Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Cost of Space vs Bandwidth

[gengar560]

Which is more expensive: web space, or bandwidth (transfer)/month?

Disk space seems to, for some reason, be the primary spec that people compare plans by. Bandwidth/transfer seems to vary greatly. Why?

[FatalSw1tch]

Bandwidth is expensive..... disk space is dirt cheep. Most hosts pay for a GB for about 1.50 to $2.30.

[eddy2099]

Bandwidth is more expensive and probably makes up the bulk of the technical cost of the plan.

Disk space on the other hand is just space on a harddisk which represents a one-time investment on the web host end. Bandwidth is variable and there are possibilities of exceeding the given limits and excess usage can be extremely costly.

[cyrex]

I dunno.. iv'e never had problems with space or bw i have a server on a 100mbps feed with 2 120 gig hd's and 1000 gig transfer and i haven't runned out yet. And if i do i always have my other backup server

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[sprintserve]

It's not comparable: i.e you cannot compare 1GB of harddisk space to 1GB of bandwidth. That's like comparing apples and oranges. If you compare 1GB of harddisk vs 1GB of bandwidth, you will find that 1GB of harddisk is actually more expensive (in terms of cost)

But that's grossly inaccurate of course.

Why then do host seem to hand out diskspace compared to bandwidth? The issue is scarcity. It is extremely hard to use up 1GB of harddisk space, especially when html are basically just text, and web graphics are usually pretty small.

Because of this difficulty in using up the space, most host has lots to spare. As such, most host do not mind. Also if you are using 1GB of space, chances are your site will consume 10-30GB of bandwidth easily i.e. there's a strong co-relation between bandwidth used and harddisk storage used. So most host just use the bandwidth as the cost driver.

The next issue is that harddisk is a sunken cost vs bandwidth which can be variable especially when you exceed the initial bandwidth allocation, and you may have to pay by per GB for overages.

The reason why bandwidth/transfer varies greatly by hosts is that they try to put a lot more diskspace to attract clients as they know that bandwidth is likely to be used more (and thus cost more) per client.

At the same time, clients look more at bandwidth most of the time rather than disk space.

Hope it helps.

[DarktidesNET]

They're most likely in sync... unless you're using hosting account as a storage shed most likely if you utilize a lot of disk space you're serving the files (images, downloads, whatever) through your site which eats bandwidth.

So, if you have a lot of space (and use most of it) then you will probably eat a nice size of bandwidth along with it.

Having / offering a lot of space can be benificial in the fact that if they do utilize it most likely they will need more bandwidth which can bring you more money... Sneaky, but that's how I would see it on high spaced plans.

[UH-Matt]

We define our pricing based on the amount of tranfer, then give diskspace based on the transfer.

so 100mb goes with 1gb transfer.

Someone buys 50gb, they get 5gb diskspace etc...

[mpope]

Hmmm... disk space is just the hardware cost though, and that's not a monthly recurring expense. Ok, maybe you can include the rackspace cost into the hardware, but that would still be cheaper than bandwidth every month. Really though, the monthly hardware / software expense is the same if you have a 10GB drive or a 750GB raid array, isn't it?

I mean, go spend $1000 on disk drives, slap them in your server, and you'll have all the disk space you and your clients can ever use. Compare that to the thousands of dollars per month that we spend on bandwidth alone, and I think disk space is extremely cheap!