In the past few months, there has been a major package war in the hosting industry. A win-win for the customer? Not necessarily.

If you've been researching a new home for your website, you're probably feeling like most hosts are offering the same thing. But what exactly are they/we offering? What is the pricing structure? I feel pricing and packages have gotten out of control, beyond what is actually deliverable, and our options are either to follow suit or educate consumers, and we definitely like smart customers.

So we've created this basic guide to help you compare package prices fairly. These probably apply to any host you're considering - including GetWebSpace.com. My goal is not to criticize some marketing techniques; only to inform. Always read the Terms of Service before signing up for any hosting package. It might take a few minutes, but the longer it is, the more they're hiding in there, and it might severely restrict or even contradict what they advertise.

Read all about Disk Space, Bandwidth, and Package Pricing - what they really are, what you need to know, and potential tricks to watch out for.

Disk Space

What is it?
Disk Space of course refers to the amount of storage space you are allowed to use on the web server. Your website, email storage, and sometimes databases all consume a portion of your allocated space. Previously advertised in MB (Megabytes or million bytes) it is now often offered in GB (Gigabytes, equal to 1,000 megabytes). So 5 GB is equal to 5,000 MB

What do I need to know?
The average website uses far less than what many hosts are offering right now - even 100 MB is enough for most large websites that don't employ a lot of music and video content. Even with broadband, that allows for enough content for a typical visitor to spend hours or even days on your site without repeating content. All hosting companies know this, and they know that if they promise you 5 GB of space, less than 5% of people will use even 1/10th of it. Don't fall for it - figure out how much you need, double it perhaps, and choose accordingly. If you're not sure and don't have an existing website to compare to, ask your host to help you choose, but 250 MB will be plenty for 95% of new websites for a long time, and you can always upgrade later.

What to watch out for?
Disk space is advertised as a commodity (the same quality everywhere), but it really varies. Is it on cheap IDE drives or mirrored redundant drives? How often are sites backed up, and are backups stored off-site, or just in a different place on the same drive? Are there restrictions on the type of files? Unfortunately if these are disclosed at all, it is deep inside the Terms of Service. Look for the word "allowed" or "space" and make sure they don't restrict you to Graphics and Text or place percentage limitations on Sound and Video files. Choosing a host only because they offer a huge amount of space may not be wise - the company is likely to be severely overselling their servers, meaning your site will share a server with hundreds of customers, making your site very slow.

By the way, unlimited or "unmetered" disk space is nothing less than a scam - hard drives cost money, and only hold a certain amount of space, so as soon as the host is losing money on your site, they have no reason to keep you, and you will be offline in minutes, guaranteed. No honest host advertises unlimited resources.

Bandwidth, or Transfer

What is it?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of network usage you are allowed per month. If you have a 10 MB file, then each person who views or downloads that file consumes 10 MB of bandwidth. If the file is viewed 100 times, that's 1,000 MB of bandwidth. Some sites are advertising in TB (Terrabytes, or 1,000 GB). It is our opinion that it is physically impossible to achieve anywhere near that amount of traffic on a shared hosting package.

What do I need to know?
Like disk space, bandwidth needs are greatly inflated. Sites getting a few hundred visitors per month will never use even 1 GB of bandwidth in a month. If your site is popular and media-rich you may need 10-20 GB or more. Sites using more than 100 GB of bandwidth will almost certainly require a dedicated server, even if the hosting package offers 500 GB or more.

What to watch out for?
With disk space, it's technically possible to use all 5 GB of space for example. Bandwidth, however, is abstract, and has two limiting factors - network speed, and CPU usage. With shared hosting, you may be sharing a server with as many as a couple hundred customers. A server has physical limitations to how fast it can "talk" to the network, and how fast it can access or generate the web pages. It is literally not possible to use the bandwidth that some hosts are offering, and many include disclaimers in their Terms of Service that say it represents network speed and "does not guarantee available bandwidth". Most hosts will shut down sites for excessive CPU usage before they use their available bandwidth.

