Is Bandwidth critical part of hosting?

Hi..very new to e-commerce and this forum and trying to sort out all the considerations..can someone advise me please? I am looking at the different hosting services and see a wide disparity in storage space/bandwidth amounts versus cost..some companies offering 300 GB storage with 3,000 GB of transfer for a piddly amount of money..ten times more than other companies! Why? so my question is..how important is the bandwidth in the equation? What other things are they not telling me in order to be able to offer apparently so much for so little that I should consider? CPU usage? I know that renting a dedicated server is the best option but at this point I want a very cheap but very reliable and optimal hosting solution..thanks for any insight!!

Chances are it's not that important for the most part. This is what's known as over-selling in the industry. Heck, our hard drives on our servers are 250G so we could not even offer that.

Basically, it's marketing. It's words that make them look like they are offering more. But if you look at their TOS they probably also have the right to suspend you if you use too much bandwidth. These types of hosting companies are usually havens for people who need to host videos. And then this might slow your site down if a lot of users are on their site.

TechEvolution is the company I would recommend. We use them for our dedicated servers. They have shared serving and you can always upgrade later

I think it is important in some cases. For instance I left a hosting company that I consider as good a shared host as there is because my e-commerce site had a function that produced a server error. This was because I exceeded a certain bandwidth. When I changed hosts, the function no longer caused an error.

@via

Disk space won't be much of a problem as bandwidth. And neither may be a problem. Web hosting companies are always trying to out do each other and up the specs on disk space, etc. but mainly for marketing reasons. If you really disk space your probably going to choose a hosting plan that has some power so it will come with a lot of room that you won't get close to filling.

Bandwidth is another issue and if you're business is so good that you're busting bandwidth, easy solution: buy more and keep the traffic coming!!