Oct 20 2008
The Truth About Shared Hosting
Has any hosting provider approached you to offer 100GB hosting space, 1000GB of data transfer and so on, at dirt cheap rate of only RM188 per year?
Sorry but you should not be too excited about the numbers above - the large space and lots of bandwidth as promised. You will never use that much.
Firstly, an average web site will not use so much space. All but one of my own sites are below 50MB each. Check this out.
Secondly, you will not use so much bandwidth. Almost all my customers’ web sites use less than 2GB per month!
Thirdly, I’m wrong. Your web site is another The Star or MalaysiaKini. You indeed need lots of space and bandwidth. But in such case, your site will have consumed too much so-called “server CPU resources” that we will have to ban your site because it has used too much space and bandwidth compared to others! Read the fine print, you have violated the hosting policy!
Fairness is a virtue in shared hosting. No site is allowed to take up too much resources at the expense of other sites shared on the same server. Is your web site having more than 1000 visitors per day? Chances are your traffic is too high compared to others that your site will be banned for monopolizing the server resources!
So even if you have access to 100GB server space and 1000GB bandwidth, you will not get to use it. Better go for dedicated hosting - one whole server just for you.
This is an “overselling” kind of business model. Let’s say a server has 100GB hard disk space. One can dare to offer 10GB hosting to 100 customers! Does the extra space of 900GB come from the air? Because, statistically speaking, we know an average customer will not use even 1GB!
If that’s the case, I can also claim to offer you 1000GB space and 5000GB bandwidth per month for the price of 1GB only. Overselling is over promising! But this seems to be how some of us compete in hosting industry 
So by claiming to offer unbelievable tons of space and bandwidth to customers, are we actually deceiving people?
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Hi Ricky. It is a number game in this competitive industry. Bravo for writing this article. *salute*
Not many people know about this except those in the web hosting industry.
The CPU usage is marked by the Compute Cycle. Ricky, this is a very helpful post for people who are new to web hosting.
Thanks Pin. Can you share what is Computer Cycle? I remember you mentioned something about it in your blog.
When someone viewing your website, they are actually ‘downloading’ information from your server to their computer, including HTML file, pictures, video, etc. The ‘Monthly Bandwidth’ introduced by web hosting service providers put a limit to the total amount of such download in a monthly basis. So, no one can abuse it.
See, when a visitor makes a request of a page of a size of 100KB, it is very different from someone who makes 10 requests of a page with size of 10KB. Through total bytes transferred are the same, but the second request use more server resources such as Ram & Processing power than the first request.
Therefore, they introduce Compute Cycle, which counts the amount of processing power used and put a limit on it, usually in monthly basis too.
A casual search on Google yields these pages on the truth about shared hosting. Kudos to the authors!
http://www.dustinsdesign.com/the-truth-about-hosting/ - This opens my eyes whether it’s right or wrong to oversell.
http://www.clubwebhost.com/shared.html - A hosting provider honest enough to tell you the truth.