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inyansuta's avatar

Digital ocean - traffic

Our team is from Czech republic and we create website for customer in USA (in Laravel). I have suggested to forge and DigitalOcean. Unfortunately, our director rejected all hosting providers that pay for data transfer (Digital, Amazon ...) and chose InMotion hosting (one of the cheapest and not pay for traffic).

In other words, they fear that the end customer, for whom we develop site will have such an increase in users on the site that will be exceeded and the traffic will have to pay high sums for extra data ...

How can I argue for forge and digital ocean (where you pay for traffic)? Unfortunately I have no experience with these limits. If anyone has practical experience and at least approximate dates, please answer the following questions:

  1. What exactly is traffic (only outbound data from the server to the client browser)?
  2. How big is the transfer of data, eg. At 1000 daily users per month (roughly 5TB or 50TB ...)?

Please any advice, because I would very much like to take forge and DigitalOcean, but I do not know how to convince.

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6 replies
nikocraft's avatar

why not try contacting digitalocean support and asking them to help you with arguments.

Just found this: http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/community-support/resources/bandwidth-overuse

Unlimited unpaid traffic is for shared hosting only. If your manager suggest that you use Inmotion and use shared hosting for a customer where you expect lots of traffic then you need to fire that guy, he clearly has no idea what he is doing :) Shared hosting is a dissaster since it's much slower and will not work for a popular website

nikocraft's avatar

actually have your director read this http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/getting-started-guides/unlimited-disk-space-and-bandwidth

IMH Personal & Business Class hosting are shared hosting environments, so to ensure fast & reliable service to all of our clients, accounts that adversely affect server or network performance must correct these issues or will be asked to upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server."

which means as soon as your customer site gets popular and has lots of visits Inmotion may terminate your shared hosting account and force you to use VPS or Dedicated Server.

In other words there is no real unlimited bandwidth free trafic as your director seems to think, because as soon as you cross a line that they have internally defined you will be asked to correct this or forced to upgrade to VPS, so it's better to go with digitalocean.

Their bandwidth for 5$ is 1TB which is probably more then what you will get with shared hosting free traffic with InMotion hosting. And you will probably not sign up to 5$ for your customer but perhaps 20$ which gives you 3 TB.

If you must go with InMotion Hosting email them and ask them what is the real montly limit in GB/TB before they force you to update to VPS. If it's lower then digitalocean or if they do not want to answer that then you should not choose them.

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pmall's avatar

You will always end up paying for the bandwidth of your website if it gets a lot of traffic.

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