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Web Hosting SecretsOr "What Some Web Hosting Companies Do NOT Want You To Know" Did you ever wonder how some web hosts can offer up to 500 mb of disk space and "unlimited data transfer" all for under $20.00 per month? It sounds like a pretty good deal at first glance, almost too good to pass up. But what these web hosts are relying on is the customer being fooled into thinking that "more is better". You see, the funny thing is, companies who actually do need this much disk space for their web hosting, or who's web sites use large amounts of data transfer every month usually give these web hosting companies a wide berth. The main customers of these companies are usually populated by small start ups, who don't really know how much disk space or data transfer they will need, and so believe that "more of everything must be better". The average web site takes up only 5 to 10 mb of disk space, and even our own web site, with over 100 web pages, numerous CGI and PHP scripts, and a mailing list only uses around 40 mb of disk space. Some of the larger e-commerce sites with a large shopping cart and storing a few thousand images of their products may get closer to the 200 mb mark. But to use anywhere near 500 mb of disk space, then you would need a very large web site indeed. So the web host marketing this sort of plan is relying on the fact that the vast majority of their customers will never use anywhere near their allocated disk space. They may have sold 1000's of web hosting plans totaling over 5000 gigabytes in total all crammed onto a single 40 gigabyte hard disk drive. The second reason that these web hosting companies are able to offer such large disk space allowances is that they almost always will use cheaper and much slower IDE disk drives in their web servers, as opposed to the more expensive but much faster SCSI hard disk drives. IDE hard drives cannot transfer nearly as much data as SCSI hard drives. It is more than likely that your desk top computer has an IDE hard drive installed. IDE drives are installed into over 99% of personal computers sold because they are much cheaper than SCSI hard drives. SCSI hard drives are normally only installed into high end (read expensive) workstations and servers. When you boot your computer, or open an application for the first time, the lag you experience is the result of the computer having to load everything off of the hard drive, into the much faster physical RAM. If you were lucky enough to have a SCSI hard drive installed in your system, you would notice that things would load much quicker. With just a single user, IDE hard drives are slower and handle less data throughput than SCSI hard drives, but the difference isn't all that noticeable. Now if there were hundreds of people trying to access your computer all at once through a network, then the speed difference between a computer with an IDE hard drive, compared with a computer with a SCSI hard drive with its much greater data throughput and transfer capability, would be significant. Now imagine a web server with possibly thousands of people trying to download web pages from all the different web sites that are stored on the server. Of course the well known and most often accessed sites will most likely have their most visited web pages stored in the system cache, if there is sufficient cache memory installed on the system. However, the less well known sites will most likely need to have their web page served directly off of the hard drive, and even if they do reside in the cache for a period of time they will be quickly flushed out again by the more popular web sites pages. If your web site is one of the less well known web sites, (and if it is a relatively new web site then it will be), in peak periods there could be a significant lag while your web pages are served off an overworked IDE hard drive, and your potential customer may well hit the back button and move on elsewhere before they even enter your site. Lost visitors means less revenue for your web site. So what about unlimited data transfer? How are web hosting companies able to offer unlimited data transfer? (some refer to it as bandwidth). After all data transfer is not free. Are web hosting companies going to continue to host web sites that pay only $20.00 per month for their web hosting, yet are using more than $30.00 or more per month in bandwidth? Of course not. Again, most of these web hosting companies are relying on the fact that most web site owners who sign up with them will have relatively low rates of data downloads per month. You also have to read the fine print before you sign up with them, because if you have a high download web site, as soon as you exceed a certain amount of data transfer then you are likely to find your account disabled, with no refund of your money paid. When you ask for an explanation they will say that you breached their "terms of service". However, there is another way in which web hosts who offer unlimited data transfer can ensure that your web site does not manage to download more data than you are actually paying for. They do this by putting a fixed "data pipe" on your web hosting account, therefore limiting the amount of data that can be downloaded at any one time. During peak periods, if you have a popular web site, when you have a large number of users trying to access your site all at once, then things will slow to a crawl (and if you don't have a popular web site then you don't need unlimited data transfer, because your data transfer rate won't be very high anyway). Lets say your web hosting company has given you an outgoing data pipe of 64K (some allocate even less than this, around 32K). If you have less than 10 simultaneous visitors to your web site on 56K modems, then the data transfer rate from your web site will still be quite acceptable (around 6.4K per visitor). But if you get 100 simultaneous visitors to your web site, then the amount of data available to each user will be ridiculously small (down to 0.64K per visitor), and new visitors who try to visit your web site will get server timeout messages as they try to access your web site, or it will take forever to download just a single page. If you complain to the web hosting company, they will simply blame the ISP (Internet service provider). If you have a high traffic web site and you take your business elsewhere because of poor performance, then that will be fine for the web hosting company too, because you are obviously a high volume customer, and you are not going to be very profitable for them. These sort of web hosting companies are happy to fleece the smaller user who has little traffic to their web site, and therefore highly profitable to their bottom line. And don't think that just because the web hosting companies web site that you are thinking of using loads fast on your web browser that your web site will too. They will often have their own web site hosted on a totally different server to what they will be hosting yours on. So you see, even though these web hosting accounts seem ideal for a high volume web site, they are often really only suitable for a low volume web site with visitors in the hundreds per month rather than thousands. And if you have only a low volume web site then you don't need all the disk space and data transfer on offer by these web hosting companies anyway (which is what these web hosting companies are banking on). At bizwebspace.com.au we don't use any of these tricks or gimmicks to gain your web hosting business. We dont need to, our web hosting services are already amongst the best value in the industry without resorting to these sorts of tricks. You can be certain that your web site will load just as fast as our web site, because our web site is hosted on exactly the same specification server and is using the same data backbones as your web site will be. To see our current server specs, click here. If you are just starting out with your web site, then we have accounts suited to low volume web sites at very reasonable prices. But as your web site business grows, and gains more traffic and visitors, our web hosting plans are able to grow with you. We have designed our web hosting plans so that you can seamlessly upgrade to the next web hosting plan with no down time at all to your web site. Whatever the size of your web site or your Internet business, whether you are a brand new startup or a seasoned web veteran with millions of visitors to your web site(s) every month, we are here to help your Internet business grow, not nobble it with poor web hosting performance before it even gets off the ground. And we think that you will find that our prices, hard disk space and data transfer allowances to be amongst the most cost effective in the industry. You can compare our prices with what some other Australian web hosting companies are charging by clicking here. |
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