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Thank you to everyone who has patiently awaited the launch of our new hosting platform. Symbiostock Hosting is now here and available for anyone looking for a robust and reliable hosting solution for their Symbiostock powered digital media store. Our aim with Symbiostock Hosting is to provide a hosting service that is technically specialized for the requirements of Symbiostock powered sites.
We encourage you to explore the new site and read our latest blog post for an introductory overview of what Symbiostock Hosting is and what we are offering:
http://www.symbiostock.org/symbiostock-hosting-launch/Key Features of Symbiostock Hosting:
- Quick Setup
- Simplified CPanel Interface
- ImageMagick
- One-Click WordPress Installation
- High CPU & Memory Allocation
- Free SSL Certificates
We also have a new Symbiostock Hosting Support forum specifically for hosting clients where they can post questions and explore hosting related issues with the community.
Free migrations for the month of July
For the month of July if you’re currently on a host you’re not happy with or want to get your Symbiostock site up and running with Symbiostock Hosting, I can manage the migration from your old server to your new server for you.
In order to speed up the process of this, once you sign up with Symbiostock Hosting:
1) Send me a PM with your control panel information for BOTH your new and old accounts
2) Tell me what your domain name is
3) Do NOT change your DNS nameservers with your registrar until I tell you to
We’ve allocated time for this just for the month of July and after that point if you want assistance you’ll have to post queries in the forum or submit a paid support request.
Hi Robin
The pricing and the ability to have multiple sites hosted all looks great, but the amount of storage seems pretty low for stock photo (never mind video) sites. I think my current package is 60GB storage and I probably use 40GB of that.
Is storage a big cost in hosting? I would have thought it was less so these days with the pricing of discs.
Steve
Hey Steve,
The issue here is not specifically space, but other resources. WordPress hosting requires far more CPU and memory as a base – when you throw in Symbiostock media processing, it can make the load 100x normal at peak times. This is precisely why so many people have so many issues where their processor stops working, or image processing is sluggish, etc. Even your site – I recall you were one of the first adopters of Symzio – when Symzio tried to extract too many images from your site at once, it actually crashed it. We actually tweaked Symzio to process media sequentially specifically because of that circumstance.
With Symbiostock Hosting, we did a lot of market research to create a very competitive managed solution that took into account the fact that we provide certain benefits no other host does:
- 100% free, perpetual, and unlimited SSL certificates (they auto-renew and you don’t have to do anything once they are setup, and setup is one-click)
- CPU and memory allocation that is quite similar to having your own VPS or dedicated server – the memory and CPU resources have been tested to ensure that even 10gb video files can be processed within your account.
- All settings are plug and play – you don’t have to tweak anything regarding PHP settings and what have you.
We already have a few early adopters and from what we hear the speed and what not is very good, so overall, I suppose you might say this is a premium service, which is what we intended it to be. Accordingly, we have to, at the minimum, charge competitively to keep it sustainable.
Finally, if you compare our prices to other hosts (specific to WordPress optimized hosting), you’ll see that it’s actually cheaper in many cases while providing a superior service:
With BlueHost for example:
https://www.bluehost.com/managed-wordpress-hosting
They try to hook you for the half price first month, but it’s $75/month for 60gb which is far more expensive than what we offer.
Namecheap VPS (which is the closest we can find)
https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/vps.aspx
Every package is either more expensive, or on par with regards to cost, and they also provide less bandwidth, no SSL certificates, and far less CPU and memory than we do. And with a VPS, I mean, you need to set everything up yourself.
Those are just examples, but as you can see the pricing, overall, provides more than most other hosts for a very competitive price. It won’t work for everyone, but we’ve actually spent a lot of time ensuring that not only are we charging fairly to Symbiostockers, but that we are also being realistic about its sustainability.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Robin,
A few questions:
Do the hosting packages include Symbiostock Express, like the Plus plans did?
Is it easy to upgrade plans as we go along, as our needs change?
What is the cost of support, if I decide I need it?
Thanks
Robin,
Forgot one of the questions I meant to ask, is the submitter included?
Thanks!
Hi Walt,
Thanks for the questions. Unlike PLUS, this is strictly a hosting service and no plugins come with it.
Support is via the http://www.symbiostock.org/support-request link, but as I’ve said, till the end of July I will try to help everyone I can with regards to the hosting.
In addition, it is quite likely that if you have an issue and post the query here someone from the team may pipe in, but strictly speaking we don’t have the resources to provide guaranteed software support for customers. Most web hosts that do are sort of lying because they tend to keep you in queue for a long time and fail to really solve issues even after doing so.
Plans can be upgraded as you need to.
Let me know if you need anything else!
hi robin
Do the hosting packages include Symbiostock Express? or i must buy it lisense too?
thanks
Hi Budi,
Thanks for the question – no, the hosting packages do not include any plugins or themes and is solely focused on providing a hosting service.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Just so you guys know, I re-checked the pricing we had for the Business and Super plans and they were incorrectly listed. That’s been fixed now. All current customer accounts have been updated and pro-rated accordingly.
I just thought I would comment now that I am up and running.
Compared to setting up on GoDaddy this has been so easy I can’t believe it. The steps to get it all running were very few and quite simple. And adding Symbiostock Express made it even easier.
I transferred four sites (one of which was a symbiostock site) from another host with Robin’s help. All went very smoothly and my sites are up and running with no break in service.
Great job!
Steve
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