Ask CWS: Hosting Plan Limits

Question: Other hosting companies offer unlimited hard drive space, unlimited emails, and 100 terabytes of data transfer per month. Why don't you offer this much?

Anwser: Simple, we don't oversell our servers.

When a company oversells hosting they are selling more resources than they currently have, just like an airline that sells more seats than the plane can hold because they expect a few to reschedule. For example, if you have a server with a 300 GB hard drive, and you sell hosting packages with 10GB of storage to 50 customers, you have sold 500 GB of server space. Since you only have a 300 GB hard drive, you've oversold the server by 200 GB.

Why do hosting companies do this? Because they know that the typical website only takes up around 50 MB of space and uses 1 GB of bandwidth per month, so on average, these 50 customers shouldn't use up all of the resources on the server.

If a typical website only takes up 50 MB, imagine how many of them you could fit on a 300 GB server -- over 6,000! The potential profits from this type of arrangement, and thus the temptation to do so, are huge. But it doesn't seem very ethical to promise what you can't deliver, simply trusting that your customers won't ask you to fulfill your promise, does it?

We don't think so.

We believe that companies who offer "unlimited" emails or "unlimited" hard drive space are doing exactly that -- promising something they can't possibly deliver. These types of offers also tend to attract a few customers who do try to take advantage of the provider and steal precious resources from quality customers (like you). We want your business website to perform at an optimal level at all times and not be affected by some kid who is streaming a video to five thousand college buddies.

If we promise more than we can deliver, we can't guarantee reliability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's our promise to you and the reason we don't offer hosting plans with ridiculous limits on hard drive space, bandwidth or email accounts. Thanks for asking!

Have a question for us?
Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We would be honored to provide some insight into how we'd tackle the issue. Send an email to support [at] cws dot net with the subject "Ask CWS".