[BradleyT]

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I just curious, is scaling up so expensive? The consensus seems to be 20tb storage and 200tb transfer will cost him at least $10k/mo plus huge setup costs. I just did a quick search for hosting plans and I see inmotionhosting (which I know nothing about) offers 800gb storage and 5tb of monthly transfer for $20/mo. 40 of those would give him the amount he needs for $800/mo. Obviously you can't just get 40 accounts linked together like that, but why is the price per gb of storage and transfer so much lower? Is the only difference whether the server is dedicated or not?

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LOL @ 5TB for $20. I'm sure once you got anywhere near 1TB they'd boot you. No matter who they are they cannot buy enough throughput to offer a true 5TB for $20 - not to mention they throw you on a shared server with 300 other accounts and you'd crash the server because of I/O and CPU requirements.

All they do is buy a dedicated server from ThePlanet.com for $200/mo and then share it out over 300 different accounts for $7-$20/mo. Most normal accounts are only going to use a couple of gigs per month so most of their servers never exceed their bandwidth. However if you actually did try and use up 5TB you'd max out a 10mb line all month long. Since they're paying minimum $200 for that kind of bandwidth they're going to boot you before you ever get to 5TB.