Well, since this is my site, I thought I would give you the information on us.

DarkForge LLC has many different services, most of which we started providing, so we had the means to give ourselves the ability to host our own projects. With all the limitations being placed on web sites, by all the “big” names, if we wanted to run our company we had to provide it for ourselves.

With that in mind, we also decided, we should provide the service we wanted, to our customers. Why not give real hosting? With dfghosting.com, you get everything we sell. If you buy a plan from us with 20GB of space, you get 20GB of space, and as long as your not doing anything illegal, we will not suspend you for using 20GB of space. Please check out our hosting site. The more support we get, the better plans we can offer. I would also like to point out, that you will never see 600+ websites hosted on one of our servers.

DarkForge LLC also provides web development and design. We are dedicated to giving a full service of hosting. We provide design for html sites, CMS’s, blogs, e-commerce, php sites, just about any site, we can design it for you. We also, code those designs. If it is for a system we are not familiar with, we will learn it, and code a design for it. We also staff developers for Nuke Evolution, Evolution-Xtreme and smf. We have coded and designed systems for CubeCart (e-commerce), and many other systems. Don’t be afraid to ask questions at our design site. darkforgegfx.com has been operating since 2005, so we are well versed in that aspect.

We can’t forget domain names. After all if you going to provide web hosting, it really is a pain for us, and our customers to have to get domains from someone else, and then try to figure out how to get it to our system. A few years ago(2008) we opened the doors on dfg-domains.com. We try to give the most and best discounts we can over other domain name companies. Since we also have resellers, we wanted to give them the ability to have their own domain selling site, so we open that door for you. I don’t know of many other places that are better priced than resellers.dfgdomains.com. Even if you don’t want a storefront, we can set you up with a completely transparent API for reselling domains through your own site.

On the non-profit side of things, we develop open source projects also. I mentioned these, but want to give you the links here. Nuke-Evolution.com and Evolution-Xtreme.com. We are also working on a few secret projects, that we hope will take off, and be popular to the communities.

As promised, we begin. Over the next few weeks, I hope to have the reviews laid out on at least 20 of the “top” web hosting providers. There is no specific order in which these reviews happen, and I will not mention the name of the company or any links to sites. The idea is to show you the information and allow you to decide for yourself.

Here is the plans of their shared hosting accounts. You will notice the claims of unlimited pretty much everything. At first glance this appears to be a great deal. Who wouldn’t want to have unlimited websites hosted for $9.95 a month? You wouldn’t ever have to buy another hosting account. As with most people you would order hosting from them. Good price, plenty of resource to host whatever you need……

You must look closer. How many websites do you think they can host on a server? With those amounts of resources given to every $10/month customer getting whatever they need for their sites, you wouldn’t think very many. That thought would be wrong. This particular company can have anywhere from 400 – 900 websites hosted on a single IP address. Upon completing a reverse IP lookup on one of their servers, I found 623 domains hosted on one IP. How can they give 623 people unlimited hard drive space and unlimited bandwidth? To answer that question we must review their terms of service. So lets get a quote of their tos page.

Using a shared account as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account. Please do not take backups of your backups.
Examples of unacceptable material on all Shared and Reseller servers include:

* Topsites
* IRC Scripts/Bots
* Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
* Pirated Software/Warez
* Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
* AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
* IP Scanners
* Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
* Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
* Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
* File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to rapidshare)
* Commercial Audio Streaming (more than one or two streams)
* Escrow/Bank Debentures
* High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
* Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
* Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
* Prime Banks Programs
* Lottery/Gambling Sites
* MUDs/RPGs/PBBGs
* Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
* Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
* Sites promoting illegal activities
* Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
* Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
* Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
* Mailer Pro

Sounds somewhat reasonable, I guess. The way my logic works though; If your going to sell web hosting, why severely limit your customers to a basic PHP or HTML driven site?
If you look closely you are banned from a topsite? If you know what a top site is, its just a ranking website for a specific industry. Say web hosting review sites. So they subscribe to webhosting topsites, but you are banned from running one?
How about the image hosting site? That includes a FAMILY image site. Even if you are not using it to share images, most image hosting scripts allow it, and therefore not allowed on this companies servers.
A banner ad site? Same as before, all web hosts use banner ad services, but they don’t want you to have one. I bet you didn’t link about an affiliate system. They are banner ad services, and you normally host them locally on your web server. Not allowed with this company.

Lets go back to their terms of service.

7a.) Resource Usage

User may not:
1) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
2) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
3) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
4) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5) Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
6) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
7) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.

Users are strongly recommended to:
9) When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include(“http://yourdomain.com/include.php”) use include(“include.php”)
10) To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
11) Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.

They are even telling you how to write your php. I guess when your hosting 623 sites on a single IP address, you would have to do that. I mean you can’t have one site use 25% CPU or Memory, and leave the other 622 to share the last 75%.

So that covers the CPU, Memory and Bandwidth, but what about the hard drive space?

The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 100,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage, however databases will still be backed up. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

So their unlimited web space only means you can put as much as you want as long as you don’t go over 250,000 file limits. This includes every email, folder, file, database. Since we have decided that you can’t use it for any files not directly related to the website, or host images, or videos, then that leaves normal php or html files. So to do the math, if a typical html or php file uses 80kb or 80,000 bytes of hard drive space, and you have 250,000 of them, then you are using 20,000,000,000 bytes of hard drive space, or 20GB. That doesn’t sound like unlimited to me, does it you? Of course, with all the other restriction, you will never reach 20GB, because they will suspend you before you get their. I know this because it happened to me with this very specific host.

Well thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next host.

welcome to “All Things DarkForge LLC”, where domain names, and web hosting meet the average Joe. I am VicToMeyeZR, and I am here to provide knowledge to you about the truth in web hosting. I will provide proof of the lies and scams within the realm of hosting. RSS my site, and visit often. I do not do this to promote my own company, but merely to show you the truth, and if you decide my company is the way to go, then great. If not, we understand that also.

Check out our shared hosting plans here at dfghosting.com

I wanted to also give you a chance to read a great book in web development. These guys really know their stuff. Check out this book here aboutBuilding Database Driven Websites.