Another factor to consider when choosing a host is to look at their server uptime reports.. and to be able to select the exact server where you want your website hosted on with the best uptime results.

Originally Posted by web hosting

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".

Sorry but i TOTALLY disagree about unlimited.

Unlimited is a BAD thing and is misleading.

Overselling is one thing, but unlimited is just plain bull.

A decent host can offer can (using your analogy) have a 250 HDD and provide 25 accounts @ 10GB, however assuming on average each user uses 5GB this means everything runs fine, and even if 50% of all users use their full allowance of 10GB the server is still fine and there is still 62.5GB left.

Where as if in the same situation you have 25 accounts @ "unlimited" and say 50% use 20GB and the rest use 5GB you will have problems.

When i provide hosting and services i strive to be as honest, open and fair with my clients as possible, and i can safely say most of my clients, and definatly my best clients respect that, and are more than happy to pay for their services, and use me for other/new services they require.

The only thing i state unlimited on is email accounts etc, and even then i have it stated in the terms of service, and on my site that these are restricted by diskspace and usage restrictions.

Honest, Fair.

Originally Posted by dansgalaxy

Sorry but i TOTALLY disagree about unlimited.

Unlimited is a BAD thing and is misleading.

Overselling is one thing, but unlimited is just plain bull.

A decent host can offer can (using your analogy) have a 250 HDD and provide 25 accounts @ 10GB, however assuming on average each user uses 5GB this means everything runs fine, and even if 50% of all users use their full allowance of 10GB the server is still fine and there is still 62.5GB left.

Where as if in the same situation you have 25 accounts @ "unlimited" and say 50% use 20GB and the rest use 5GB you will have problems.

When i provide hosting and services i strive to be as honest, open and fair with my clients as possible, and i can safely say most of my clients, and definatly my best clients respect that, and are more than happy to pay for their services, and use me for other/new services they require.

The only thing i state unlimited on is email accounts etc, and even then i have it stated in the terms of service, and on my site that these are restricted by diskspace and usage restrictions.

Honest, Fair.

I completely disagree with you. The "Unlimited" thing is not bad at all, as long as the hosts are honest and know what they are doing. Most of the hosts limit their unlimited offers with some CPU resources limitations. In fact, all the hosts on Shared Web Hosting environment limit the resource usage for each and every account. That's what you get on Shared Hosting Environment.

And Show me a site which uses unlimited diskspace and/or unlimited bandwidth, then I will agree with you that the unlimited thing is BAD. You Me and Everyone knows that there is a limit to everything on this planet. That's the same thing the hosts use to their advantage. If you again go through my post and read and understand it completely, you would understand.

You Me and Everyone knows that there is a limit to everything on this planet.

SO!
Why are there so many people complaining when they get bumped by their "unlimited" hosting provider for their "excessive" use of something??

Originally Posted by chrishirst

SO!
Why are there so many people complaining when they get bumped by their "unlimited" hosting provider for their "excessive" use of something??

They are kicked out of the hosting because the excessive use of CPU resources. And all the hosting providers mention in their terms that on shared hosting environment you can't use more than certain percentage of CPU resources. That's not the hosting providers' fault.

When they can see the "Unlimited" thing in the features of the hosting packages can't they see the TOS of the service?

To be frank, the Unlimited thing is kind of a tactic to attract sign-ups. The hosts know people can't use more than a certain amount of disk space, owing to their Terms Of Service. But to stay alive in this business they need to play these kinds of tactics. That's why I always support genuine hosting companies that offer unlimited hosting.

Also if a "LIMITED" hosting provider offers a 50 GB disk space shared hosting plan and you are hosting a site with them which is big (I mean a lot of traffic) DO YOU THINK YOU CAN STILL BE ABLE TO USE THE WHOLE 50 GB DISK SPACE? Can you continue to fill you disk space with more content even if you exceed the CPU resources limit? On shared hosting packages it's more about "Usage of CPU resources" than that disk space.

I fully understand WHY (being a hosting provider as well). The point being, that it is tantamount to false advertising.

