Cheap Hosting and Overbooked Airplanes

Huh? What the heck am I talking about today? What does hosting and airplanes have to do with one another? Over the weekend, I was getting ready to upload my first release of NetWebVideo (which, the beta release is currently up!). But I had a major concern about the disk space and bandwidth of my website. Because NetWebVideo contains a lot of large videos and downloads, I needed a server that had a lot of bandwidth allocation and space. Plus, because the service will ultimately have a paid aspect to it, having down time would be unacceptable. So I started spending a little bit more time researching hosting.

Currently, I run TheWebReviewer with a service called TVCNet. I originally was using GoDaddy, but when my Hacker-Safe seal started to disappear, my Hacker-Safe investment was not well spent. So, instead of $3.99 per month, I pay about $18 per month. TVCNet has provided a LOT of support in the move and continues to provide me on a very stable platform. That is all good, but the major problem with TVCNet is that they do not have very high space and BW allocations that I need. So this was not a solution to my problem.

So what about these other big companies like GoDaddy and ixWebhosting (and dozens of others). They offer TONS of bandwidth and TONS of space. ixWebhosting is even a Hacker-Safe member (which gives me a warm fuzzy!). But how do they offer these huge numbers at such a low cost? This troubled me a lot. Is basing my new *business* on a $4/month hosting a good idea? Why not? They say they offer it. But what is the truth?

Remember we were talking about overbooked airplanes? Well, the hosting world is now very similar to overbooked airplanes, but instead of planes, we are talking about overbooked servers. Unless you have your own dedicated server, you are sharing space with other websites. These virtual servers make hosting affordable. So lets say that a single server can handle 10 users and each user is allocated 1GB of bandwidth. What most ecomony hosting companies do it sell you *3GB* of bandwidth. That is three times its capacity. Why do they do it? Because the statistics show that a majority of users only use a fraction of their allocated bandwidth. They are banking on this statistics. But what happens if your server just happens to have a lot of heavy users? Just like an overbooked airplane, problems occur.

Of course, most of these hosting companies will fix these issues, but they are not immediately resolved. Slow downloads and down time can occur. Does this happen often? Probably not, but it does happen. Do I want to my new business in the position of “stand-by”? Personally, no.

I finally chose to use Pair hosting. I won’t get the one-on-one support I get from TVCNet, but they do offer 24 hour assistance. For $18 per month, I now get a fraction of what GoDaddy and ixWebhosting has to offer, but I do get the assurance that my allocation on the server is mine and only mine. This server is not overbooked.

I still use GoDaddy and ixWebhosting for a lot of my trials and smaller websites, but when it comes to a bigger and more lucrative ventures, paying extra for that first class ticket is definitely worth the price and the security.

- Matthew Bredel