The Truth About Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting

Unlimited bandwidth hosting was developed because of the competition among different web hosting services, and it is of great benefit to customers. If you have unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, then you never need to worry about your website growing too big or too popular for a cheap monthly hosting package – at least in theory.

But, what does unlimited bandwidth hosting really mean? As you feared, the answer is a negative one. Even if most, if not all, website hosting companies have many servers and fiber optic cables that provide Internet access to the sites they serve, they too have limited capabilities.

The Internet is worldwide, but websites do require a physical address. They can’t just exist in an ethereal world. And that’s the purpose of web hosting to provide storage space and cables to connect the sites to the Internet.

So hosting companies are limited to the amount of capacity that they have. And given that they probably have thousands of customers, many of them with a large number of sites, then clearly each site and each customer must have limits too.

Something you will notice if you compare shared unlimited bandwidth hosting deals with the more expensive reseller or VPS packages, is that the reseller and VPS offers have limits. Why would you pay 5 or 10 times more for something limited, when unlimited bandwidth hosting is so inexpensive?

The main difference is that limits of resellers and VPS are very clear. The limits on shared hosting packages can be varied depending on what other customers are doing. If you buy a VPS, you have that space and that bandwidth and nobody else can use it. You never have to worry about your site running slow because someone else is using too much bandwidth.

If you are on a shared bandwidth unlimited hosting package, your site is on a server that is shared by other people, and all of you are sharing the same IP address. So in fact you cannot use all of the hosting company’s servers. You cannot even use the whole of that one server, because other customers will need space too. You can find this information in the ‘fair use’ clause in the contract.

Most of the unlimited bandwidth packages are sold assuming that most people only use a little bandwidth. If one looks at the times each customer’s site peaks, they somehow even out with each other. This works on the same concept used by airlines as they overbook seats expecting someone not to show up.

So, what should you do if you are in need of a lot of bandwidth? Make sure to read the fine print of your contract, but you may have to upgrade to a different package fairly quickly. You might need more space if your site suddenly becomes popular and if you need to include videos or a lot of pictures. If enough customers complain, and your site suddenly occupies too much space, you will probably receive an e-mail letting you know unlimited bandwidth is not so unlimited after all.

VPS is a cost effective alternate option to dedicated servers. Choose from cheap VPS systems including CentOS VPS.

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