Wouldn't you be aggrieved if you had bought a brand new car with a 16 litre, 16 valve, double overhead cam, turbo charged, nitro fuelled engine with a Huge boot and can do 90 miles to the gallon. And then when you start driving it the engine cuts out every time you go over 8 MPH?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

I fully understand WHY (being a hosting provider as well). The point being, that it is tantamount to false advertising.

Wouldn't you be aggrieved if you had bought a brand new car with a 16 litre, 16 valve, double overhead cam, turbo charged, nitro fuelled engine with a Huge boot and can do 90 miles to the gallon. And then when you start driving it the engine cuts out every time you go over 8 MPH?

Don't take it personal chrishirst, But I am actually stunned to know you are actually a hosting provider and don't know much about the hosting business.

Now about the car: Suppose that you bought that car even after the maker of that car clearly stated in the car specifications & service voucher book or something that the engine cuts out every time you go over 8 MPH, WHOSE FAULT IS THAT NOW? Yours or the maker of the company?

Also, could you please tell me if you offer shared hosting to your customers and what packages you offer and what resources limitations you have for the shared hosting accounts? Surely you are not offering 100% CPU resources to each and every account holder on the server, Right?

@ dansgalaxy: When I was talking about that example (250 GB disk and 10 GB disk space per each shared account) I was not talking about a limited (10 GB) hosting package. I WAS ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT "UNLIMITED" HOSTING PACKAGES. Well, I guess I somehow missed the point that you took it as limited hosting packages when I said 10 GB disk space per account.

Now here is how the web hosting business actually goes: "ABC" hosting company buys a 250 GB disk space. Then "ABC" decides to host 25 shared hosting accounts on it. That should actually give 10 GB to each account. But our "ABC" advertizes Unlimited disk space on their webiste and gets 25 sign-ups of people, who think they have got a deal here with an unlimited disk spaceshared web hosting account. Now, our "ABC" hosts only those 25 accounts on that particular disk (they just consider it 10 GB per account) but tell the people that their accounts are unlimited.

Now since our "ABC" knows none of them can use even half (5 GB) of the 10 GB quota the company actually assumed per each account, it goes to repeat the same steps for another 25 customers.

But to make sure the users on that acount can't use more than a couple of GBs, they throw some Terms of Service like:

1. You shouldn't use the hosting account disk space as a backup or storage device, If you use it as a storage for your files, THEY WILL TERMINATE YOUR ACOUNT.
2. CPU resources limitations (You cannot use certain percentage of them)
3. Can't use IRC scripts and Bots
well the list goes on............

The same thing happens to Bandwidth. All the hosting business runs on the assumption that "An average site cannot use much bandwidth or diskspace", If it goes beyond half of what resources they actually alloted to that account, by the time the account goes beyond the CPU resources limit (I can't explain you eveything how much it goes how much it uses, EVERY HOST HAS ITS OWN CALCULATIONS) and gets terminated. That's the story of Web Hosting.

Now can you guys ("dangalaxy" and "chrishirst") tell me a bit about your hosting companies strategies or at least could give me the URLs of your sites? I would be glad to know about them.

Also, could you please tell me if you offer shared hosting to your customers and what packages you offer and what resources limitations you have for the shared hosting accounts? Surely you are not offering 100% CPU resources to each and every account holder on the server, Right?

The trick is to MANAGE the server correctly and NOT oversell it by ramming 1000 accounts on to a 2.6Ghz Celeron machine.
We really don't need to worry about resource limitations and looking over server stats for the past week or so, the daily average per CPU has never exceeded 10% TOTAL for ALL accounts. That's on an 8 x 2.5Ghz Xeon machine running Centos.

We don't do the supermarket style "pile it high, sell it cheap" kind of hosting. We consider our clients are worth far more than that.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

The trick is to MANAGE the server correctly and NOT oversell it by ramming 1000 accounts on to a 2.6Ghz Celeron machine.
We really don't need to worry about resource limitations and looking over server stats for the past week or so, the daily average per CPU has never exceeded 10% TOTAL for ALL accounts. That's on an 8 x 2.5Ghz Xeon machine running Centos.

