Webhosting companies are tricky ones; many will try to grab your attention by offering gigs and gigs of space and bandwidth. Some are tricked by this, while others are not. Don’t get me wrong, there are those of you who have great experiences with these companies, but remember, a server only has limited resources. Purchasing these plans are a great idea, in theory, but you also will have over-crowded servers and it will slow down your website drastically in most cases. If you need these plans for extra space for downloading, that’s fine, but if you’re running your blog on them, it isn’t recommended by me.

When you go to places with dirt cheap prices you’re getting dirt cheap service. Remembering that “you get what you pay for,” is a really good idea in these types of investments. Paying 5 dollars a month for 55 GB of space and 55 GB of bandwidth sounds like a really good idea, right? Most of these companies don’t offer the favored choices of cPanel, Fantastico, 24 hour service, unlimited ftp, pop3, mysql, and subdomains, as well as fast and reliable servers, no matter what they say.

In realistic views, 5 dollars a month should get you anywhere from 100mb to 300mb of space and at least 5-8 GB of bandwidth. The average site doesn’t need more than that. In all honesty, I think I use about 5mb of space as of 2-01-2007. However, bandwidth is the tricky part. 8 GB should be more than enough for the average site, unless you have tons of pictures, and even then there are free picture hosts. Every time your site is loaded, any picture on even the main page is included in the bandwidth. Downloading email from your pop3 is even included in bandwidth. Starting out small is a better idea to see exactly what your site will need. Most reputable companies will either pro-rate for an upgrade or offer you a deal on more bandwidth. It is better to go small then start out huge.

Now, these companies are fine if you like taking a chance, and it is a chance. You’re rolling the dice with signing up since who knows how many people will sign up after you. Some people do it because they want to host their message board there and some message boards are over 30GB of bandwidth a month. A friend of mine has a message board with 1400 members they use about 600MB of space and over 30GB of bandwidth a month. Now, if that server hosts 20 of those sized message boards, that’s 600 GB a month alone in bandwidth. They’ve sold the amount of bandwidth allotted for an average size server a month and they haven’t even scratched the surface of the cost of that server.

So please take heed when you see the really great deals. Sometimes, in the end, they aren’t so great.