Web Hosting Tutorial Series

Video #8: Ramifications of exceeding bandwidth and space quotas

When running an online business, it can become quite overwhelming and frantic at times. There are countless responsibilities and a plethora of aspects to question or worry over. One such concern for some is what happens if you exceed disk space or bandwidth quotas with a web hosting provider.

The first thing you need to realize is that every hosting provider varies from one another. This is one area you want to consider prior to agreeing to any long-term contract of some sort to ensure you never dig yourself into too deep of a hole.

There are some web hosting providers that will flat out suspend your account for going over the disk space limit or monthly bandwidth quota. Fortunately, there are other providers that will do nothing more than feed up a strict warning. Again, this is why it pays to read into the terms of agreement before signing on board.

While a suspended account or warning may not seem all that bad, there are some companies that will go as far as charging you an outlandishly expensive overage fee. This is when things can get ugly as no one wants to open next month’s bill with a fee that far surpasses that of the bill itself.

The easy solution to this is to make sure you never go over your disk space limit or monthly bandwidth quota. Another solution is to search for a company that offers a large quantity or even an unlimited web hosting plan. Just be cautious with unlimited plans as there are a number of scams spread throughout the internet.

While searching for a reliable web hosting company that offers unlimited plans, take the time to read over the terms of service agreement and any other legal agreements that may be thrown your way during sign-up. You can never be too careful when it comes to signing some kind of contract or agreement no matter what it is for.

With an unlimited plan, you will never have to worry about going over the limit. But if you do have a specific quota to stick by, make sure to contact your hosting provider about upgrading to a plan with higher limits if you find yourself pushing it.

A simple phone call is far better than receiving one late fee after another. Even worse is a late fee that exceeds that of the bill itself and a suspended account to go along with the damage. Do yourself a favor and consider all options before signing on with a web hosting provider.

Up Next:

Web hosting terms of service: Are you allowed to resell web hosting space?

Web Hosting Tutorial Series

Video #7: Read the contract when considering an unlimited hosting plan

You can never be too careful when shopping online. When searching for the perfect web hosting provider, take the time to look closely at every detail including the terms of service before agreeing to any account. Precaution will land you an honest and reliable company with reasonable limits.

The Internet is full of web hosting providers that have pieced together enticing offers that truly seem too good to be true. What you need to realize is these companies are masterminds for putting together plans that are irresistible on the surface, but end up being nothing more than a marketing ploy to trick customers.

By now you have certainly run into that web hosting provider that is feeding up to 500 gigabytes of space and 2000 gigabytes of bandwidth for just $3.95 a month. Or better yet, an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth for just $6.95 a month. Just remember, if it seems too good to be true it might be. Conversely, there are some hosts that are still able to provide a good product at a very affordable price while offering unlimited web hosting.

Providers are capable of offering these remarkable pitches because of overselling. Companies are well aware of the fact that most customers will use very little space and bandwidth. And for those that do, the company may or may not be able to afford the costs. If they can, you are fine and dandy. The problem is more often than not these companies cannot afford the high costs.

These are the companies you need to be wary of as they will often have a plethora of hidden terms of service agreement stating you can only use a certain percentage of your space or bandwidth. Their whole goal is to get you to buy into the plan without realizing your account could be suspended for abusing the limits.

Another thing to keep an eye on is poor customer service as this is a key attribute of over-sellers. If the company is a scam, sadly your web sites and downloads will face slow run-times and may even go down from time to time. This is when you know it is time to head elsewhere.

It is upsetting to see the industry turn to this as overselling has become a real problem over the past five or six years. There are still large hosting providers that have an honest reputable image they have built up over the years. But with these companies in constant competition with each other, the average space and bandwidth limits have skyrocketed thus making it incredibly difficult for the legitimate companies to compete.

As with a lot of things in the economy today, hard drive and internet transit prices have plummeted. However, this still compares little to the number of rate hosting offerings have gone up.

The bottom line is you can never be too careful when shopping online. When searching for the perfect web hosting provider, take the time to look closely at every detail including the terms of service before agreeing to any account. Precaution will land you an honest and reliable company with reasonable limits.

Up Next:

Learn about the consequences of exceeding web hosting disk space or bandwidth quotas.

Web Hosting Tutorial Series

Video #6: How much disk space and bandwidth do I need for my website?

This video tutorial can help you determine how much disk space and bandwidth you will need to host and support your website.

Perhaps you are already familiar with what the term disk space means. Similar to how it relates to the amount you can store on your personal computer, it is the amount of server disk space a hosting company allots to you to host your website. You can use this space to upload and store the content of your site – HTML pages, images and graphics, video and audio clips, databases, etc.