We don't do the supermarket style "pile it high, sell it cheap" kind of hosting. We consider our clients are worth far more than that.

Chris, So you are a moderator here! You know what you know **** about hosting, your posts say it all. And you are also promoting bdlhosting?

I was a customer of that ****ty hosting, who didn't know how to manage servers and offer customer support. The new promotional offer on DP forum clearly says you are a overseller. Stop promoting ****ty services.

Originally Posted by chrislevinn

Chris, So you are a moderator here! You know what you know **** about hosting, your posts say it all. And you are also promoting bdlhosting?

I was a customer of that ****ty hosting, who didn't know how to manage servers and offer customer support. The new promotional offer on DP forum clearly says you are a overseller. Stop promoting ****ty services.

Obviously you are clearly unable to read.

The new promotional offer on DP forum clearly says you are a overseller.

AND BTW

I find your suggestion that I might have a DP account highly insulting

I hope by "bdlhosting" he didn't mean bldhosting (BLD Hosting) - which would have to be my company. Although I would absolutely love it, I haven't seen Chris promoting my services.

Chris, I believe his God given talent to be illiterate may have confused "chrishirst" with "andrei155".

So, now I'm going to assume that everything in that post is pointed towards me. Please let me know how we oversell - and what you think the term means.

Also, I believe that the following:

The trick is to MANAGE the server correctly and NOT oversell it by ramming 1000 accounts on to a 2.6Ghz Celeron machine.
We really don't need to worry about resource limitations and looking over server stats for the past week or so, the daily average per CPU has never exceeded 10% TOTAL for ALL accounts. That's on an 8 x 2.5Ghz Xeon machine running Centos.

We don't do the supermarket style "pile it high, sell it cheap" kind of hosting. We consider our clients are worth far more than that.

hit the bulls eye. That's exactly how a hosting company should be ran.

Steve, so you're saying that selling 50 accounts of "Unlimited Web Space" on a 250GB Hard Drive is going to work out? Unless you seriously start crippling what each customer can do with the host at hand - you can have 25 customers using up all of your web space - without even touching your "max CPU usage" policy.

Originally Posted by andrei155

Steve, so you're saying that selling 50 accounts of "Unlimited Web Space" on a 250GB Hard Drive is going to work out? Unless you seriously start crippling what each customer can do with the host at hand - you can have 25 customers using up all of your web space - without even touching your "max CPU usage" policy.

It was just an example I used to tell you people how the hosting business is run these days, besides I think I said 25 accounts on a 250 GB drive, with 10 GB per account. Again, that was just an example I used to tell you guys how they can back up their unlimited hosting offers.

Different hosting providers use different tactics to limit people to use the lowest amount of resources they can restrict them to. For example, Hostgator use inode limitations to restrict you to the lowest say (25 GB disk space at the most, well I haven't actually calculated that, will do later and tell you).

Also, please tell me how 25 customers use up all the 250 GB disk space under all those restrictions.

And can I tell you one thing? IN MY OPINION, Your hosting service (BLD Hosting) is the most unprofessional one I have seen on the net (I am comparing you with hostgator kind of one's here, not all those DP hosters who just sign up for a reseller account and sell it). You guys have got no good Terms of Service. Probably, you don't know how much resources those crowded IRC chat scripts and some of those pHP scripts use. Also, you haven't yet told me if you allow IRC scripts use.

By the way, could you please tell me why do most people use up all their CPU resources with just one (say, 5 GB) website? I am sorry I had to ask you, Since from your posts I am forced to think you don't know much about the hosting business (or I don't know much about it).

If it's not restricted in the ToS, we allow it. If your little script grows so large that it starts causing a problem, we'll let you know. Naturally, this can occur with ANY website. We'll give you the option of upgrading to one of our VPS's or Dedicated Servers.

