More, or at least, cheaper bandwidth, should be provided

[goodcow]

Hey,

I've been with HostGator for over a year now, and I really must say this host is near-rock solid in terms of uptime, support, and speed. However, given that my site (www.goodcowfilms.com) is a multimedia one, and I keep growing in terms of visitors, the bandwidth issue keeps rearing its head.

Now I won't pretend I actually know how much bandwidth costs HostGator, but it sure as hell ain't $2 a gig, and I'd probably guess under a dime, which is an insane markup. Every month, without fail, I have to shut down my "Sega Commercial Archive" section of the site with a password until the first, as to not go over my bandwidth limit, and it annoys me.

A friend of mine, who runs the website www.subwayspot.com, has a host which offers 10GB space, and 300GB bandwidth for $29.99 a month. Now since this post isn't meant to sway people away from HostGator, especially since I myself don't have personal experience with that other host, I won't post the link, but my friend's had his site up for months now with them, and said he's had zero problems, although he admits HostGator has faster download speeds.

I guess my overall suggestion is that the hosting plans should either just have more bandwidth allotted to them, or at the least, the $2 a gig bandwidth cost come down quite a bit.

[JayDog]

I don't see how your doing your math? I am thinking it is .50 per gig?

[Sev]

after you pass your bandwidth limit, it is $2 per gig

[JayDog]

yeah that could be a problem if your on the highest plan available and still going over, dedicated maybe? It depends how much over you are going, the cheapest dedicated I see is 174/month but that would give you 1200gb instead of 200 if your on the highest reseller, if your on the regular shared hosting plan you might wanna upgrade to a reseller plan.

[GatorBrent]

Bandwidth is very cheap. The problem is sites using a ton of bandwidth use a ton of cpu and ram. The ram and cpu is what is costly. To much being used means slow servers, and a lot of downtime. Anyone using over a 100 gigs bandwidth usually isn't suited for a shared hosting environment and should be on a dedicated server. That 29.95 for 300 gigs is a scam plan. Wait till your friend uses it =)

[goodcow]

Originally Posted by Gator_Support

The problem is sites using a ton of bandwidth use a ton of cpu and ram. The ram and cpu is what is costly. To much being used means slow servers, and a lot of downtime.

Now does this apply to sites getting massive amounts of hits, or just bandwidth transfer in general? Because one would think, or at least I do, that there's a huge difference between a site serving lots of five meg downloads (my site), versus a site doing the same traffic, but in the form of hundreds of image files per five megs. Or maybe I'm wrong. :?

[GatorBrent]

There's a difference between type of bandwidth being used. Plain downloads doesn't cause much of a problem compared to mysql usage.

Although when you make your hosting plans there's really no way to stop nor distinguish who's going to be a problem most of the time. So we are left making our plans to try and take the middle ground to all possible scenarios.

[BradCis]

GoodCow.. Suprisingly, most other hosting companys charge $5.00 a gig. I believe that there should be a deal; So if you buy 5 or more gig it should be a dollar a piece or something?