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Frequently Ask Questions
Advertising gimmicks (things you ought to know about better hosting deals)!
- How do and can other hosting companies give a lot more bandwidth/data transfer than you?
- How do other hosting companies give a lot more disk space?
- Why do some hosting companies have a lot cheaper prices using the same (or at least claim) top-end technology as you?
How do and can other hosting companies give a lot more bandwidth/data transfer than you?
To understand this, you need to have general knowledge about Internet and
understand the difference between data transfer and bandwidth, which we
explain under Miscellaneous Technical Questions.
To begin with, not all bandwidth is the same. Just like there is tap water
and spring water, although both are water, they are not exactly the same.
When it comes to bandwidth quality, there are some providers which will
deliver your website's data over a much better path (shorter path with less delays) than
others, thus resulting in a lot faster browsing experience. Some providers will also
experience a lot less problems (downtime) than others.
Second, some hosting companies will oversubscribe (sell more capacity than
they have) their network, thus leaving no room for peak usage, resulting in
lag (delay) for your website's viewers during peak hours. This is usually
done without any disclosure to the clients. You won't find out until you
try their service during peak hours.
Third, many hosting companies will list a maximum data transfer per megabit
of bandwidth, which under normal circumstances is never reached. In other
words, a hosting company would list 320GB (gigabytes) of data transfer included
with a plan and then not tell you that they throttle the speed or bandwidth
of your account to 1mbps (megabits). The only way you would ever use up 320GB
of data transfer on such account is if you completely saturate this 1mbps pipe
every single second, for entire month. If you do this, your website would be
extremely slow and inaccessible to many, resulting in downtime, loss of revenue, and poor
website experience which most surfers wouldn't come back to. If your website uses anything more
than 100-150gb of actual data transfer, you will soon find out that your website
is extremely slow on such account and you will request an upgrade, which will
cost you extra $$$ (hidden fee?) In reality, you can only use about 100-150gb of data transfer
without much lag from a single 1mbps of bandwidth. This number scales to about 200-250gb with
a much larger bandwidth usage. Keep in mind, a single broadband surfer can usually download
at .5-10mbps This means, with just 2 broadband surfers downloading a file off your website,
an entire 1mbps of bandwidth is used. If you have 4 such users, they will only be able to
download at no more than 256kbps each. The speed is further reduced by greater number of
simultaneous visitors.
AcceleratedWeb: we use top-end Internet backbones and many private peerings (connections) on several
large Internet IP Exchanges, such as NYIIX and LINX. Also, our plans are generally not
throttled, thus we cannot list (and offer) crazy amounts of data transfer like some other
companies can, using small amounts of actual bandwidth allocated for listed data transfer.
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How do other hosting companies give a lot more disk space?
While the harddrives used to store data have increased in capacity and
decreased in price over the last several years, it is still not possible
to offer some of the deals some hosting companies do, when it comes to
disk space.
First, there are 2 type of harddrives used by most hosting companies.
1. SCSI - intended for server environment, these drives are expensive and are
not used by most of the hosting companies which offer large amounts of disk
space.
2. IDE/ATA - these drives are cheaper than SCSI but are not as reliable as
SCSI and are usually 2-3x slower than SCSI in server environments with many
random reads and writes
Second, there is what's called RAID technology. It allows a system to utilize
more than one harddrive together to provide faster access and fault tolerance.
A lot of hosting companies which offer a lot of disk space will not use RAID
due to additional hardware and maintenance cost involved. Should a single drive fail on a
system without RAID, the data will have to be restored from backup, if there is one. Restoring large amount of
data from backup is a very slow prcoess which could take many hours, especially restoring from backup tapes.
Third, a lot of companies will not perform backups for their clients without
extra cost or at all. In the event of a harddrive failure, and they do fail
frequently, especially under stress, if a hosting company
has no backup, you will have to reupload all your files and start from scratch.
If you are lucky to have a copy of your own backup, you will need to upload it
to the server. While download speeds have increased with arrival of broadband
technology (DSL and cable modems), the uploads are still slow. It can take anywhere
from 3-15 hours to upload 1gigabyte worth of data using a broadband Internet connection
and up to 72 hours using a dialup. Imagine how long you will be down if you have to
reupload 20gb of data.
AcceleratedWeb: We only use SCSI harddrives to store and serve user's website files.
We also use RAID technology to prevent downtime and data loss in the event of a harddrive
failure. Finally, we make daily backups which are kept for 7 days using fast data
backup servers. We can restore any missing files within minutes when needed. Make
sure our competition does the same!
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Why do some hosting companies have a lot cheaper prices using the same (or at least claim) top-end technology as you?
The answer to this question could be summarized in three words: support, reliability, volume.
In other words, not all companies provide the same kind of service and support even if they
use the same top-end hardware as we do. Cheaper web hosting companies do not hire knowledgeable personal whom
they need to pay
high salaries. A lot of cheaper hosts depend on volume rather smaller customer
base and better service. They rather have 1000 x $10 clients than 100 x $100 clients. However, it's
a lot easier to help 100 people than 1000 or 1000 people vs 10,000 Make sure our competition
provides topnotch support when you need it. This is not something which you can determine upfront.
You will have to use their service to find out. You might end up coming right back to us :-)
Simply put, you get what you pay in web hosting.
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