Wordpress is a PHP script. So is an image gallery. What are you trying to say? A lot of users use PHP, and most of them are not BIG GIANT resource hogs. Again, the same thing applies. A shared environment can only handle so much. If your PHP applications are growing too large - we would ask you to upgrade in our chain of services. I don't see any problem.

www.bldhosting.net is coded in php. How does the fact that it's in PHP cause it to utilize so much resources...

By the way, could you please tell me why do most people use up all their CPU resources with just one (say, 5 GB) website? I am sorry I had to ask you, Since from your posts I am forced to think you don't know much about the hosting business (or I don't know much about it).

I don't get it. Most users never even cause a problem. We don't limit the CPU to a certain amount per customer because it isn't necessary. Since we don't offer "unlimited" plans - our plans are already limited by their space and transfer limit. There is already a cap, we don't need to introduce a CPU cap as well.

Yea, I thought of mentioning it but totally forgot about it. I was not talking about Wordpress or image galleries, I was talking about some special scripts like "Check your PR", "What's your IP", "Find Invisible Yahoo buddies". Do you allow them on your shared hosting accounts? Or ask them to host them on VPS or Dedi?

Suppose you have got a 5 GB site on your server in a shared hosting account and it's getting around 30 to 50k unique visitors a day. Then what happens and what would you do to resolve the problems that may arise from the site? Remember it is on a shared account on your server!

And you sure haven't actually experienced the wrath of IRC bots and high traffic from small sites, Have you? You would understand about this hosting business more once you experience those situations.

You're basically asking me what we would do when someone outgrows a shared hosting environment. Naturally, the answer to this would be to tell them to upgrade. What else could I do.

Suppose you have got a 5 GB site on your server in a shared hosting account and it's getting around 30 to 50k unique visitors a day. Then what happens and what would you do to resolve the problems that may arise from the site? Remember it is on a shared account on your server!

That customers Transfer Limit would run out very quickly. If the Transfer limit were the only problem - then we would just tell him to upgrade his plan, and stay under the same shared environment. However, if his account were interfering with other accounts on the server, we would tell him to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server.

Also, are you inquiring about actually hosting an IRC server under a shared environment? I left that out of the ToS because it causes confusion. We allow IRC applets - but it should be obvious to each client that running an IRC Server under a shared web host, simply can't be done. However, people do host IRC applets, which basically acts as an IRC program and connects to the IRC server from your own computer's connection (not the server's). These are absolutely fine - and I'm pretty sure this is what you're enquiring. Either that, or you don't know know how these Java applets work.

You're missing the point. We're not like Hostgator whom gives you everything unlimited, and HAS to limit CPU usage, or else their servers will be screwed.

High traffic is controlled by "Transfer limit". Something you haven't yet experienced under your "unlimited" plans. The only thing you have experienced is CPU restrictions - because that's the only way HostGator is capping you.

OK, It's better to use the word "Bandwidth" than "Transfer Limit" (I think you mean bandwidth when you say transfer limit) since it is a webmaster forum and a large percentage of webmasters are more comfortable with the word "Bandwidth".

Ok, Now let's discuss your Shared hosting "Business Plan". You offer 15 GB disk space and 30 GB monthly bandwidth at $16.50 a month with only 96% uptime guarantee. There Hostgator also offers an (now) unlimited plan at only $9.95 a month (if you pay monthly, but if you pay for a three year plan, it is $7.95) with 99.9 uptime quarantee for probably the same 15 GB and 30 GB monthly bandwidth plan (I am sure with that unlimited plan you can use at least that 15 GB and 30 GB bandwidth even with all those CPU and inode limitations). Now, How can you prove your hosting service is better than that of hostgator? How can you beat hostgator here?

Also, I will come up with the traffic statistics of a site which will prove that your "Corporate Plan" is no better than all those unlimited plans. It is because I am going to come up with the traffic statistics of a site which will be within your disk space and bandwidth limitations and your terms of service yet force you to ask the owner of the site to upgrade because of its CPU resources overuse.

OK, It's better to use the word "Bandwidth" than "Transfer Limit"

No it is NOT better.

bandwidth is the capacity of the connection and would determine the transfer RATE NOT the transfer limit.