Web hosting requirements
The question you may have is why do web hosts say
unlimited traffic when they really don't offer it? The answer is simple. It's
all marketing. Unlimited traffic sounds a lot better than being put on a limit.
Web host providers are aware that over 95% of the web sites out there does less
than 100 megs of data transfer per month. So they know that most of their
customers will never tax their servers. And for those that do, they kick out
using many different escape clause.
The most blatant use of this is
CommuniTech.net. They are
by far the worst web host I have ever dealt with. Here are a few choice quote
from their website:
"All clients are allowed to use as much bandwidth as needed per month as
long as their content is in accordance with our Acceptable Uses Policy. In
short, clients can use an unlimited amount of bandwidth."
"Some of our clients who take advantage of our unlimited bandwidth
feature push out in excess of 100 Gigabytes of data month after month.
CommuniTech.Net is a member of the Better Business Bureau On-Line and the Web
Host Guild, and is an ISP Check Guaranteed Web Host. We would not have been
able to earn these honors if we misled our clients about offering unlimited
bandwidth."
Reading the above quote you would think you can run as much
traffic as you want, right? After all, they have customers who run over 100 gigs
of traffic every month and they don't care! And running a tech site doesn't
violate their acceptable uses policy. Well, that was what I thought when I first
signed up with them.
Not only did CommuniTech kicked me out, they suspended my site
without giving me any notice for "too many connections to the server". In other
words, they didn't kick me out for using too much bandwidth, because they offer
"unlimited bandwidth". They kicked me out because I had too many users connected
to the sever all at once. I guess it never came to them that bandwidth and
connections to the server are inter-related. If you have a lot of people
connected to your server does it mean you are doing lots of bandwidth or very
little? A lot of course. The point is, it doesn't matter how the web host spins
it, none of them will give you unlimited traffic for a fixed price.
Now, at first you won't have to worry about the bandwidth issue,
but keep in mind once your site start doing anything more than 10 or so gigs of
traffic per month, it's going to start costing you big time. How big? Regardless
of whether they give "unlimited bandwidth", most web host will give you 5 to 10
gigs of data transfer each month with their hosting plans. Go over that and you
will run into traffic charges of about $5 per 100 megs over their limit. That
means a site like The Tech Zone, which does 100 gigs of traffic each month, will
get a bill for $4,500 of traffic charges!
Now I don't pay $4,500 a month for web hosting. I wouldn't be
able to keep the site on the web if I did! But I do pay way more than $19.95 per
month. The reason web hosts put such a high price on going over their limit is
to keep people from going over. So what are your options? There are really only
two options once your site grows beyond normal web hosting; dedicated server or
joining a network.
Next
page: Getting dedicated
[Page
1]
[Page 2]
[Page
3]
[Page
4]
[Page 5]
[Page
6]
[Page 7]
[Page
8]
[Page 9]
[Page
10]
