Most webhosts charge a fixed rate each month based on what plan you sign up for. You decide when you first sign up how much disk space and bandwidth you're likely to need, and you pick the appropriate plan. After that, as long as you stay within the limits you pay the same fee each month -- and if you use more bandwidth or disk space than your plan supplies, you get charged a over-usage fee, which is generally much larger than the added cost of upgrading to a more expensive plan.

Instead of offering fixed plans, at BSDwebhosting we charge entirely based on what you actually use. If you have a tiny website with very little traffic, you could pay as little as a few cents each month. We can do this because everything, from account creation down to billing and payment processing, is automated.

When you first sign up, you'll be asked to deposit funds into your account. After that, each day we will look at how much disk space you're using, how much traffic your web site(s) received, and how much cpu time you used, and deduct the appropriate amounts from your account. If your account reaches zero, it will be suspended until you deposit more funds. (But don't worry, we send out reminders for a week in advance so you'll have lots of time to deposit more funds).

After that, just deposit more money into your account whenever the balance gets low, and you can go ahead and create as many web sites, of whatever sizes, as you like.

The first and simplest reason is efficiency. Credit card payments are notoriously hard to handle, with credit card processors taking a fee of anywhere from 2% up to 10% of a payment; in addition, credit card payments often take hours or days to process. In contrast, via Paypal we can receive funds with a much lower surcharge -- meaning we can pass the lowered costs on to you -- and process payments much faster.

The second reason is one of security: While we are quite confident in our security, there is always some risk, and we don't want to be responsible for some 31337 hax0r getting your credit card number. By only accepting payment via Paypal we completely eliminate that risk.

If you read the fine print from almost any hosting company, you'll see a provision stating that they can "suspend accounts which place an unreasonable burden on the servers" (or something equivalent). What that means is that if you're running lots of CGI scripts they can throw you off their servers. This is often phrased as "you're site would really be better suited for one of our dedicated servers", which really means "you're an expensive customer to host, but we'll keep hosting you if you pay us more money".

We don't agree with this practice. Just like disk space and bandwith, cpu time is a commodity which costs us money; it only makes sense that we pass on those costs to you. The alternative would be to have light-cgi-usage sites subsidizing heavy-cgi-usage sites, which is both unfair and causes aggravation to everyone involved when a web host decides that a site's cgi usage is "excessive".

CPU time is consumed by more than cgi scripts. Any program that you run consumes cpu time, whether it is a cgi script, a procmail script, something you run from a shell, or the POP3 daemon which gets run to give you your mail. However, these others are generally very small consumers of cpu time -- rarely more than a small fraction of a second each day.

Disk quotas can be enabled for your site(s) and user(s) at your discretion. The only effect they have is to stop runaway programs (or users!) which might otherwise use large amounts of disk space and run up a large bill at your expense. Use them or not, it is up to you.

The name servers to use are ns.bsdwebhosting.net and ns2.bsdwebhosting.net. Their IP addresses are 209.120.136.141 and 209.120.136.142.

Assuming that you have created a user under one of your domains, that user's login name will be of the form username@domain.tld. The "@domain.tld" is crucial: without this you will not be able to login since it wouldn't be evident which domain the user belonged to. This login name is used for SSH, SCP, and POP3.

If your domain has been pointed at our DNS servers (see above) you can SSH to your domain.tld with your login name (see above) and password. If the DNS hasn't propagated yet, SSH to "209.120.136.141" instead.

If your domain has been pointed at our DNS servers (see above) you can use mail.yourdomain.tld as your POP3 server. As with SSH, if the DNS hasn't propagated yet, use "209.120.136.141" instead.

Please note that POP3 is insecure and will send your password in plaintext across the internet. We highly recommend that you either read your email by SSHing in and using a textmode mail user agent, download your email via POP3 through an SSH tunnel, or forward your email elsewhere to read it.

Don't. You should send mail through your IP carrier's SMTP servers. If there is some reason why this is impossible, we do relay mail from localhost, so one solution would be to setup an SSH tunnel for the purpose -- but this is hardly a good solution.

You use it just like any other CGI script. The path to the php binary is /usr/local/bin/php. It does not run as a module, it runs as a CGI. It runs via suexec, so don't set group/other write on the script, or it won't run. It also has to be set executable, and you'll need to print out the "Content-type:" header (as well as any others you want to use) at the top, just like you would for a CGI.