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There’s a dirty little secret out there amongst hosting companies, and that is what they call “Unlimited” hosting, usually something like “Unlimited Diskspace/Storage” and “Unlimited Transfer/Bandwidth.” Obviously, if this were completely true, companies like Ebay, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Craigslist would simply sign up for them too. The reality is, you will have to upgrade if you have a moderately busy site, but it’s too complicated to explain to the average customer.

With web hosting companies offering unlimited bandwidth, storage, and support, how can the leading brands on the web be offering their hosting services for only a few dollars a month? And if they really can offer these services for so little, how come purchasing VPS hosting and dedicated hosting can cost so much more – to the tune of hundreds of dollars per month? With such large price variations, the average web host consumer needs a little help in figuring out the best way to determine their needs. Well, fear not – this article is going to help you decide whether “unlimited” hosting services or a dedicated/VPS server is best for your needs.

FACT #1: Hosting Companies are Overselling & You Probably Won’t Use That Much in the Beginning

The reason most modern shared hosts can offer “unlimited” bandwidth and storage is that Hosting Companies are mostly banking on the fact that you really won’t use that much, especially considering the ever decreasing costs of storage and transfer. They are overselling their hosting services. There are a few companies that do not oversell, and in return, they tend to be much more reliable in our experience.

Most small, new websites will use a tiny fraction of the diskspace offered. In most cases, less than 1/1000th of the limits they are offering you. This is even true for Hosting Companies that offer a couple gigabytes of storage space for your site. We have rarely seen a site that has exceeded limits here. Traffic on most small, new sites alse tends to be low relatively speaking. Of course, there are lots of exceptions to this rule. Hosting Companies are playing a game of averages here, knowing that on average, most people will use very little resources.

Like your home computer, hard drives are used at Hosting Companies to store your website. Hard drives are very large now, and probably much like your home computer, you really won’t use that much space for your website (unless you are a power user). Websites haven’t gotten that much bigger over the years, but hard drives have, driving down the cost for Hosting Companies. The same is true for bandwidth (a.k.a. transfer). It has gotten cheaper, and most websites really don’t need that much. It’s cheap for the hosting company.

Actually, as of late, many people have started using their hosting company to backup their home computers, which has put a strain on these companies that oversell, forcing them to spell out various rules against using them as a backup service.

So, what is the bottleneck you ask, and what are they actually selling?

FACT #2: You WILL Run Out of CPU and Memory Long Before You Run Out of Diskspace or Transfer

This is a bit technical, but don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the details. Realize that your website is hosted on a server, which is just very much like your home computer (but usually in a different shape, and more specialized for hosting purposes). There are usually dozens, or hundreds of websites hosting on each server.

A big host like Bluehost defines their server limits as a number of CPU seconds used which are equated to real-time seconds; if a website has 200 processes in a minute and each uses .4 CPU seconds, your website would be suspended. If those processes took two minutes, then the website would remain running. Most web hosts try to avoid explaining the technical side of this, and instead try to sell to customers based on how many domains can be hosted with one account, and how much space a website is allocated.

In short, if your site starts to get a lot of traffic at once and slow down your website, it’s going to hog up that servers processor (CPU); which in turn will make everyone elses website on that server go slow too.

The same is true for memory (RAM) usage. Some hosts even give you a short history of your site’s CPU and memory usage.

FACT #3: Most Hosts Have More Than Enough, so Shop on Customer Service Quality, Uptime, and Other Features

With the thousands of sites we have worked with over the years, almost never has a site exceeded the bandwidth, or storage limits of their hosting account. In fact, probably the biggest cost in hosting is becoming the cost of support. One server can support hundreds of websites, but it might take thousands of man hours per year to support those customers.

With this in mind, the factors that really make a difference to your website will be how the host can support your customer service needs, the quality of that customer service, and the actual uptime the host experiences. How quickly does your host respond to your needs? How often are its servers (and therefore your websites) off-line? Are they pleasant about solving your problems effectively?

As Christopher Heng puts it in his fine printe on Web Hosting article, “you will never be able to use up all of the bandwidth you are provided. Long before you even reach the amount you are supposedly allowed to use, your site will have hit its resource limits.”

Dynamic, database-driven sites, such as ones that have PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, and other coding languages, will definitely take up more server resources (e.g. CPU and memory) than a static site–one written in HTML. This is even more so when your site has poorly coded scripts, and fails to use caching, which can be accomplished numerous ways.

