
But I see three types of site owners:

1- If you are going to manage your own networks, worry about your own DOS, and take an active part in your day and night management you will be better off. And if you can commit to a larger amount of traffic then you will get the best price.

2-I call these non-critical users. They sell on the web for extra income. Sure, if their site is down for an hour or more they will complain but it's not going to make them homeless. They have a great advantage for pricing as they are the casual user.

3. And the final user is someone that doesn't know how to spell CISCO or know the difference between a layer 1 and layer 7 switch...or even what a managed switch is for. But they need their sites up 24/7 and really need handholding and support. We all know these users as they are on the phone an hour or two a day to their hosting company. Although they watch their budget they understand the value in a good hosting partner and will pay a little premium on their services.

I used to think my $50 a month for hosting boysinc.com was expesive 7 years ago....now lots and lots of $$$$ later and lots and lots of servers I understand the differences.. <smile>

Any geeks out there that want to exchange stories at Vegas or Phoenix say hi. I'll have the "Red Apple Media" shirt on at the functions.

Steven