Has IX Web Hosting gone mad? Have they exercised the nuclear option in the war for new customers? Whatever you want to call it, they’ve made their final raise in the server storage and network bandwidth game - both are now unlimited. That’s right, you can publish an infinitely large site to an infinitely large audience. So much better than the competition. Or so it would seem…
Of the 5 BOB web hosts covered today, 1&1’s Home plan has the leanest limits on storage and bandwidth at 120GB and 1,200GB (1.2TB), respectively. Hostgator and midPhase have nearly 3 times that and Hostmonster has 10 times the storage and bandwidth. But back to 1&1… Do you know what you can do with their measly 120/1,200GB limits?
The MSN home page serves as a good reference. It’s richer in content and style than most pages. The complete download was measured today at 338KB (including pictures, stylesheets, and scripts). Storage on 1&1’s Home plan is enough to have another 355,000 pages just like it. And the bandwidth limit would allow 3.5 million page views. Another useful reference might be a 5 minute video of the YouTube variety. Assuming your video file is around 10MB, you could store 12,000 of them and have 120,000 visitors view it. It’s probably a safe bet that 99.9% of all shared hosting customers won’t run sites like that.
The net effect is that the storage and bandwidth offered by all 5 BOB hosts are effectively unlimited. As a result, BOB doesn’t give these factors any weight in differentiating between them. Much more important considerations include performance, ease of use, and customer service. While the BOB hosts all score well on these measures, there are differences among them. The goal is to find the best fit between your needs and the relative strength of each host.
A footnote on storage and bandwidth limits… No matter how extreme your needs, you will almost certainly not reach the storage and bandwidth limits set by your host. Restrictions such as CPU and memory limits outlined in the terms of service (TOS) will make sure of that. Brent Oxley (CEO of Hostgator) lays out the brutal truth in Hostgator’s official blog. You may find his analysis shocking, but everybody plays by the same rules with the same understanding. Mr. Oxley is just honest enough (and apparently confident enough) to tell it like it is.