I have had free hosting from 1and1.com since 2003 based on a special deal they sent out through IEEE Computer Magazine called the “1&1 Professional Linux” offer. It was cool – 100% free, shell access, – all in all a lot of fun – it has allowed me to do lots of cool things (including this very blog) for the past six years.
Recently I noticed file uploads were failing. So I dug into it a bit and realized I had hit my disk Quota! My free quota was 500MB. So I guess it was time to get off the free thing and pay for my hosting (I already pay over $1200 per year to 1and1 for domain names – another $60.00 for hosting is barely noticeable).
So I was looking at the limits of the $5.00 per month account – the storage is 120GB and the transfer was 1200GB. If I paid $10.00 per month the storage went up to 250GB and the transfer went up to 2500GB per month.
I started looking at my monthly transfer for my current dr-chuck.com – my monthly transfer was 2700MB out of 5000MB. This kind of concerned me because my new account only had 2500GB per month and I was *already* at 2700MB per month! I figured that while I could easily afford the $10.00 for hosting, I really was uncomfortable paying for bandwidth. I get hit a lot by search engines – and I just did not want to be nailed with a $100.00 bill when my bandwidth limit was exceeded – and it was not even my fault!
I went back and forth – how could the free account from 2003 give me 5000MB transfer per month and the pay account from 2009 reduce that to 1200GB transfer per month! It seemed like my free account was just too good to be true with its awesome 5000MB per month transfer – perhaps this was a trick to get us off those free accounts and stick us with bandwidth bills! What is up with that! Good thing I caught these folks before I mistakenly upgraded!
It took about 20 minutes of going between screens at my ISP before I realized my mistaken logic – and went ahead and ordered the upgrade. Perhaps you can find the flaw is my thought process in less than 20 minutes :).