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Debbie Gillespie does a good job of explaining what are KBs, MBs, GBs and TB in When Size Does Matter. There are so many ways of representing storage and bandwidth that you really need to know what they are so that you can compare apples with apples and not think you’ve got an orange.

So today I was comparing between Site5 and AN Hosting (Mid-Phase owned) and Site5 has a plan that gives you 55GBs storage and 5TBs bandwidth while AN Hosting (Mega Plan Plus) gives you 300,000MBs storage and 3,000,000MBs bandwidth. Arghhhh!!!

Here’s the decoder…

• 8 bits = 1 byte.
• 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB).
• 1,024 kilobytes (KB) = 1 megabytye (MB or Meg)
• 1,024 megabytes (MB) = 1 gigabyte (GB or Gig)
• 1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. (TB)

But often hosts will forget about the 24 part so you might need to replace all the 1024s above with 1000. It’s also a little simpler on the maths.

Staying correct with the 1024, I worked out that the AN Hosting Mega Plus Plan offers 293GBs storage (compared to 55 at Site5) and 2.86TB bandwidth (compared with 5 at Site5). So I guess it’s a question of what’s of more importance to you, hosting or bandwidth? Normally, I’d choose bandwidth but in this case I’m looking to set up some off-site private backup of some of the junk on my hard drive so the mega amounts of storage are actually looking pretty attractive.

Costs and number of sites hostable are some more important factors. Site5 with $5/month and 55 domains beats AN Hosting’s offer of $9.95/month and 30 domains hands down this round. But you have to pay 24 months upfront to get the $5 Site5 deal whereas AN Hosting’s offer only requires 12 months prepayment (and I have a 2 months free code: AN-SUMMEROFLIGHTS-0202 ) so the upfront fee is pretty similar (though of course this buys you an extra 12 months with Site5).

But I’d say the biggest factor is reliability and performance and I’ve heard very good things about MidPhase/AN Hosting, including this glowing review from Chris Pearson (aka Cutline fame).

I am a little bit of a hosting junkie so I will probably check out the Site5 offer some time soon, but for the time being, I’m going with AN Hosting. Will let you know how it goes!