Archive for April, 2009

The Truth in “Unlimited” From a Hosting Company

Bigger is NOT always better.

Nowadays, hosting companies are going crazy with the amount they claim to offer in their hosting packages.  But it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Unlimited Bandwidth

This is the biggie.  Everyone wants something that’s unlimited, right?  But is it really unlimited?

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to and from your website.  This includes files (pages and images) downloaded to viewers’ cache’s, FTPed files up and down, and email in and out, as well as a few other things.

An average site won’t use more than 10GB per month.  That’s enough for 1,000 visitors per day.  A large site with tons of traffic?  Maybe 20GB.  The sites that really use a ton are sites with large files (downloadable content, for example), or sites that have been hijacked for spam (or legitimate spammers), or sites with hundreds of thousands of visitors every day (like microsoft.com).  So the average hosting client does not really NEED unlimited bandwidth. › Continue reading