Unlimited bandwidth is also a scam, period. (If not - why doesn't Google.com sign up for a $10 "unlimited" plan?) Network equipment, data lines, and fiber optic cables are expensive and have a limited capacity... hosts that offer these packages are betting that you don't know any better, and often put limits as low as 2 GB right in their Terms of Service - usually phrases like "Bandwidth is unmetered for the first 2 GB and will be billed at $5 per GB after that" ...what does that even mean?

Advertised Prices - Monthly? Paid Yearly? Two Years?!

What is it?
Most hosts offer discounts for paying quarterly, annually, or more in advance. You must pay the total amount up front in exchange for the discount. In many cases, refunds are not allowed after a trial period, often 14 or 30 days.

What do I need to know?
Always find out how much you have to pay at a time to get the advertised price. Many large hosts are advertising their 2-year pre-paid rate as a monthly rate. One popular host that advertises just $4.95/month throughout their site requires a 2-year payment to get that price - that's $118.80 up front, you haven't even tried their service, and the offer is for new customers only - you can't switch later. At the bottom of the product details page, they explain that the price is $4.95 for 2-year payments, $5.95 if paid annually, $6.95 if paid semiannually, $7.95 if paid quarterly, and $8.95 if you pay each month, plus a $10 setup fee for monthly payments. That makes it almost $9.95/month for the first year.

What to watch out for?
Just be aware of what the terms are. Personally, this scares us. First of all, what does it mean if a company is willing to give you as much as 50% off for paying a year or two in advance? Assuming the cost of providing the service is constant, they are either taking a major profit hit in exchange for locking you into their service... or the company is thinking short-term and may implode before the year is up (it happens a lot actually)... or they're gambling that most people will walk away from their service and write off the money as a loss. All three of those options are harsh - obviously there are exceptions and great hosts offering these discounts (if only to be able to compete!) But be very careful and always compare the right prices. In the example above, even though the advertised price is several dollars cheaper than our prices, unless you're going to commit to two years up front, we're almost two dollars less per month. Surprise!

You get what you pay for... really!

What is it?
Even though many hosts are just trying to compete, all three of these are based around one thing - being somewhat misleading to the customer in order to get the sale, and then getting as much of your money as they can up-front.

What do I REALLY need to know?
Disk space and bandwidth aren't the most expensive part of your package anymore. It's company overhead - the customer support staff that answer your questions. The phone lines and support software. The technicians that keep the servers online. The less a company charges, the less money they have left to provide the best quality service. It's not a mystery - If a server technician makes $20/hour, and you're only paying $4.95/month, how many technicians can they afford to hire? This directly affects customer support response times and emergency response times. Recently, a host had problems with several of their servers and some customers were down for 18 hours because there weren't enough technicians to deal with the problem effectively. We've read about customers being down for days (and staying because they thought it was a good host or paid too much up front! WHY?)

Isn't it worth an extra buck or two a month to not deal with all that?
We think so, and that's the level of service we focus on providing. We could compete on price, but... no. I don't ever want to explain to a customer that their site will be down for eight hours while we wait for a new hard drive, and I don't want to ask any of my staff to do it either.

So I should choose GetWebSpace.com then?

Oh, absolutely!

Seriously though - we don't oversell our products by offering more than we can provide. Our servers have redundant drives, rare in shared hosting, so a hard drive failure during the busiest part of your website's day won't even cause a minute of downtime. Our servers' network speed isn't throttled, so you get the full available network speed, making your site load quickly every time. And most importantly, we have a team of over a dozen support technicians monitoring the servers several times a minute, and working the help desk around the clock, with response times usually under 15 minutes, whether you try at 3 PM or 3 AM... no matter what your time zone.

This is a lot of reading, but I hope you've learned some basics to help you make a better decision. As always, don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. We look forward to the chance to serve you!

Thank you,
Adam Ellsworth
Senior Administrator
adam@getwebspace.com