Webhosting companies are tricky ones; a lot will try to grab your attention by offering gigs and gigs of space and bandwidth. Some are tricked by this others are not. Don’t get me wrong there are those of you who have great experiences with these companies but remember a server only has limited resources. Purchasing these plans are a great idea in theory but you also will have over-crowded servers and it will slow down your website drastically in most cases. If you need it for extra space for downloading that’s fine but if you’re running your blog on this it isn’t recommended by me.
When you go to places with dirt cheap prices you’re getting dirt cheap service. Remembering you get what you pay for is a really good idea in these types of investments. Paying 5 dollars a month for 55 GB of space and 55 GB of bandwidth sounds like a really good idea right? Most of these companies don’t offer the favored choice of cpanel, fantastico, 24/hr service, unlimited ftp, pop3, mysql, subdomains, as well as fast and reliable servers no matter what they say.
In realistic views 5 dollars a month should get you anywhere from 100mb to 300mb of space and at least 5-8 GB of bandwidth. The average site doesn’t need more than that. Theblogworld.net which is still new granted doesn’t even use up that much space. (My own plan is 100mb space / 400mb bandwidth) In all essence I think I use about 5mb of space as of 2-22-2007. However bandwidth is the tricky part, 8 GB should be more than enough for the average site unless you have tons of pictures. (Even then there are free picture hosts) Every time your site is loaded any picture on even the main page is included in the bandwidth. Downloading email from your pop3 is included in bandwidth. Starting out small is a better idea to see exactly what your site will need. Most reputable companies will either pro-rate for an upgrade or offer you a deal on more bandwidth. It is better to go small then start out huge.
Now these companies are fine for those who offer good deals if you like taking a chance, and it is a chance you’re rolling the dice with signing up since who knows who will sign up after you and what not. Some people do it because they want to host their message board there and some message boards are over 30GB of bandwidth a month. A friend of mine has a message board with 1400 members they use about 600MB of space and over 30GB of bandwidth a month. Now if that server hosts 20 of those size message boards that’s 600 GB a month alone in bandwidth. They’ve sold the amount of bandwidth allotted for an average size server a month and they haven’t even scratched the surface of the cost of that server.
So please take heed when you see the really great deals sometimes in end they aren’t so great.
