Okay... what if like the Web Host is new and got plenty of Bandwidth to work with (maybe "Unmetered")?
Unmetered is still not allowed in the forum, and is basically the same as "unlimited". How exactly will you let every client use as much as they want? Each server is allocated X amount of space and transfer, and if you go over then you will either be suspended or "fined" quite a bit. Thats overselling and will catch up to you. Then when that host cannot handle that load, they screw their clients by shutting down w/o notice.
But then again, I've never had a website before, so I have absolutely
no idea how much bandwidth my site is going to draw.
My fear is just that at one point I'll get Slashdotted, exceed the limit, and be
shut down or charged a lot of money because of the spike.
A new website, with maximum 100 daily visitors, can use aprox. 1 GB of BW every month, unless you have a site with tons of images which will eat more BW.
Okay... I suppose I'll be fine then, at least for a while. When it comes to
images, isn't it possible to upload images on imageshack or something,
and embed a link to them in the html?
Well... I have "Burstable" Bandwidth and can allocate 1TB of bandwidth to each account...
n my experience, anything with the word "burstable" or "balloon" automatically indicate overselling.
How about burstable RAM at many VPS offers? Is it overselling?
It's not guaranteed by any means.
Overselling is when your RAM goes down lower than amount you were guaranteed, in other words, when provider is unable to give as much resources as you were promised to be given. There is nothing like this in burstable ram or bandwidth, when we talk about professional service.
Sounds to me like we all agree the base rate should be provided. Then for this "Burstable" part, it sounds like "quantifying the Bonus" that is admitted not to be guaranteed. However, it is omitting the other half of the equation, which is something like the %liklihood of you getting the bonus at any point in time. % is greater than zero, so any one client will get it at least some of the time. Classic marketing.
I suppose you could do this, but then you run into a risk that your images might disappear after a certain period of time, or their URL might change. It's better to host images by yourself, or get a CDN service (Content Delivery Network) most of the time it is a paid service, designed for improving speed.
It is better to compress your images using free service as this one that I'm using - "Yahoo Smush It".
Does this work with jpgs as well, which already are compressed?