Today, we raised all account allotments for every shared account that we offer, all the way from the Intro Account on up to the standard shared hosting accounts. At the lower end of the spectrum, disk space was doubled (as well as each feature), and bandwidth was doubled and tripled in some cases.

“OMG! They’re selling out! They’ve gone to the dark side! They’re doing what they just hypocritically railed against! Those jerks!”

Well, not quite. And just to avoid that argument, we’ll explain exactly what’s going on!

Recently, we codified exactly how much CPU average and memory average and MySQL average you’re allowed to use per day (on… um, average). We kept detailed records of sites that used higher resource usage and came up with something that we thought was fair, then we stuck it into the TOS,. That left us free to look at the allotments that we have, what resources are being used, and whether we were offering too little considering the server specs that we have.

The machines we have are a little under a year old, are all dual processor with dual cores, and are expandable up to 24 Gigs of memory (most run currently at 8 Gigs to 16 Gigs). When we bought ‘em, we got some hefty disks (with Raid) because we saw that ya’ll were using more and more disk space and wanted to be prepared. We’re well known at this point for being overly prepared and, frankly, we have lots of disk space sitting idle on all 4 servers.

Blastoid is using 63G with 111G free, Mudkip is using 81G with 93G free, Squirtle is using 69G with 106G free, and Warturtle is using 40G with 67G free (Poor War is a little smaller than his brothers). So, we host 253 Gigs of information in the home partition (where your sites go), and we have the ability right now to expand into 377 Gigs of free disk space on hand. In every case, the server has more space free than is being used.

Currently, we’re installing on squirtle, however, resource-wise ol’ Squirt’s a fairly busy server and we’re likely looking at our 5th box here within the next month or two. This begs the question as to what we do with all that disk space lying around, and so we decided to give it to you (because, well, that is what its there for).

When server’s begin to average their load at about 1.5 to 2, we stop installing new accounts on them, as all servers have resellers on them and we need to leave room to grow for them. (None of the servers currently are actually there, yet, but we’d rather leave a lot idle than start moving accounts.) We have a hard limit of 500 accounts per server because have a lot of extremely small allotments on some of the accounts, like the Intros, and they don’t have the ability to make all that much of a resource dent. (For the curious, there are 217 on Warturtle, 360 on Squirtle, 418 on Blastoid, and Mudkip’s got 434.)

Everything’s balanced really well, with lots left over, and that’s why we made the decision - not because we’re working up to a gazillion terabyte shared accounts. We felt upping these allotments was a safe bet, and recently we’ve seen more higher resource sites that are not having an adverse impact on the holy triad of shared hosting (cpu/mem/mysql), so we still feel comfortable with the fact that you can use the resource we’re allotting you outright without a problem, and they still give you a good indication of where you are in the “OMG my site is gonna get suspended” spectrum.

Let us know if you have any questions!

I read Web Hosting Talk religiously. It’s a great place to stay plugged in to the twists and turns of the web hosting industry. Since its inception, Web Hosting Talk is where the web hosting savvy come to dish and bitch, and anyone can learn a lot just by stopping by there.

Compared to Dreamhost and Lunarpages and Bluehost, we’re pretty small potatoes in the industry. Granted, we’re not that small - at the moment, we host about 1750 domains. But, we’re not some three-headed corporate monster driving the industry, we’re the little quiet guy in the corner humbly scooting along as we always have. We generally don’t advertise, don’t run around begging people to sign up for our affiliate program, don’t invest a $100 payback to bribe someone for a client, and we don’t send staff in to make fake reviews on forums, or create fake sites telling everyone just how great we are.

OK, once we paid money to be #2 on a Top Ten list for a week. I didn’t feel like buying the #1 slot and I was curious as to what it felt like to be on a top ten list. To be honest, it felt skeevy. I knew I’d bought my way on the list. It felt wrong.

A lot of the things in the industry feel all kinds of wrong these days (aside from the fact that there’s almost nowhere to get honest reviews and ratings of any host because nearly every ratings site charges hosts to be on there, and many hosts pay companies to plant fake reviews), and one of them is these allotments that are all over the damn place. I literally cannot stand them. It’s not even a jealousy thing. It’s just a disgust thing.

