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Radified Guide to Virtual Private Servers | Upgrade to VPS from Shared Web Hosting: Page 9

VPS Guide

Contents

VPS-10

Radified

Forums

Blog

Radified Guide to Virtual Private Servers | Upgrade to VPS from Shared Web Hosting: Page 9

How Shared Web Hosting Providers Offer Unrealistic Specs

"Shared" hosting packages typically cost ~$100/year, usually discounted slightly if you pre-pay annually. Most come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

DreamHost is the king of Shared hosting. I hosted with Lunarpages for 2 years. They were good (.. until they got nasty).

Countless more options exist. This is where most of us begin, and all that most of us will ever need.

Shared hosting packages offer maximum bang for your web hosting buck. Don't be misled however, by outrageous offerings of disk storage and bandwidth.

For example, Lunarpages touts a disk storage allowance of 1,500 GB (1.5 Terabytes) and 15,000 GB monthly bandwidth (15 Terabytes).

And these mind-blowing numbers are likely to grow by the time you read this. Consider how much it would cost to simply store this much data, and you can see why offering this much space is unrealistic.

Also note that Lunarpages charges an extra $20/month for 10 gigs of "Additional Backup Space" when used in conjunction with their VPS hosting accounts. Seems inconsistent, no? Why offer 1,500 gigs for $5/month on one plan (which includes hosting), then charge $20/month for only 10 gigs (as pure storage)?

Dreamhost has a policy where they automatically increase your allowances every week (by 2-GB storage and 40-GB bandwidth). Now, it should be obvious that anyone using more than 5-terabytes of monthly-bandwidth has long outgrown Shared web hosting. So it's silly to even offer such outlandish specs. (Or is it dishonest?)

Comparing Shared Web Hosting Specs with VPS Servers

Let's compare the (unrealistic) disk space and bandwidth offered by Shared webhosting providers with the (more realistic) specs offered by my (far more expen$ive) VPS plan, which offers » 40 GB (storage) and 600 GB (monthly bandwidth) .. which is ~30-times less than the plan offered by Lunarpages.

As a further point of comparison, Radified (which hosts thousands of web pages) uses ~50 GB monthly bandwidth and 6-GB of disk storage (5 of which is due to the base installation of WHM/cPanel and other web-related software, such as MySQL, PHP and Perl).

So you can see we're using ~10% of our allowable bandwidth limits and 15% of our disk-storage .. which would equal less than 1% of the "limits" stated by the Shared webhosting providers referenced above.

Also note that Radified nearly exceeded the RAM limits associated with WiredTree's cheapest VPS plan (based on 384-MB). This should give you a rough idea how storage, bandwidth, CPU & memory-usage compare in the real world .. regarding both Shared and VPS webhosting accounts.

Also note that Radified is (for the most part) a static site. We use no PHP. (Not yet, anyway, but learning PHP is on my list.) The only major dynamic software we use is the forum (which employs a Perl-based script). Back when we were having trouble with CPU usage at our old host, this script (YaBB.pl) was the culprit Lunarpages cited as the source of our excessive usage.

Also note, WiredTree lets you upgrade your memory allowance at a rate of $7.50/month per 64-MB. If the hardware node (physical server) upon which your site resides has no memory available (and you need more), Zac says they will simply move you to a different server which does (have more memory available).

This might be a good place to note that most hosting gurus agree » the CPU/memory module that WHM uses to monitor your resource usage (for your account) .. is "a piece of krap". So when your Shared web host starts throwing "statistics" at you (retrieved from WHM/cPanel), realize it's merely a sign to start looking elsewhere for your hosting needs. But the numbers themselves do not necessarily reflect actual usage.

Getting back to those outrageous offerings, why do so many Shared hosting providers (claim to) offer such unrealistic disk storage & bandwidth specs? In a word » Marketing.

They realize that prospective clients (like you & me) are likely to compare the features offered by Provider 'A' with those offered by Provider 'B.' When we see 'B' offers more, we'll likely decide to host with them. (Like I did.) But Hosting providers also understand that most of us will never come close to reaching those limits.

Best VPS Web Hosting Provider

Notice, on the page touting Lunarpages' long list of features, you see nothing there mentioned about either CPU or memory usage restrictions. (Why not?) Does this mean they think a site can actually use 15,000 gigs (15 Terabytes) of monthly bandwidth and not exceed 1% CPU usage?

If you actually tried to *use* all 1,500 GB (disk space) and/or 15,000 GB (bandwidth), they'd quickly send you a nastigram, notifying you that your account had been suspended (for some other reason, or course).

Simple economics dictate that no Web Host can actually provide its customers with such extravagant storage & bandwidth specs and expect to stay in business. (Ain't gonna happen.)

Does this make these providers dishonest? Perhaps. Understand they're merely seeking an edge in a highly competitive industry. The reason they feel compelled to tout such large (tho unrealistic) numbers is two-fold »

  1. The competition does it.
  2. It works. (Hey, it's the reason I decided to host with Lunarpages over Dreamhost and the others.)

On the next page, we'll compare Dedicated servers with Virtual Private Servers, and analyze how Web Hosts can afford to purchase the very best equipment for your new VPS.

NEXT » Comparing Dedicated Web Hosting with Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

For more along these lines, here's a Google search preconfigured for the query » shared web hosting providers

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