I received notice at the beginning of May that I'll need to secure new hosting by the middle of June or GU service will suffer outtages.

The Safehouse Network has been hosting GU for free for a long time now and their ability to host GU has come to an end. They'd keep doing it if they could, but they can't. I understand. As a matter of fact, I wish I could turn the tables and help them out. Late payments from my ad provider and childcare expenses make this something I can't swing though.

Aidden is working with me to try to figure out where to move GU too so that service stays pretty much the same. But, in the end, the wallet might dictate what I can and can't do with the site. We'll just have to see. The new monthly hosting fee will be a new thing for GU. But, I figured it was coming eventually.

The advertising, when it's paid for on time, pays my bills. Those bills do not include unexpected hosting charges though. If you want to help, I'm not looking for handouts (unless you're looking to invest in GU). I'd rather you buy stuff from the GU Store.

UPDATE: (as of 6/9/08)
As an option to losing my host, I ended up taking over hosting duties. Over the course of three days GU readers donated enough money to host the site for an entire year. I'll be doing a full page Zombie comic over the next few months as a thank you for their contributions.

This totally sucks More so that the Safehouse will likely dissapear than anything else. Although the extra hosting cost each month is going to be kind of a pain, too.

[nerdiness] Perhaps you should change your name to Woody Dax for the duration [/nerdiness]

As you see woody, the community loves ya. I'll talk to misses too and see if can fling a few more bucks to charitable cases. I think I speak for everyone though when I say we love ya man

Okay, so I've had to join if anything to attempt a save for GU >.<.

I've suggested this to other such people in this same boat, and all have looked at me with utter distaste or draconian flamings. Some have even shoved me off as some form of spammer or general "noob"...

So, rather than typing up some random, wordy pasta for the masses to read--I'll just make my suggestion: www.HostMonster.com.

I've compared Safehouse's service plans to HostMonster's single service plan and the difference is a bit extreme: Safehouse's highest plan is $30/month and they only offer 1000Mb of storage and 30Gb of transfer. Hostmonster offers Unlimited storage and transfer, as well as an enormous amount of additional features (such as ftp accounts, email in-boxes, PHP, OC-48 backbone, Ruby on Rails, etc). Their cost? Only $6.95/month, or $4.95/month if you use their 2-year plan.

I'm not trying to step on people's heels here, nor am I trying to advertise something; I don't work for HostMonster and gain nothing from this (I don't ask for anything!). I just want to lend my own little form of help and hope that it at least assists someone.

Additionally, if anything, why wouldn't you use this service? I keep on hearing people call it a "shared host", but comparing it to Safehouse, they seem to be the same thing. Am I missing something?

People might be dismissing you as a noob because you have the wrong Safehouse. The Safehouse I'm talking about is not a hosting service. It's a community for rogues across various MMOs. http://www.thesafehouse.org

That aside, let me start by saying: GU is not some website with menial foot traffic. We play host to 250 unique users registering over 5 million page views each month. Sure that ain't Penny Arcade or even VG Cats traffic, but it's nothing to try to server through a $6.95 a month host.

Sites that offer "unlimited bandwidth" typically have capped transfer rates. As a wise man recently told me "badnwidth ain't free". Now add to that the fact that GU would not perform well on a shared host server. Why? Because shared hosts have the same hardware serving hundreds or thousands of sites. That means at any one point in time (specifically peak hours) I would be woefully short on processing power and RAM because it's being distributed across all the clients on that server. Result? All the sudden GU starts loading slower, and eventually just times out because the resources aren't there to support my traffic load. At the very least GU would need to reside on a virtual dedicated server, but even that is selling my users short. To maintain the current quality level, even on days when sites like Blizzard link me and triple the traffic to my site, GU needs to sit on a dedicated server.

You'll notice that HostMonster doesn't mention dedicated servers. This means they're probably just a reseller. The people they get their server(s) from is who I would need to talk to. So HostMonster might work for your neighbor's hobby page, or your relative's church website, but, they wouldn't work for me. Besides, the lack of real information would scare me off long before I even considered their service. Truth of the matter is though... the people that would use then, don't need access to amount of server info I need.

So, I'm not trying to "step on people's heels" here either, but not fully comprehending the size of GU means you're missing a LOT.

Woody, as someone who was in a very similar situation as yourself very recently, I thought I would just help by giving what happened with me and where we turned.

I am the webmaster for an NCAA Division II school's athletics program. We were hosted on the university's network for years until the Athletic Director decided he wanted to offer advertising on the website as an incentive for sponsors. Advertising of any type is a big no-no though while we were using state funded hosting. Thus we had to get our own hosting elsewhere.

I began to research different hosts, and like you I quickly found that the cheaper hosting options were not an option for us. Our site handles roughly 1 million requests a month on our slow months, spiking to ~9 million during basketball season. To complicate things the site uses php with mysql tables and has no cache so everything is queried live. I knew I had to over purchase bandwidth to handle our processing needs.

I ended up settling with Liquid Web. Their support is phenomenal, true live phone support 24x7. We ended up using the VPS 2 package and it has handled our needs exceedingly well. I find them to be worth every penny.

Give them a look, paying a little bit more to receive their level of support and attention is definitely worth it.

[ Link corrected. These forums do not allow HTML tags, you must use vB code. ]

As an option to losing my host, I ended up taking over hosting duties. Over the course of three days GU readers donated enough money to host the site for an entire year. I'll be doing a full page Zombie comic over the next few months as a thank you for their contributions.

Out of curiosity, how many 200$ donars did you have? The ones that will have their zombie self in the upcoming comics?

Eleven.