I personally will not offer a shared hosting allotment that’s larger than reasonable specs on a high end server - it’s a bald faced lie. It’s wrong. I don’t get how companies can do it. I don’t understand how on earth the industry has gone down this road, and a lot of the time I am totally baffled how customers can buy a shared hosting account from a company for $7 a month who’s specs outstrip the server that same company is selling for $200 a month and not have alarm bells go off in their head. It baffles me.

One of the most honest posts I’ve ever seen from a web hosting company was HostGator’s post entitled “Selling Out”, made the day after they raised their account allotments from “crazy to downright insane”. To my chagrin, they caved - to my admiration, they admitted they caved. They decided that they had to remain competitive, the top 5 hosting companies were offering things you could never hope to use, and even though they knew (and were telling you) you’d never used all of it, they felt they had to offer it. I call it the “mythical account allotment”.

It’s a ceiling that doesn’t exist. The number people compare to see what bang they get for their buck? In practicality, they’re essentially meaningless.

First of all, you’ll likely not be one of the 2% that uses a lot of resources. The vast majority of our accounts, regardless of what they’re paying for, never see more usage in space and bandwidth than would fit in a Junior. Second, if you are, your site is likely robust and will process a lot - and you will slow down a server because you’re hogging all the CPU and Memory before you ever get within eyeball distance of any of those allotments that these companies are selling you. They simply don’t exist. They’re not real. It’s a bill of goods. Disk space and bandwidth on these supercharged accounts are totally and completely meaningless. It’s a marketing technique, nothing more. It’s a marketing technique that works because people don’t know.

I think I’m just old school. I believed all that morality crap that they taught me when I was growing up - don’t trick people. Don’t lie to them. Don’t mislead. Don’t be dishonest. Do what you say you’re going to do - at the core of it, all of these account allotments that are being offered drive me crazy because they only work because of one person’s ignorance, and another person being willing to take advantage of that person’s ignorance.

I just hate that.

I have podcast sites serving 100 Gigabytes a month that the server barely notices is there. I have Wordpress sites serving 35 Gigabytes a month that show up in my “Top Ten Resource Users of the Day” list. People don’t yet know that it doesn’t matter how many gigs they serve, and that it really is hard to pack files in a site in Gigs, that what matters is how much they process, and that can’t be quantified - most hosts won’t quantify it. You don’t know - you find out when you get the email from the host saying that they have been the sole determining decider that your site has to go (off completely, or to a server).

And your first thought is “But I’m nowhere near the Terrabye of Bandwidth!”. Yeah, and you were never getting there, either.

It seems unfair to me that popular sites get nuked based on something they cannot see, and that so many hosts deliberately refuse to define. We may be one of the only hosts that have chosen to define cpu, memory, and mysql usage per account in our Terms of Service. It seems unfair that “regular” users base their site’s health on how close they are to their bandwidth limit when that number is meaningless regarding how many resources they’re taking up. Sites don’t get shut down for serving too much bandwidth - they get shut down for using too many resources.

And that’s a number that NONE of these gazillion terrbyte $7 accounts will give you. You can’t see it coming, you can’t feel it coming, and there’s no way you’ll know until it hits you. You’ll think that you can because of those handy dandy graphics in your control panel telling you that you still have another three gazillion terrabytes left. You’ll be wrong.

So, we’re probably going to stay small because we’re not going to go there. To all the people rushing to get their $7 accounts with more bandwidth and disk space than my $600/m servers, we’ll be too expensive, too little for too much money when compared to the leaders in the industry, and we’ll continue to only get clients based on word of mouth because we’re all old school and don’t buy our way onto top ten lists or hire minions to post fake reviews.

Ok, there was that one time, but we didn’t get any orders from it, I swear.

I’m ok being old school - I’m ok just offering a good product for a good price, growing slowly because our clients tell their friends, only advertising by donating free sites to non-profits who kindly stick a button on their site, paying affiliates a token instead of a bribe. I’m very comfortable with the fact that what I say you can use, you can really use, and it’s not a deceptive trick just to get you here (and likewise, I’m ok when you go somewhere else because it’s not what you want and you’d rather pay a few bucks for a gazillion terrabytes of bandwidth you’ll never use). I’m glad that our bandwidth allotments are actually a good indication of how far you can take your site in this environment, in my opinion and in my experience.

The web hosting industry is, admittedly, an entertaining animal. I think considering what it takes to get to the top, I’m happy DrakNet’s existing quietly somewhere near the lower-middle.