Best Unlimited Cloud Hosting Services
Unlimited Cloud Hosting usually means both an unrestricted storage space as well as an unlimited bandwidth. In this article we’ll have a closer look at both of those features, and discuss what you should know and consider before choosing and hosting offer.
Unlimited Cloud Storage
For many customers, especially for companies, unlimited storage space is an essential point when choosing a cloud provider. To mark this occasion, we have listed the cloud storage providers with high or even unlimited storage capacity and below are a few points you should consider:
Unlimited Cloud Storage – Does That Pay Off For Providers?
Inmotionhosting and Siteground both advertise unlimited storage space. A smart move from a marketing point of view, for many users it sounds tempting to get so much “free storage” for so little money. However, our conversations with both manufacturers and users show time and again that only a very small part of the storage volume is used in practice.
Accordingly, we assume that Inmotionhosting and Siteground also do the same and that the mixed calculation is well worth it for the manufacturer. Of course, there are also users here who store huge amounts of data in the cloud beyond the terabyte limit, but this is certainly the exception rather than the rule. Anyone looking for a lot of storage should not only look out for providers with unlimited storage space.
So most users get by with the 5,000 GB of Livedrive. And should also not be enough Livedrive still offers a business account with 10 TB of storage space.
Are Large Amounts Of Data Practicable In Practice?
Everything you want to retrieve from the cloud must first be stored there. Many users are unaware of this at first, but the focus when choosing an internet connection has so far mostly been on the download speed and not on the upload speed.
In practice this can have unsightly consequences: Even if one can fully use the upload speed of 1,024 k/bits offered by many DSL providers, an upload of 250 GB of data would take about 25 days. If you also consider that this upload speed is not reached in many cases with some cloud storage providers, it can take even longer.
However, this does not deter many users. Many users report how they simply let the computer run permanently for the first upload of their data. If the upload is interrupted once, it will be automatically resumed with most providers when a new connection is established. To prevent the upload from blocking the entire bandwidth, some cloud storage providers such as Livedrive and JustCloud also allow you to define the bandwidth to be used for the upload.
How Do I Get My Large Amounts Of Data Quickly Into The Cloud?
A very good alternative to uploading data via the Internet is the so-called send-in service. With this service, the cloud storage provider sends you a hard disk. The data is transferred to this hard disk and sent back to the cloud storage provider by post. The provider then transfers the data directly to the user’s cloud storage. Unfortunately, none of the cloud storage providers mentioned above offers this service, so there is only the way via upload.
What Is Bandwidth?
Simply put, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that exists between your website and the Internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can offer is determined by its connections – internal, through the connection to its data centers, and external, through the Internet connection itself. Hosting companies offer a lot of bandwidth options.
Networking Capabilities
Simply put, the Internet is a group of millions of computers connected in networks. The size of each network connection determines how much bandwidth is available. If you have a DSL Internet connection, you should have 1.54 megabits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are composed in bytes. These form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the Internet.
If you have a DSL Internet connection, there is a dedicated bandwidth between your computer and the Internet provider. However, your Internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections within one location. All these connections accumulate at your Internet provider. It has its own dedicated connection to the Internet (or multiple connections), which is much larger than your connection.
The Internet provider should have enough bandwidth to meet your IT requirements and those of other customers. So while you have a 1.54 MB Internet connection to your Internet provider, your Internet provider can have a 255 MB Internet connection to the Internet. In this way the Internet provider can satisfy your needs and those of up to 166 other users (255/1.54).
Internet Traffic
Internet traffic is simply the number of bits transmitted within the network connections. Internet traffic can best be understood using examples. One gigabyte corresponds to 1024 megabytes. To put this into perspective, a byte is needed to store a character. Imagine 100 filing cabinets in a building. Each filing cabinet contains 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – One GB are all characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 3 to 4 MB, the same song in WAV format is about 40 MB, a full length movie can easily be about 1000 MB (=1GB).
If you want to transfer these MP3 songs from a website to your computer, there will be 4 MB of traffic between the website from which you download the song and the computer. Depending on the network connection between the website and the Internet, the transfer can be very fast. It may also take a long time for other users to download files at the same time.
For example, if the website from which you are downloading files has a 10 MB Internet connection, and you are the only person who has access to that website, your 4 MB file will create the only traffic on that website. However, if three users download this 4MB file at the same time, it means that there will be 12MB (3 x 4 MB) of Internet traffic.
In this example, the host has only 10 MB bandwidth, so users (downloaders) should wait longer than usual. Every person who downloads this file goes through the network technology of the hosting company and transmits a small part to the users. However, the file transfer will be slower than usual for everyone. If 100 users from the same website download this file at the same time, the transfer will be very slow. If the host wants to reduce the waiting time while downloading at the same time, it could increase the bandwidth of the Internet connection (at a cost of better equipment).
Hosting Bandwidth
A web page can be very small or large. This is related to the amount of text, the number and quality of images that are integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for Fox.com can be about 200 KB (200 kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is usually quite a lot. In comparison, Yahoo.com is about 70KB.
How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?
It’s always different (you hate that answer, don’t you). In truth it’s just like that. Since bandwidth is a significant factor for hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine how much is sufficient for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months. As a result, you should simply estimate the amount of bandwidth your website will use in a month.
If you do not intend to provide the file download feature from your website, the formula for calculating the bandwidth is very simple:
- Average Visitors Daily x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Evasion Factor
If you intend to allow other people to download files from your site, you should determine your bandwidth as follows:
- Average Visitors Daily x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Avoidance Factor
Let us check the individual elements in the formula: - Average page views – this is the expected average number of web pages a person will look at. If you have 50 web pages in your website, an average person can view only 5 of all web pages at each visit.
- Average Visitors Daily – The expected average number of people who would visit your site each day. Depending on how you market your site, this number may vary from 1 to 1,000,000.
- Average page size – this is the average size of your web pages, in kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your website, you can calculate this directly.
- Average file size – this is the average size of the files that can be downloaded from your website. Similar to your web pages, you can calculate the size directly if you already know which files can be downloaded.
- Average Daily File Downloads – The expected number of downloads that could occur on your website. This is a function of the number of visitors and how often a visitor downloads a file on average per day.
- Avoidance Factor – This is a number greater than 1. With 1.5, you are safe. This assumes that your estimate differs by 50%. But if you’re very unsure of your estimate, you can also take 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements will be exceeded.
Basically, hosting companies offer bandwidth measured in gigabytes (GB) per month. Therefore, the above formula uses daily averages multiplied by 31.
Summary
Most private or small website companies do not use more than 1 GB of bandwidth per month. If you are consuming more bandwidth than your plan says, your hosting company may charge you overuse fees. So if you feel that your website visitors are likely to be significantly more than you thought, you can go through the above calculations to estimate the amount of bandwidth required.
Well, you know what the bandwidth is and can decide which of the German hosting companies has the best deal for you.