I have been with this hosting company about 3 months. The support isn't all that great at times, but I have not had any real problems with downtime or anything.

I have not seen many, or any, others with the amount of disc space and data transfer for the price.

http://www.myvirtualnet.net

Has anyone else used this host or heard anything about them? I heard about them from a friend who uses them and is happy.

I have the basic plan which is shown on the home page there.

How do you estimate how much data transfer you will need?
I am a newbie in this arena.

Thanks in advance.

nope never but i can find out the info for ya.

it doesnt look that bad, but yet i can get a host for $3.99 with 100 mb space. the $5.99 one brings 5 emails to give out and then the $10 one brings more mb of transfer. ill have to look that up again though cuz i forgot the website
soon ill have it though

Hello Suzi-

Welcome to the forums. What type of websites do you plan to host? php? MySQL? Are you looking to use a particular control panel?

The price you are paying is okay...but not for bad support.

-Lamar

i found a couple of good hosting sites...
www.bareboneshosting.com
www.icdsoft.com
www.credithosting.com
www.ipowerweb.com

Doesn't look too bad. As ghettocars mentioned, there are a lot of hosts out there that offer lower prices (if thats what really matters). If you're looking for decent support and good value I'd recommend Hostrocket. I've been with them for a year and a half and haven't had any major problems (I know a lot of people have complained about them on another forum but I've had support responses very often within 30mins of sending the trouble ticket in). Although the hosting is slightly more expensive (unless you pay for 2 years in advance) you get 350MB with 20Gb of transfer.

Back to your host, though
Although they don't seem to have any problems, this did worry me a bit:

For example, a T1 has 1.54mbps of bandwidth. This means that a T1 can handle 1.54 megabits per second of data transfer, which is a great deal of data being sent out. To give you an idea of how much data 1.54 mbps can transfer in a second, think of sending a one megabyte file to another server within 1 second.

Now, I may be understanding this wrong, but surely a 1.54Mbps (megabits per second) line can transfer 197KB (kilobytes) in one second, so the 1 megabyte file would take 5 seconds to transfer. I wouldn't be very happy if my host didn't understand file transfers correctly!

As for how much transfer you are using, if you have a statistics program (for example Webalizer) this will usually give you a figure in KB for how much data you have transferred. If not, you can work it out roughly by adding up the total size of an avarage page of your site (HTML and images) then multiplying it by the number of pageviews you get each month.

Hope that helps.

Working out the data transfer you would need... (NB this is easier if you have a site already)

This formula uses worst case scenario, that way you know the sort of traffic you can expect.

First of all, work out the average size of a typical web page - include items and images used for page furniture, don't forget any style sheets and JavaScript files that you add.

For example, my site has around 2 images and 1 style sheet per page - this is just a quick estimate on what I'd use...

7 Kb for HTML
8 Kb for logo
3 Kb for recommended book cover
4 Kb for CSS

Makes an average of 22Kb per page veiw - but the effect of caching makes it much less than that in reality.

Now - times your average page size by the number of page views you have (or expect to have)... and you will get the type of data transfer you need.

Carrying on with my site again... at around 22Kb worst case average, at around 300 page veiws a day I estimate I need...

6,600Kb or approx 6.6Mb a day (these are very approximate figures).
6.6Mb x 7 = approx 47Mb a week.
6.6Mb x 30 = approx 200Mb a month...

So, looks like I'm in no danger of running out of my allotted 5Gb of transfer this month - even if everyone requested all the files for each page they looked at. In practice, I use about half of that I've just estimated by making my pages as cache friendly as possible.

Rounding up rather than down is better as overestimating a little on your transfer requirements gives you more room for a sudden burst of traffic...

Things to watch out for
Downloads can really eat up your bandwidth, I'd work out a seperate average for downloads rather than factor those in as part of your page views.

If you have an unusually larger page with a lot of activity count the expected transfer for that page seperately.

Ask your host if the data transfer they quote is just for web activity or if it is for all activity on the domain. If it covers all activity on the domain then you will need to estimate your FTP and Email usage too - which is less predictable and so much harder to estimate...

Great info Tiggy - thanks! That is very helpful.

One question - I don't exactly understand what this phrase means: "even if everyone requested all the files for each page they looked at"

What does "request the file" mean? All I know is going to a web page and looking at it - how does one request a file?

Thanks.

You request a file simply by "looking at it"... all I meant there was, that, in the worst case scenario everything needed to see the page is downloaded each time someone wanted to see it. In practice, when looking at a site where images are reused, the image is usually only requested once, which is why the method will overestimate your actual needs.

Originally posted by suzicat
Great info Tiggy - thanks! That is very helpful.

One question - I don't exactly understand what this phrase means: "even if everyone requested all the files for each page they looked at"

What does "request the file" mean? All I know is going to a web page and looking at it - how does one request a file?

Thanks.

Hi suzicat,

Whenever you view a page, there are images, flash files, music, Java applets, and of course, the HTML page itself. Even if you view a page with only text and a few images, you still have to "request" all the .html and .jpg/.gif files.

Darn, Tiggy beat me to it.

In fact, she beat me by 9 minutes. Man, I know I don't type that slowly. Maybe I should turn of MSN next time I make a post, lol.

Lol - you guys are great! I have learned a lot in the few days I have been coming here.

And looking at everyone's websites is very interesting too!

the hosting site looks...average...that you pointed out suzi. 8gb of bandwith hey? when you think that that means that if you filled you 100mb of space entirely, someone could still view your entire site with every file in it 10 times before you ran out, that shows you how much 8gb really is.

my site, at present, is under 1mb. i keep it small, concise, and it loads quicker, thus providing less frustrated customers. At present i'm predicting about 10mb of bandwith used this month out of about i think 1gb that i have. thus i'm using less than 1% of what i have available.

of course, i only launched my site this month (and its being redesigned already), so my usage will go up. but i can't, with the sizes of files that i use, see me in the near future going much over 500mb/month before my traffic levels out.

if you really need 8gb, then stick with that host. otherwise, for fast, efficient, and friendly tech support as well as good prices (wow, that sounds like an advert, not meant to be ) i recomment www.hostone.co.uk or www.lmhost.co.uk - both of which i've used, and never had a sausage of a problem with.

Originally posted by DaveTodd
the hosting site looks...average...that you pointed out suzi. 8gb of bandwith hey? when you think that that means that if you filled you 100mb of space entirely, someone could still view your entire site with every file in it 10 times before you ran out, that shows you how much 8gb really is.

Hi Dave-

Are you sure it is only 10 times?

1G = 1000 mb
so,
8G = 8000 mb

8000 mb / 100 mb = 80 times

-Lamar

monamie (or something similarly classy and french)

1gb = 1024mb
thus 8gb = 8192mb
so...with the screwing up of my last post, i will correct myself

81.92 times your site can be totally downloaded per month before you run out of bandwith. how many people want to download your entire site? do you fill your entire site anyways?

(thankx for the info perfecthost, don't think anyone else noticed )