You need to be wary of shared hosting providers offering you "unlimited" ANYTHING. Space/bandwidth whatever. This is SHARED hosting we're talking about. You are sharing a server with who knows how many other sites, if your hosting is really cheap, its probably far more sites than should be on a single server. How else could they undercut their competition.

If they offer you unlimited space, but you put too many files on their server, they'll most likely terminate your account. Its like being asked not to come back after you've eaten ten plates at an all-you-can-eat buffet. If they can't make money off you they don't want you in their diner.

When it comes to unlimited bandwidth you have to remember that you aren't really getting unlimited bandwidth. Hosting providers have to set a limit to the number of concurrent connections each site is allowed to have. Lets say your hosting provider allows you 50 concurrent connections. This means that only 50 people can be downloading files from their server at once.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying, you can have MILLIONS of people on your site at the same time, as long as they don't all visit at the exact same moment. Once your site is loaded, the user looking at your site is no longer a concurrent connection. However if you have anything streaming in your site: files to download or video/audio, then as long as data is being served that counts as a concurrent connection.

The hosting plan that I have is through GoDaddy, which offers "unlimited" bandwidth with it's $14.95 per month unlimited hosting plan. However the number of concurrent connections they allow is only 200. Their cheaper plan allows only 50! They do not advertise this in any of their promotional materials, but this is the back-door way of controlling how much bandwidth you get without actually setting a limit. You really can have as much bandwidth as you can possibly use with only 200 visitors connected to your site at once.

I have a video on the main page of my site that automatically plays when you visit the site, for this reason every single user I have is a concurrent connection. So I literally can have only 200 users on my site at once. If my site starts getting over 200 hits at once I'll have to turn off "auto play" on that video. But I still have a half dozen vids on my site, so I am limited to how many users can be watching videos at the same time. If 200 people were watching a vid at the same time, my consurrent connections would run out and every other person who tried to visit my site would get a connection error.

However unless you have a lot of streaming content, audio, video, or large files to download, 50-100 concurrent connections should be fine for the average user.

One more thing to consider with shared hosting is that, in most cases, you are also sharing an IP address with dozens/hundreds of other sites. If any of those sites is blacklisted for spamming/phishing etc etc their IP could be penalized... but THEIR IP is YOUR IP! For that reason, some users choose to pay extra for a unique IP address. GoDaddy charges an additional $2.99 per month for unique IPs.

Chad Spillars
http://www.disneysubmarines.com/index.html

Chad,

This is extremely helpful information. Thanks!

BTW, your site is a trip! (Can I ask if CC was used to construct it?)

DB

My site WAS designed with CC. EVERYTHING you see was made with CC software with the exception of the embed code for the videos which is through longtailvideo.com.

Chad Spillars

Always good & positive info from you, Chad. I hope you stick around in these forums for a long time. I bookmarked your site for the submarine ride as we went to Disneyland almost yearly growing up and never checked back up on the ride once it was being changed. Good stuff & impressive example of CC software put to use.

Let me just make an addendum to what I said a few posts up. I just found out that Hostgator.com allows 400 concurrent connections on ALL their hosting plans, even the $4.95/month plan. And I have heard really good things about them from other users. I am actually thinking of switching to them because I have so many vids on my site. It would be VERY hard to me to outgrow that configuration. They are having a 20% off sale right now, and I promise I don't work for them :-)

Chad Spillars

Most of the big guys here, 1and1, hostgator, godaddy, etc are pretty good.You want to AVOID resellers, these are people with these companies that "sell" a portion of their account to you. Some resellers provide their own support, some get support included from the parent company. HOWEVER, these resellers pay monthly for this main account, if they "miss" a payment, or just disapear... so does YOUR website.
I own a hosting company nexxterra.com and I watch these larger companies like a hawk.
I have been in business since 2003 and back then any company that said "unlimited" they were something to be avoided!
A SCSI hard drive cost $400 for 140 gigs and bandwidth was expensive.
Now with SATA drives that cost $100 for 2 TB and bandwidth (internet connections) that are not limited by the providers (phone Companies, etc) The unlimited is now being picked up by a lot of these big guys.
If you have a "legitimate" web site and not one of these "get rich quick" type of sites (wares, mp3, file sharing) any of the above companies would be great!
If you want a great place to host your business web site, Give my company a try!

I too use 1 & 1 to host my sites but my domains are registered with Name.com. At one time I had an issue with uploading an ASP.NET site to 1 & 1 and just could not get support to understand my question. If I choose to move my site host I simply have to re-point my domains to another host. I try not to put all of my eggs in one basket. Now if I could just find one...

I host with 1and1 shared Linux servers, as well as many of my friends and clients. I have never had an issue with them. Service and price are great. Yes, service calls are usually with a person who has an accent but that has never been an issue. And I have never been waiting for more than a few minutes to speak to someone. Uptime and speed are not a problem either. Their control panel is intuitive, as well. I once accidentally deleted some important files I did not have backups for and they had them restored from a backup within a half hour. Impressive. They have assisted me inrestoring a mysly database too. I highly recommnd 1and1. You will be hard pressed to beat the price and features included in their plans.

I have read some bad reviews about 1and1 hosting but I think these are on dedicated servers and dealing with idiots who don't know what they are doing. I have also read bad reviews about their billing practices. All I can say is that I have had several accounts opened and closed with them and never experienced being charged innapropriately.

Chad mentions an interesting point of concurrent connections that I have not really thought about. I don't think most of us will be having that many visiors at once to really be worried about that but an interesting point, none the less.

I too would recommend 1 and 1. But not GoDaddy.

well, I might as well put in a plug for my hosting
I have a plan that is $7.95 a month that will do just about anything you would need. And you have access to set your own php.ini file for php4 and php5 and you can use both. The servers are in Baltimore MD
http://www.onelakesideweb.com

If by chance you need a high performance hybrid server, I have one in Black Hills NC.