Good grief people! Back to Kindergarten!
Computers use binary on / off states to represent information and because
of this fact, all unit measurements are always an equal power of "2".
A single binary on / off state represented as "1" or "0" respectively is a "Bit".
8 Bits make up a "Byte"
1,024 Bytes makes up a "Kilobyte"
1,024 Kilobytes makes up a "Megabyte"
1,024 Megabytes makes up a "Gigabyte"
1,024 Gigabytes makes up a "Terabyte"
To answer the question:
The industry standard and only officially recognized value for Gigabyte
is the values given above.
Some people just round off values and multiply by thousands but this is
only good for estimation and does not give you an accurate total.
Any host that offers 10,000 MB legally has to say 10,000 MB and cannot
say 10 GB because they are not actually offering 10 GB and that actually
falls under DTPA and a host could actually get nailed on a technicality if
they used a calculation of 1,000 vs. 1,024 and advertise that they
offer Gigabytes.
There is a bit of a legal loophole though in that a host could dress up what
they advertise with words such as "almost" or "nearly" and then using the
Gigabyte measurement would not be false advertising.
Example: We offer nearly 2 GB web space on all accounts!
(In the above example, the host might offer 2,000 MB instead of 2,048 MB
as they used the word "nearly" in their advertising. Without that quantifier
though, the host would be legally bound to setting the limits at 2,048 MB)
At our own hosting service, we offer our members 2 GB of web space
which means the limits are actually setup properly as 2,048 MB.
Computers use binary on / off states to represent information and because
of this fact, all unit measurements are always an equal power of "2".
A single binary on / off state represented as "1" or "0" respectively is a "Bit".
8 Bits make up a "Byte"
1,024 Bytes makes up a "Kilobyte"
1,024 Kilobytes makes up a "Megabyte"
1,024 Megabytes makes up a "Gigabyte"
1,024 Gigabytes makes up a "Terabyte"
To answer the question:
The industry standard and only officially recognized value for Gigabyte
is the values given above.
Some people just round off values and multiply by thousands but this is
only good for estimation and does not give you an accurate total.
Any host that offers 10,000 MB legally has to say 10,000 MB and cannot
say 10 GB because they are not actually offering 10 GB and that actually
falls under DTPA and a host could actually get nailed on a technicality if
they used a calculation of 1,000 vs. 1,024 and advertise that they
offer Gigabytes.
There is a bit of a legal loophole though in that a host could dress up what
they advertise with words such as "almost" or "nearly" and then using the
Gigabyte measurement would not be false advertising.
Example: We offer nearly 2 GB web space on all accounts!
(In the above example, the host might offer 2,000 MB instead of 2,048 MB
as they used the word "nearly" in their advertising. Without that quantifier
though, the host would be legally bound to setting the limits at 2,048 MB)
At our own hosting service, we offer our members 2 GB of web space
which means the limits are actually setup properly as 2,048 MB.
