Regarding actually using the storage/bandwidth you purchase, and hosts booting you if you actually use it ...

I've had a site hosted with one particular company for some years now that has grown by 40-50%/year for the last 3 years. The plan is a shared hosting plan, with 1.5GB/storage, 100GB/transfer per month. While we only use about 800mb of storage, we are VERY close on 100GB transfer/month all the time. (Which is why yesterday I started getting my monthly notices that we're about to his our 100GB quota.)

We've never received ANY hassles from them about using what we've purchased, only notice in the past that if we exceed the transfer, we will be billed extra for any overages.

The ONLY time they had ever sent an email suggesting we moved to a dedicated server was a couple of years ago we had a script that was chewing up a lot of server resources. (image processing on the fly) And if we didn't fix the problem, they would remove us from the shared host to prevent problems with other clients. Perfectly reasonable in my books. I re-coded the offending script, server resources dropped accordingly, and we've carried on with no hassles.

So I would say that any host that will simply boot your butt without trying to remedy the situation first, is simply a poor host that doesn't want your business. A good host will work with you to fix a problem and/or seek a solution. But they should NEVER threaten to cancel your contract for simply using the resources they promised. That's breach of contract and could probably be dragged through court if you had the desire, time, and money to fight it.

DigitalLink you failed to mention how much your actually paying... if you paying what i would consider resonable amount then i think thats fine...

Very useful document. Thanks a lot whym

This thread has been very informative, I will definitely re-read it sometime.

Interesting points raised about doing your own research, especially how you can get a biased opinion and need to do cross-checks. I would agree that customer support is essential whenever doing business with anyone.

Useful a knowledge, Thanks.

These are excellent tips. Especially tip number one. Often people that are looking for hosting are lured to companies that say unlimited features. This is not true and if it is, it will only be for a short time.

I had an argument with someone the other day about "Unlimited Diskspace and Unlimited Bandwidth" and didnt understand why i said it was impossible and false advertising...

No no, look you can have a lot but you cant have unlimited.. WHY DONT U GET IT!

Most big time hosts now in days give unlimited ._.

^ They just say they give unlimited...

Oh I see >.<

Originally Posted by dansgalaxy

I had an argument with someone the other day about "Unlimited Diskspace and Unlimited Bandwidth" and didnt understand why i said it was impossible and false advertising...

No no, look you can have a lot but you cant have unlimited.. WHY DONT U GET IT!

That's a good point...it's false advertising. I've heard of people who were kicked off they hosting service because the providers said they were using too much resources, or something along those lines. It just belabors the point that you need to dissect the terms of service or whatever contract you agree to before signing up; no company deserves instant trust.

I Just think is silly full stop, pay for what you use/need and pay for what you get, simple as.

Dan

that was really an interesting and informative post on things to consider on picking up the right hosting services! really nice....

Memory is very important factor. Some shared hosting provides less memory for each site. If you get more traffic, your site stops working.

Great Post

Thanks for the good post. very helpful for user looking for hosting.

thanx a lot for sharing these points

Thanks for the info. Good to see someone with good information. There is a lot of misleading information out there. Keep up the good work. Unlimited, nothing is unlimited. But it is good advertising. Thanks again.

Well, some of the tips maybe are good but I beg to differ with the first. You can't say a host is overselling or they are a bad host just because they offer you "Unlimited disk space", "unlimited bandwidth" and other unlimited features like emails, databases etc. Some of the best hosts are offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth out there, or just a ridiculously high amounts of disk space and bandwidth. Does that mean these hosts are crap? No.

The "Unlimited" thing in the hosting business works this way. The hosts as well as you know that you are not going to use 100's of GB's of the space or bandwidth per month. Most of the "unlimited" offers are backed up by CPU resources restrictions and other restrictions in favor of the hosts. Even if you still have 90% of your disk space and bandwidth unused in your package but you have crossed the limit of CPU resources usage, they are either going to tell you to move to a dedicated server or suspend your account. That means you are never going to get to use around 90% of space and bandwidth with those shared unlimited or shared (ridiculously) big hosting packages. So, in my opinion, all those big hosts which offer you these unlimited packages just calculate how much DS&BW you are technically allowed to use per account and put a specific number of accounts on each server to ensure better hosting.

I have just noticed Hostgator, BlueHost (also HostMonster), LunarPages are all offering unlimited packages at the moment (didn't check other hosts). Does that mean they are crap hosts? No. Most of them know what they are doing and they have their own calculations. The "Unlimited" thing is just sugar coated words to attract newbies but it may not necessarily mean they are crap or scam. Also once you are into the business you would understand how painful it is to leave all those DS&BW resources unused on your servers if you are not going to oversell even a bit. To be frank, with genuine hosts (which know what they are doing) you can't use the word "Overselling" it's more like "Utilizing unused resources".

Just imagine you have got a 250 GB disk on your server and you have sold 25 accounts each consisting 10 GB disk space. Do you think all those are going to use all the 10 GB on their accounts? Can you even say they (on an average) they will use 1 GB out of the 10 GB? Let's imagine each one of the 25 account holders have used 5 GB. Then what about the remaining half of the disk space of the disk? So, with a strategy and some calculations, you can oversell. But that shouldn't be "OVER oversell".

Thanks for sharing it with us..I will keep that on mind.