It has become popular in recent years that cheap web hosting services offer unlimited bandwidth and disk storage. Though this seems extremely appealing and provocative, in general it is not TRULY unlimited bandwidth and disk storage. This does not mean you should throw away that company as soon as possible, it merely means you should seek clarification, calculate your own potential usage, and convey this information to your web hosting provider.
You should know that your hosting company must either pay the data center or internet service provider for every little MB of data that is transmitted from the web server’s computer to your users’ or your own computer. In addition, every MB of data you have stored on a server is consuming hard drive space, similar to your own personal computer. There is no infinite hard drive known to man and this concept is almost physically impossible, even for NASA super computers and the like.
So, why is it called unlimited? First, when a cheap web hosting service says their users may purchase unlimited service, this is a great marketing technique. However, you will not find many users that actually take this to its extreme. For a less technical example, when cell phone companies offer unlimited calling, what do you think would happen if everyone that purchased that plan was on their cell phone twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week? The cell phone company would lose money, signals would be bogged down, and most likely you would get a message saying “The network is busy right now. Please try your call again later.” Of course, this scenario is very unlikely. So, the cell phone companies bank of the fact that just because the usage is unlimited and available to their customers, it will not be used in a truly unlimited way.
The same practice is used by your hosting service. They are banking on the fact that everyone on a server will not be utilizing every sense of the word unlimited. As we discussed earlier, there is no physical way available today to accommodate everyone reaching for the unlimited mark all the time. The hosting company would quickly be out of business and sites would be completely unavailable.
This is not to say that a budget web hosting service offering unlimited everything is not a good deal! In fact, on the contrary, a budget web hosting company offering you unlimited storage and bandwidth is probably a very good deal. In addition, your hosting company will probably not go out of business due to high usage and your website will probably be fine. There are practices employed by cheap web hosting services called load balancing. This means that when a particular user is utilizing too much storage and bandwidth for a particular server to handle, that user’s site is moved to a different server or computer, usually without the end users knowledge. A good cheap web hosting service will have elaborate load balancing techniques that are constantly in place to better manage their users.
Calculate the amount of storage and bandwidth you will need and let your cheap web hosting service know this up front. You can calculate this by adding up the space that your web site and databases take up on your own computer, before you upload them. Once you calculate this figure, multiply it by the amount of users or visitors you expect to receive every month. Then, add fifty percent. This fifty percent should accommodate people that just stumble upon your site as well as search indexes and spider bots. Be liberal with your monthly bandwidth calculations as no one can really predict to the exact accuracy how many visits they will get once you are available on search engines.
Convey this information to your host before you upload your site. This will assist your cheap web hosting service in their load balancing tasks and offer you a bit of insurance against other users chewing up your server’s bandwidth and storage.
If you have any doubts, throw hypothetical situations at your web hosting service provider and see if they have a plan to take care of these things. Ask them how they would handle a user causing a bottle neck problem or how they deploy load balancing techniques. A good cheap web hosting service will have a plan of action ready and in place in case of any disaster.
