The truth about unlimited bandwidth hosting plans
August 15th, 2008We get asked regularly if we offer plans with unlimited (or huge) amounts of space and bandwidth like some other well known hosts.
The answer is simple, No, as we prefer not to LIE to our customers.
Offering an unlimited amount of a limited resource is simply a marketing ploy or in other words a Con, and it can’t and doesn’t exist.
As a rule a single server will usually have maybe up to 2000GB of bandwidth per month allocated to it, so how can a web host offer a single customer more bandwidth than the whole of the server they’re hosted on has available to it. Answer: It’s a lie and they can’t.
How the unlimited space and bandwidth Con works!
In hosting circles it is a well known fact that people on the whole don’t know how much space and bandwidth their site is going to need, and so if they can take an unmetered/unlimited plan then they don’t have to think about it, they feel that if their site suddenly becomes popular they are covered because there’s no bandwidth limit.
Unfortunately the fact is that the opposite is usually the case. Unlimited plan hosts are by definition over-sellers, they rely on the fact that in 99% of cases a website will use very little space and bandwidth, and so they pack their servers with customers vastly overselling the space and bandwidth available to the server. The same goes for hosts offering huge amounts of space and bandwidth.
What this means is that when the odd site does start to use a high amount of bandwidth, (or god forbid the site gets hit by Digg) or a client decides to make use of the huge amount of space they were promised and uploads their digital photo or video collection, the host then has to act quickly to remove the customers site so as not to bring the whole over-sold server to it’s knees.
This usually comes in the shape of an email or phone call telling the customer that their site is using more server CPU cycles than is allowed, and asking the customer to upgrade or risk lossing their hosting, in many cases though is just means the site is closed without notice.
So what about us?
In our case we never oversell our servers, and we only offer plans with a realistic amount of space and bandwidth. We never allocate more space and bandwidth than is allocated to each of our servers, in fact we generally allocate less than 50% of a servers overall resources to allow for the growth of the customers on it, and to allow for the odd occasion when a customers site may suddenly gets an unusually large amount of traffic, e.g their latest promotion went really well, or they got a boost in the search engines as has happened to us all at some time I bet.
Another thing we don’t do is immediately disable sites that go over their allocated space or bandwidth limit, in fact unless it is an ongoing problem and we’ve heard nothing from the customer from multiple communications you probably wont hear from us, we’ll also advise how the customer can reduce their usage to come within their limits, or suggest a simple low cost upgrade path to cover the overused resource..
The final word.
The last question you should really ask yourself is this - Can I trust my valuable website with a host that has no problem systematically and blatantly lying to me.
I know I wouldn’t…
Anyway don’t take my word for it, I work for a web host after all. Just visit these independent sites to read what they have to say about the unlimited space and bandwidth Con.
http://www.findmyhosting.com/truthunlimited.htm
http://www.calvinleong.net/blog/2008/06/10/choosing-a-webhost-unlimited-bandwidth/
http://forums.webhostdir.com/showthread.php?t=14899

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Anyway so what has happened in the last 6 months. Well we’ve added lots of nice new features to our service offerings,
We’ve upgraded our DotNetPanel Control panel to include some