Dangers
of Unlimited Space & Bandwidth
Player
Narrated By: Robert Smith (CEO of HastyHost)
Over the years, the web hosting industry has taken
several changes. One of these changes includes the
introduction of unlimited space and/or bandwidth. These
changes are a way for hosting companies to deceive it's
customers, as a way to bring in more income. The sad
truth is, you do not always get what you pay for, but
these companies hope that you are unaware of this type
of trickery.
So what exactly are
the dangers of overselling Unlimited Space & Bandwidth?
"Overselling is a term used in
the
web hosting industry to
describe a situation in which a company provides hosting
plans that are unsustainable if every one of its
customers uses the full extent of services advertised.
The term is usually referred to the web space and
bandwidth
transfer allowance (source)."
That basically means, a web hosting
company will sell you a service that it really cannot
offer. This can be called false advertising, however,
not one person has been able to prove a web host
wrong because of three main factors:
- The first reason why no one has
successfully revealed a web host wrong that offers
unlimited disk space is because the web host will
suspend that individuals account as soon as it appears to be
using more than the allocated space (usually 1GB)
that web host may have set that you as a customer do
not know about.
- Secondly, all web host that provide
unlimited space and bandwidth will have in their
terms of service many restrictions that most
customers simply bypass without paying any attention
to. These restrictions usually include all types
of websites that use up a large amount of space such
as the following:
- Backup websites
- Warez or Illegal Content
websites
- Streaming videos or music
- Downloading software, movies,
music etc websites
- Sites that offer free
resources to the public
- and the elongated list goes
on...
- Lastly, when it comes unlimited
bandwidth you have to be careful about that as well.
"Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that website
visitors can download from a website (source)."
Most unlimited bandwidth provides will claim they
have unmetered bandwidth which can be true, but, the tricky part
is, if your
website consumes too many CPU resources your account
will be suspended. Most host give your individual
web hosting account a 10% CPU resource limit, but if
you go over that limit your account will be
suspended. Most customers have no idea how to
prevent this from happening, and lack the knowledge
of rather or not their type of website is suitable
for such an shared environment.
As you know, you are sharing the server you are
placed on with other individuals just like you. If
one person uses too many CPU resources or creates a
high server load at any given time, that effects
your website as well, which causes downtime or slow
response time to your website. Many web host that provide
unlimited bandwidth will eventually face this
horrible factor.
Andy Anderson,
an individual currently involved in the web hosting
market had this to say about overselling disk space and
bandwidth:
"How
much room do you actually need for a site? Looking
through my server logs most people use 500MB
(megabytes) of disk space and about 5GB (gigabytes)
of bandwidth. That is plenty of room for the average
person with only 1GB of disk space. But most people
will not ever look at how much space they are using.
They only look at storage space when they are
looking for a host. The hosting market these days are
very competitive. Web Hosts bank on your lack of
knowledge and promise you TB (terabytes) of space
and bandwidth. If you look at
burst.net they have
a terabyte hard drive for $400.00 a month per host.
So think for a minute, how can a host offer you
a $1.95 month web hosting plan for a terabyte of
space? Mathematically they cannot possibly do it,
and yet, they know about it and lie to your face
that they can. They also hide behind their TOS
(terms of service) saying you must have active sites
etc. Do you think Google.com would pay for 1,000’s
of servers if they could host at DreamHost, who
oversells web space, for $7.95?"
The bottom line is, if you are serious
about the future of your website, it is best to do your
own research and actually pay for what you receive. If
the offer looks too good to be true, more than likely it
is.
Written By: Robert Smith (CEO of
HastyHost)
