Understanding hosting episode 2 - Bandwidth, storage, usage limits and pricing

Welcome to the second episode in my "understanding hosting" series. In episode 1 I discussed the first step in finding hosting; understanding your hosting requirements. In this episode I'll be explaining what bandwidth and storage are as well as describing usage limits and the pitfalls of pricing... Let's begin.

It's often taken for granted that every user in the world must understand what bandwidth and storage are; but what if you don't know? What about if you don't understand usage limits or the importance of knowing your pricing structure? Well that's where I come in. Most of this advice will be below most of you but everyone had to start somewhere and it's really hard to become a blogger if no one takes a minute to explain the basics.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is measured in megabytes (mb), gigabytes (gb) and terabytes (tb). It's a physical measurement of how much data that leaves/enters your server; So if you have a 100mb file that 10 users download, your bandwidth usage will be around 1gb. Obviously this is an important factor of your hosting because it defines how much activity you can afford.

Obviously if you're running a blog for very few readers bandwidth is less of a consideration; but if you're writing for an audience (or trying to) then you should consider to buy well above your expected usage. Also, if you're looking at serving media (music/video/large documents) then your bandwidth requirements are going to be quite high. On my Dreamhost hosting package (which only costs $120 a year) I'm allowed over 2 terabytes of bandwidth per month... Which is a lot. I've never exceeded 30gb in a single month.

Storage
Storage is also measured in mb, gb and tb (same as bandwidth) but this represents the amount of storage you get on the server itself (in the same way you'd store things on your hard drive). If your server has a storage limit of 100mb, your website (and associated files) cannot exceed 100mb in size. On my Dreamhost package they allow me 200+ gigabytes of storage which is more than most desktop machines have.

Usage Limits
These are limits upon your bandwidth and storage set by your hosting company. So bandwidth is the measure of the data being transferred and storage is the measure of how much you're storing on your server; but it's the usage limits that dictate how much of both you can use. These variate an awful lot from package to package; you very much get what you pay for.

Pricing and Usage Limits
Pricing varies depending on what you're after - that much is clear. However, the thing you need to look at is how the pricing fits with your usage limits - cheap hosting often stops being cheap. So supposing you're running a blog on a hosting package that allows you 100mb of bandwidth a month; which is fine because you normally only use 80mb of that. Then someone submits your content to Digg and you get 20,000 more users come your way, burning up 4gb of bandwidth. Cheap hosting packages will normally charge you something silly like $0.10 for every 1mb you go over, so that's $400 in extra hosting charges that you didn't need to spend (just as an example).

So your cheap hosting that was only costing $3 a month has suddenly cost you $400. So I would advise against buying hosting like this, especially when vendors like Dreamhost will provide packages with limits that you cannot accidentily exceed. I'd suddenly have to receive 16,000,000 visitors above my normal levels before I ran out of bandwidth, which is a nice margin considering I only pay $120 a year for it. There are similar hosts to Dreamhost who do packages like this but I'm just singing the praises of them because I've had a good 12-18 months experience.

So it's clear to see that cheap hosting can quite quickly become expensive. Hell, even Dreamhost have quite high charges should you go over-and-above their usage limits, but like I said above - I'd need 16 million surprise users for that to become a problem and I'm sure my eCPM would accomodate that. So while you should understand your requirements and understand your "average" consumption; I highly recommend buying a package like the "Crazy Domain Insane" from Dreamhost because it's more than you'll need but gives you plenty of opportunity to expand.

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