The corollary would be if they gave you 1500 minutes but said “call anybody you want, but if you call your sister across town, we’ll disconnect you.”
Mangetout, your description of different backup concepts might be what they are thinking about, but again, if I rewrite all the data daily for backup or web purposes, I can’t see why their disk, server or whatever cares as long as I don’t exceed the amounts I am paying for.
One reason I didn’t look at other sevices is these two were the top two in a list of services in a review. When I saw the similar wording in their policies, I suspected other services might not be much different, and I didn’t want to spend all year reading fine print. We’ll see what happens in the next year.
The point is that this pattern of usage would be atypical for a website, and that’s what they’re relying on - so in a way, your hard limits would be something they’d be quite happy for you to bump up against once in a while, but not something they want you to push all the time.
I agree though, that the concept of fair/reasonable at a lower level than the signed-for package limits, is inherently absurd, but it’s a marketing trick that seems to work.
NFS may not fit your usage, but the point stands; you have options.
Agreed. I think the bottom line is that you’re absolutely right to question this rule, and their reasoning for making this rule is likely not very sound. It’s like they said: people who abuse our service often do it by putting large unlinked files up, as opposed to hosting pages with links to large files. We can’t think of much of a reason to allow unlinked files at all, so let’s forbid it in order to inconvenience the abusers. No matter that it’s trivial to work around their policy if you want to be an abuser. No matter that it’s a burden on their legitimate users (hey: it’s trivial to work around it, right? ;)), this is what they decided is a good idea.
Perhaps it’s an issue of liability? As strictly a web host, if something happens to your data they can tell you that you should have a local backup of your entire web site. However, if you’re just using their storage for your backup files and it gets deleted, they don’t want to be liable.
If you upload a 1GB backup, you’ve used 1 GB of bandwidth right there. If you retreive it shortly after, another 1 GB. If you are just serving up HTML files with moderately sized images, it takes a damn long time to reach 2 GB of bandwidth used, and you’ve reached many, many more users.
They are just trying to cover their own asses. Honestly, unless you have the same 10 .mp3 files draining a few gigs of bandwidth a day, they won’t care.