If..Else Log

It's human nature to want for more; we always look for the best deal, the best bang for buck whether it's shopping for food at the supermarket or using price comparison sites for checking out the cheapest fare or television. And as anyone who owns their own domain are probably quite net-savvy, webhosts are under pressure to competitively price themselves.

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a while now, who's front page pricing of $8 per month for a crazy 1TB of bandwidth and 20GB of storage is incredibly tempting especially when you look back just 5 years ago and compare what you were paying and getting then with now¹. Of course, the announced specs should only play a tiny part in your decision making process² but fortunately, I've been more than happy with DH.

Material needs

However, Podz is quite right in pointing out how little we actually use and need. We give to much weight to numbers and concerns about planning for unforeseen circumstances whereas we rarely even strain the packages that we pay for. So following his lead, here's what I actually use for this site.

• 160mb used by the db
• 200mb disk space used
• 600mb of bandwidth per day or 18gb per month³

In other words, I use less than 0.01% of my allocated storage space and bandwidth. The problem is that, in the hosting market, there's substantial feature inflation brought on by the need for competitiveness. Because of the difficulties in comparing service, inordinate focus is placed on specs.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a better alternative.

But what can we do?

We can rely on word of mouth, though anecdotal evidence carries with it a whole load of flaws such as the limited/non-representational sample size, bias and imperfect correlation⁴. Review sites are even worse carrying with them an awful stench of corruption. How about sites that offer customer ratings? Sounds good until you consider that there's a lot of incentive for dodgy webhosts to add their 'noise' to the system.

Numbers are easy to understand and use. But the simplicity of figures mean that we have to be careful the dangers of giving unfair weight to them. We probably wouldn't buy a car simply because of it's top speed; we shouldn't make the same mistake with hosting.

1. Particulary for us poor UK denizens. [back]
2. Especially when you consider that, like airline companies, most webhosts including DH, also oversell. [back]
3. Actually, this was more than I expected especially since there's no big downloads like movies or music on this site. [back]
4. Not to mention that there is a serious conflict of interest with referral fees that are often offered by hosts. [back]

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