The unlimited bandwidth controversy

For some time now a lot of hosting companies are supposedly providing “unlimited bandwidth” for their web hosting packages.

It’s absolutely true, you can have unlimited bandwidth. However, you will need an unlimited amount of money by your side! Jokes apart, if you ever come across such a host it would be best to turn around and run back the way you came from.

Just think, if you can get unlimited bandwidth for $25-30 a month then why aren’t big companies like Sun, Microsoft etc. not hosted there? In fact, why isn’t everyone hosted there? For that matter, if unlimited is a standard feature then why don’t all the hosts offer it? Is it because it is expensive and requires better hardware? No, it’s because some hosts are honest and don’t give in to such gimmicks.

Statistically speaking, a T1 Internet connection (huge broadband) equals approximately 500GB per month and costs around $1200 per month. So how can it be possible to get the same or unlimited for $30 a month?

There are a lot of ways you can be duped by these ‘ unlimited’ hosts; here are just a few of them: The secret of ‘unlimited’ is actually buried in the Terms of Service by the host. Do not be surprised to find that unlimited = 15 GB.

The host may restrict the sort of files that you can host on their server. Generally image galleries and audio/video files attract a lot more downloads thereby resulting in higher bandwidth consumption. So if there are no files of this type, your site won’t really require a lot of bandwidth.

Some newly opened hosts use it as a scam. They take your money and after a few months when their server starts to become slow or reaches its limit, they run… with your money!

Some hosts outline in their Terms of Service that you can have unlimited bandwidth as long as you qualify for it. i.e. Your site must use less then, let’s say 2 GB of bandwidth in order to qualify for the unlimited bandwidth feature. As soon as your site goes over that limit they either start charging you for it or cut off your downloads altogether.

In life it’s a universal truth that you always get what you pay for, and it’s no different for web hosting.

If a host is using a cheap advertising gimmick like ‘unlimited’ bandwidth they maybe lying about a few other things too. Their ‘dedicated’ support team could be a single person (the hoster itself in most cases) sitting in front of a computer and taking your calls.

Do you really want unlimited bandwidth hosting from hosts that have very limited resources at their disposal? Or, do you want to go for a host that has spent thousands of dollars on setting up a good network infrastructure, servers, and a highly qualified and dedicated support team? The choice ultimately is yours and yours alone.

Bandwidth explained:

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that you are allowed to have for a hosting package i.e. Let’s say you have a web page that is 48KB in size, now each time a user opens your site and goes to that page S/he downloads 48 KB of information on to their computer. If a 100 users view that page one time each then there has been a total of 4800 KB of data transferred from the server on which your files are stored for the computer of users.

Size of web Page: 48 KB

Number of users who viewed the web page: 100
Total amount of data transferred: 48KB * 100 = 4800 KB
Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space.
The amount of bandwidth that you require while choosing a host depends on two factors:
> The size of your site.
> The popularity of your site.

If your site is not very huge and you do not have any audio/video downloads and it’s not very popular i.e. not a lot of people visit your site then you do not really require a lot of bandwidth, on a average a web site uses up only 500 MB of bandwidth per month. Or if your site is small but extremely popular then you might have to go for a web hosting package that offers high bandwidth.

On the other hand if your web site is huge, providing audio/video downloads, as well as being very popular then you would certainly require a huge amount of bandwidth. Let’s say you have a video file that is 150 MB in size and in a single day a 100 visitors download the file. This means that 15 GB of bandwidth will have been used. If you multiply that by 30 days for the month it comes to 450 GB.

The article written by Ashish Jain

Communication at the heart of change’ the animation video presentation of Panosexplains the essential role that information and communication plays in development. Sustainable development demands that people participate in the debates and decisions that affect their lives. They need to be able to receive information, but also to make their voices heard. Nevertheless, the poor are often excluded from these processes by geography and lack of resources or skills. The video explores that can happen when poor and marginalized people are listened to, and given access to the information they needed.

Above video on the Bangladesh livebits experiences from 80 market places of Dhaka. Along with livebits, the project focuses to freshbits and connectbits as well. The livebits was web cast directly from market spot to Linz Australia via wireless internet, however broadcast via video blogging.

The global project ’80+1 : Journey Around the World’ was formulated with the spirit of Jules Verne’s famous classic, “80 Days Around the World ”. The activities of the project was formulated with unique combustion of new media and old media. This project is the first use of LiveBits video streaming, together with FreshBits and ConnectBits multimedia documentations in Bangladesh.

