The web hosting industry is bustling with activity. There are new
companies coming up and old loss making companies selling out.
Competition is very hard. Some web hosting companies such as India
Access are still selling web hosting at outrageously high prices. For
example, India Access is selling merely 250MB of web space at $136 per
year. At the same time, other companies such as Blue Host sells
unlimited hosting for $47 per year. There is such a huge difference in
price, and such a huge difference in the amount of space offered. Why is
this so?
Are you intending to upload your WordPress blog, and create a quick
website using WordPress? You need to understand what you need and why
you are buying hosting from a particular company. If you are intending
to use WordPress, you probably don’t need more than 100MB of space. Why
buy unlimited space then? The idea is, not that you can use hundreds of
GB of space, but you can be rid of the mental worry of planning the
amount of space you need. You can worry more about developing the
website, as you really need to.
On the other hand, if you want
merely a small 10-15 page website, you need not pay for “unlimited”. If
you can make a rudimentary estimate of the number of pages you need, and
you can significantly save even more. Siteground offers 10GB space at
$3.95 per month, and at the same time bluehost offers unlimited hosting
at $3.95 per month – why would you chose to take only 10GB? I will
explain now that, you are better off, by choosing the 10GB one.
When you pay for a certain determined amount of space, you get much
more bang for your buck. This means that you are able to use more
resources in terms of CPU processes, RAM allocation and simultaneous
processes. You will almost never find these details on the website of
any web hosting company. This is a well guarded secret of the industry.
Why do they not tell you this? They need to constantly change those
things so that all the users can use the servers. Imagine this, there
are 200 users on one server – one user is using a ton of CPU in a very
complex php script, but all the other users have only HTML pages. At
this point, you can afford to allow that one user to use the excessive
CPU usage that he needs. But now imagine that all the users need a ton
of CPU? What do you do now? You have advertised unlimited space, and
packed the customers on one server like a pack of sardines. The only
option is to start restricting the CPU and add more hard drive space to
the server, or buy a new server. Buying a new server is very expensive
and would affect your bottom-line. So, what do you do? You go ahead and
restrict the CPU. Why would this not happen if you had a restricted
space account? This would not happen, because almost always, all users
having restricted space account would be on one server, and all users
having unlimited accounts would be on another server. The total users
having limited space accounts are generally relatively low – which gives
you a larger share of the overall resources.
Don’t fall for
tricks and fancy advertisements. Be smart and estimate your
requirements. Most of the users who take unlimited accounts, think they
are getting a good deal by doing so. But that is not always the case.
Estimate your needs and buy smart.