I have read of some sites with 100s of Gb of bandwidth needs. I assume that if a visitor visits 5 basic HTML web pages that are each 100K, they just used up about 0.5 Mb of bandwidth on the virtual hosting account correct?

What if someone is using a virtual hosting package with a limit of 20 Gb bandwidth and very suddenly their bandwidth demand soars to several times that much - say 100Gb? I am asking this question because I want to plan to avoid a potential disaster with a huge overrun of bandwidth but also hate to write off using some very good virtual hosts in the beginning simply because I am worried about this scenario in the future.

Unfortunately, nobody knows if and when the day of soaring bandwidth will come or how fast or unexpectedly the emergency might appear. What would most virtual web hosts do for the web site owner with a 20 Gb bandwidth virtual hosting plan so the rush of new customers wouldn't be denied access to the newly popular web site? What if the host does not offer dedicated hosting or anything greater than 20 Gb? Would they quickly move you to an empty server and charge you huge amounts of excess bandwidth fees or just let the original server get overwhelmed?

What can one do to avoid denial of service and potentially huge $/excess Mb bandwidth fees? I am a complete newbie at this but I am wondering if the key question might boil down to knowing just exactly how long it would take from the moment you realized you were in trouble to do the following:

* contact and reach an agreement with a new host that has virtual dedicated or true dedicated server packages,

* get the web site files transferred over from the old to the new host (I have used very basic FTP before),

* get your domain names pointed to the DNS of the new host (I think I can do this part myself inside my account with my domain name registrar) and

* wait for the DNS information to propagate through the system.

Is this all there is to it? What did I miss? OK, so the big quesiton is: how long would it take to do all of this? Might I go broke paying all those excess bandwidth fees before I can get the site completely transferred and working on another company's dedicated server and get the traffic pointed at the dedicated server? I imagine many of you have done this before; can it be done without disruption of service for your customers?

Thank you very much for your patience with this lengthy post.

If you know exactly what you're doing, and you're moving to a host which can set up servers quickly (eg, rackspace), you can do it in 36 hours. Practically speaking, however, it would probably take a week.

If I were you I'd find a host which doesn't have excessive bandwidth fees.

You did already your homework quite good.
And cperciva is right about the timing.
But the best would be a host who is able to provide small accounts, bigger accounts and dedicated servers - this way the transition would be painless.

Originally posted by Arizona
I assume that if a visitor visits 5 basic HTML web pages that are each 100K

A basic HTML page with 100K? Most are much smaller.

What if someone is using a virtual hosting package with a limit of 20 Gb bandwidth and very suddenly their bandwidth demand soars to several times that much - say 100Gb?

This happens very seldom. 20 GB is already a huge amount of traffic for a small site. Or do you plan to be the next hotornot.com ?

Originally posted by Arizona
What if someone is using a virtual hosting package with a limit of 20 Gb bandwidth and very suddenly their bandwidth demand soars to several times that much - say 100Gb?On certain hosts, you would be charged a massive bandwidth overage fee and possibly be kicked off for using too much server resources.

Originally posted by Arizona
What if the host does not offer dedicated hosting or anything greater than 20 Gb?Find one that does. The only shared host I know that provides 100 GB and upwards is Worldzonepro.com (which is not taking orders until sometime this week...)

Originally posted by cperciva
If I were you I'd find a host which doesn't have excessive bandwidth fees. Or any bandwidth overage fees.... (to some it is preferable that their account is stopped for the month when they reach their limit).