Beyond the physical travel, the virtual journey was accomplished with the satellite hook-up, fiber optic cable and the stops along the way 20 locations of the world covering 20 contemporary issues from June 17 to September 5, 2009 for 81 days. From Dhaka focus to Dhakai market, we present Dhaka life style, culture and reality to the global audience.

Why Dhaka and what we did ?

The Dhaka city itself is a market. It exhibits Bangladeshi culture and spirit as a capital city. From small street tea stalls to modern coffee shops, from bazaars to parks, from slums to megamalls, everywhere has touch of products and marketing. The metropolitan city is known as city of rickshaws and mosques. The most densely populated city Dhaka is the biggest city of the country. It can be called live exhibition of Bangladeshi culture. Here every day millions people come from the districts of the country.

E-BOOK ON 80+1 JOURNEY IN DHAK

To visualize the true life and culture, we did at first extensive research and divided Dhaka market into three types, spiritual market; civic and commercial market. During the “80+1 day Journey every day we did LiveBits from one market through the wireless Internet connectivity directly from the spots. During the LiveBits, audience in ‘Linz’ (cultural capital of European Union), got live tour experience in Dhaka over live vide stream by overcoming time and space limitations. However the participants were united and felt oneness with the life and culture of Dhaka. By the new-media intervention, it has been proved again that all humanity are part of on ‘Global Family..The scheduled (June 17 2009 – September 2009 ) was arranged systematically based on markets position, cultural entities and traditions. In the tour along with traditional market, we bits from the non recognized market like, rickshaw market, love market and street markets. We live-cast the non-traditional markets of new Dhaka by riding on a rickshaw, and in old Dhaka we covered by riding on Tom Tom. The regular live bits activities were everyday one hour LiveBits. After returned from spot, we did blogging with a photo story, web documentary as FreshBits production in official blog at www.80plus1.org. However in the end of journey, we published a complete documentary with 81 minutes duration as ConnectBits production and a e-book.

The technology

With wireless networking, live video streaming, online distribution, blogging, video production, photography and e-book publishing multimedia features make the project an good example with the unity of new-media and old-media. It was big challenge to do live streaming in slow GPRS wireless internet connection with portable devices from the market spots. Anyway the 80plus1 experiences has created confidence for South Asian about innovative use of new media and multimedia journalism.

Beyond the mainstream media hegemony, with the power of new media, the 80+1 travelers now know Dhaka very well. They know from the history to market view, street tea stalls to modern shopping male, street man to reach man. The misunderstanding has been disappeared for this media presentation. The prejudices about Bangladesh and its culture have been changed into positive views.

In such way if new media presentation could be created understanding bridge easily between North and South, East and West, however can contribute for making One Word. Now proven truth, first growing powerful new media can unite the people easily beyond the time, space and cultural barriers by inspiring, connecting and involving the people. Nowadays Bangladesh is moving ahead with the vision 2021 to establish ‘Digital Bangladesh’ with new leadership and political commitment. In this moment, we have achieved the experience of “80+1.

Hope, such way more innovative initiative will be organized which will profoundly contribute for freedom, peace, unity and happiness.

Shahjahan Siraj
Dhaka, 01 October, 2009

Two days long training workshop for child  journalists of Shishu Prokash was held at MMC premises on July  25-26, 2008. This training was jointly organized by UNICEF and Mass-line Media Centre (MMC). Shahahjahan Siraj, the director of Machizo facilitated the training. News editor  Moniruzzaman Khan; Sub-editor, Masum Bellia, Dhaka Team Leader M.  Tohidul Islam of Shishu Prokash coordinated the training. Twelve child  journalists participated in the training and learn the effective use of the computer, the internet, and photography for report writing and news publications.

Machizo’s director ‘Shahjahan Siraj’ joined  in the Transmission event to share his views and experiences.

The documentary ‘Riding on a Rickshaw’ and ‘Flood 07’  from Bangladesh screened in the event of Transmission Asia-Pacific at Java/ Indonesia (Sukabumi, Indonesia, May 19-25 2008.).  Transmission Asia-Pacific is a meeting of video activists and free  software developers who are using online video distribution for social justice  and media democracy. The event was organized by  EngageMedia and Ruangrupa TX-AP.

The  audience appreciated the documentaries very much and understand the rights and reality of grassroots poor and marginalized community in Bangladesh.