Now, what is bandwidth? Bandwidth is the rate and maximum amount of which this information can be transmitted. Whenever someone downloads a file or views a picture that you host on your account, it uses up bandwidth. A bandwidth quota is a limit placed on the amount of data that can be transferred each month to and from your websites.

Disk space and bandwidth costs your hosting provider money – as a result, they pass that cost on to you. For most providers, this usage is typically measured over a monthly time period. To determine the amount of bandwidth you use, you would multiply the amount of hard drive space your files take up by the amount of people that access them each month. This number equals your bandwidth usage.

So, how much disk space and bandwidth do you need to host your websites? It depends on a number of factors. Do you intend to host a lot of big downloads such as videos, audio clips or images? Do you anticipate a large amount of web traffic to your website? Such factors can quickly consume your space and bandwidth.

With so much variation among web hosting companies, it can sometimes be difficult to know how much bandwidth your website will require. However, when first experimenting in the world of web hosting, it’s probably safe to choose a plan that supports the average storage and transfer limits. Should you find you need more disk space or bandwidth down the line, you can always upgrade.That being said, it is important to keep an eye out on things and monitor your usage. Most providers will charge extra or suspend your account if you exceed your limits, even if they offer “unlimited” web hosting space and bandwidth.

Up Next:

Now that we’ve talked about how much space you may (or may not) need, let’s discuss the pros and cons of unlimited hosting plans.

Web Hosting Tutorial Series

Video #5: What are bits, bytes, megabytes and gigabytes?

This video tutorial will teach you about the units of measurements used in the world of computing.

The smallest unit of measurement on a computer is a binary digit; also know as the “bit”. There are almost always eight bits in one “byte”. A byte is the fundamental data unit for computers and is the unit most computers use to represent a character such as a letter, number, or symbol. It is also the basic unit of measurement for computer storage.

Because they are so similar, these two terms are commonly confused with each other. Not to mention the abbreviation for these two units of measurement – a lowercase b for “bit”, an uppercase B for “byte” – are also easy to confuse. To further complicate the matter, all of the compound forms of bits and bytes – kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB), etc. – can refer to two different values. Sometimes you’ll see kilobyte and it means 1000 bytes, while it can also mean 1024 bytes.

Why this is true is a much longer and more complicated conversation. In any case, a megabyte refers to roughly 1024 kilobytes, and a gigabyte refers to roughly 1024 megabytes. Gigabytes are currently the most common term being used to describe the size of a hard drive. At the next level is terabytes, and hard drives really haven’t gotten any further past that at this point in time.

One other important thing you should know is that whenever you hear about the speed of an Internet connection, it’s almost always going to be referred to in bits, whether that’s kilobits, megabits, or gigabits.

So just keep in mind that whenever “bits” is used, it should be abbreviated with a small b. For example: kilobits = Kb, megabits = Mb, and gigabits = Gb. The speed of a connection would be referred to “megabits per second” or Mbps. This means a 100 Mbps connection can transfer 100 megabits every second, which equates to 12.5 megabytes per second.

Up Next:

Now that we’ve talked about the units of measurement used to measure computer space, let’s discuss how much of it you need for your website.

Web Hosting Tutorial Series

Video #4: What is a control panel?

This video tutorial will teach you about the control panel, an essential part of any web hosting account.

In terms of web hosting, the control panel is a web-based interface provided by your hosting company that allows you to manage a variety of hosted services in one spot. A control panel allows you to configure email accounts, upload files to your website, access server logs, manage databases, analyze web traffic, add new functionality, and more. It is an essential part of any web hosting account. Without it – even just a basic control panel – you wouldn’t be able to get very much done.

You do not necessarily need to know computer programming to effectively navigate your way around a control panel. It is a browser-based, point-and-click interface. Three of the most widely used web hosting control panels in the industry today are cPanel, Parallels Plesk, and DirectAdmin. They are popular because they are easy-to-use, intuitive, and offer a wide variety of robust services.

Some control panels only run on Linux, some are meant for Windows, and some will work with both types of operating system. One important thing to keep in mind – just because your computer at home is running Windows doesn’t mean you need to find a
Windows hosting account. You only need a Windows account if your website requires features that only work on Windows. Otherwise, a Linux account will work just as well, and with very few differences.

What’s the difference? Most versions of Linux are free, whereas you can’t install Windows on a computer unless you pay for a license. Because of this, Windows hosting accounts generally cost a bit more. Many of the companies in our top 10 web hosting list provide linux-based control panels like cPanel, this helps make them very affordable.

Up Next:

The key units for measuring website space and usage: megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB).