How are hosting companies able to offer 300GB cpanel hosting accounts so affordably?

From a technical standpoint, you are not restricted to the amount of available resources on the server when issuing quotas. For example, you could allocate ten accounts each with 300GB allocations on a server that only actually has a terabyte of storage. This might become a problem if all users actually use their 300GB allocation.

There was a very interesting thread about this not too long ago here on the forums about this topic (from a business rather than technical standpoint) that you may want to search for.

 

It´s marketing... You will see a lot of companies offering things as 500gb, unlimited bandwidth, ssh access in a shared enviroment, etc per 4-5 dolars per month.

It´s simple stupid. For example here in Argentina is a hosting company that offers lot of things at very low price, but service is bad and people then complaints. Cheap = lot of users = lot of bandwidth consumtion = lot of servers to administrate

If you want to host a site for test or hobby purpouses then go ahead, but if you need to host a company site think it 3 times.

As David said you can allocate 10 accounts of 300gb on a server. Imagine $ 5 dolars per account, only $ 50 of gain. Affordable server below that amount dont exists. And I think it´s not business to have a $ 50 buck gain per server for anyone.

You pay what you get. Will be nice to write a doc about this kind of companies, just to educate users that nothing is unlimited.

 

That is true. I used to do personal webhosting for people; nothing major or corporate - I got tired of people complaining that I was too expensive because they could get 300 GB for the same price. I always believed that a company should base the price and package on their total resources rather than try to oversell it. Of course, some of them try to justify it in weird ways. Then you have people loading their sites up with LOADS of big files and videos, causing the hard drive to poof away. Or, you have the providers with the TOS agreements that say "No videos, images over 250 KB, music files or applications allowed." Must make for some very small and plain websites.

I get a kick out of someone telling me he has a 300 GB site, then complaining because the server ran out of space when he uploaded 5 GB. In one case, 2 days later, the provider shut the server off because they ran out of their monthly bandwidth!

Anyway, you're right about marketing. The providers hope that people will just be buying for gaming teams and thus will use less than a gig of space. Their theory is, if you can do it that way, you can offer this gigantic package and attract every young kid and unexperienced user, thus repaying the cost of a very cheap server.

 

It's still all about the sizzle. Most of these types of marketing ploys are hatched chasing after the noob and - even worse - the "semi-literate".

People confuse commoditization with simplicity - just because you can buy Web server space and sign-up as a reseller doesn't mean you are qualified to use it.

Anybody can buy a concrete truck, but that doesn't mean they are qualified to drive it.