SubscribeYou know the time-honored argument that broadband traffic isn’t free, some broadband users out there are just using too much, costing the company its profits, clogging up the lines, and ruining it for everyone else. That’s the company line we hear again and again from broadband providers who want to engage in Internet Overcharging schemes. “It’s inevitable,” they say. “Unlimited cannot go on like this,” they write. “People should pay their fair share,” they demand.
We say nonsense — broadband providers are making billions in profits under existing plans that don’t annoy customers with gas gauges and overlimit penalties that typically range $1 per gigabyte, representing a several thousand percent markup.
While broadband providers continue their quest for a payday at your expense, web hosting companies, whose broadband traffic crosses the same lines your ISP uses, are doing the exact opposite.
The self-described “world’s largest web hosting company” 1 and 1 today announced it is abolishing its web traffic allowances across all of its web hosting plans. Formerly, customers exceeding their traffic allowance were billed $0.49 per gigabyte. Not anymore.
1 and 1’s action today calls out the illegitimacy of Internet Overcharging, and tells their customers they never have to worry about overcharges again.
I’ve noticed an increase of bandwidth limits that web hosting companies provide. For example, the free hosting company I’m with right now has an ad-free and an ad-enhanced package. The Ad-free package gives 500MB disk, 10GB bandwidth, and full cPanel/FTP/mail/etc access just like professional hosts. My account had it’s resources doubled since I was helpful enough at the forums, so now I have 1GB of space, and 20GB of bandwidth to spare, as well as my limits on MySQL/Mail accounts/etc was doubled as well. I can double it once more. For the ad-enhanced packages, they give disk space up to… Read more »
Not sure this is a good comparison of issues.
As a we hoster, I know that 1&1 is (what is called int he hosting world) “over selling”. What this means, is they give you all that bandwidth, but because your server is so overloaded and mis-managed, that the bandwidth you want to use is not available.
Just like with all industries, please be sure to do your homework before buying so you dont get ripped off
Just my 2 cents
I mostly use 1and1 for domain name registration, but we do use them for backup and to serve video and audio and it works generally well. I agree that they do not have the most robust throughput, and my personal blog on 1and1 crawls when I do updates there. Usually, the squeaky wheel gets you moved to a less busy server, though. They are better than the usual oversellers that you see on those “top 10 web hosting company” sites, that pay enormous referral bonuses and then cut your site off if it generates too much traffic. The trend is… Read more »
Well, glad you 1&1 experience was better than mine.
I agree, that most hosting providers are over selling and hurting the customers in the end.
In my personal experience, most customers use little to no resources, but there is always the 1 bad apple that can hose up the server pretty hard if you are not watching out.
I did notice that your blog and this site were hosted on separate companies (SliceHost’s VPS for this site, 1and1 on a shared server I’m assuming for your blog/video). The only thing I’ve really noticed with the over sellers is that their servers can feel a little sluggish at times, and they tend to have DNS issues often (I’ve noticed this with LunerPages as of late). Now with 1and1, for the most part I get decent throughput to Phil’s server. I do notice though that every 10 seconds I get tons of jitter which make throughput tank. I see this… Read more »
WordPress crawls on 1and1 which is why I am probably not going to keep my personal blog over there much longer. Video clips here should transmit in their entirety as fast as the connection will allow (and what kind of congestion 1and1 has). I am monitoring that fairly closely looking for occasions when the video player ends up pausing because the content cannot be streamed out fast enough. Sometimes just pausing a video for a few seconds to let more of it load will do the trick for the entire clip, and I’ve done that often on YouTube. If people… Read more »