Hi,

Forgive my ignorance but I have a question about some(a lot, really) budget hosting that offers a ton of disk space (eg. 50MB, 75MB, 100MB, etc) with a limited bandwidth (500MB, 1GB, 2GB). This doesn't make sense to me at all...

When I first started with my site (at this time I had no idea what "bandwidth" meant :) , I signed up for one of these budget hosting something like $3+ a month with 25MB Disk space and 2.5GB bandwidth/month. I had created a lot of pages on my site and used up almost 20 or so MB of my disk space. After the first 10 or so days I noticed that my bandwidth usage was up to 50% of my limit because of multiple page access as well as my file uploads, etc.

After being charged tons of money for the extra bandwidth I used, I realized that bandwidth is what people should be looking for first when deciding to a host, IMHO.

So anyway, why do hosting companies offer 100MB of space and only 2GB of bandwidth? If you used up all 100MB, you'd run out of bandwidth on your first week! (depending on the popularity of your site, of course and how many times you update and upload pages).

That's my story and I'm sticking to it :)

Any comments?

Some customers can get by quite fine with 100MB and 2GB. Usually that 100MB wouldn't get filled, so a less popular site would want to signup with that hosting company. If their web site is 50MB and not too many people visit it, they have plenty of room to improve, and they have enough data transfer for a fair price.

Most company give more disk space than needed because they know the costumer won't use it, but in some cases like music distribution disk is very necessary. When you pay for hosting, in genral you pay for bandwidth and that's exactly what you should look for.

Usually there are several resellers who further resell the web space to many small sites, which hardly have any datatransfer, and huge web space allow them to sell more and more accounts.

Second many people also prefer to keep a back up of their and/or their customer's sites on the server itself (inlcuding on their own computer), which occupy the web space but not any bandwidth once created.

You can find many hosts offering huge bandwidth at very reasonable price if you feel your site is making lots of bandwidth specially when you use all your web space.

[Edited by m6.net on 03-02-2001 at 12:58 AM]

Originally posted by easypooltutor
...

So anyway, why do hosting companies offer 100MB of space and only 2GB of bandwidth? If you used up all 100MB, you'd run out of bandwidth on your first week! (depending on the popularity of your site, of course and how many times you update and upload pages).

The answer is: disk space is cheaper than bandwidth.

Intelligent reply:-)