UNLIMITED Bandwidth – A Modern Day Myth

Some web hosting companies offer web hosting plans with the “unlimited bandwidth”, “unmetered bandwidth”,or “unlimited disk space” as a sales feature to tempt unsuspecting consumers.

Unfortunately, bandwidth is not free. And there is no such thing as an unlimited size disk drive.

If there were, large companies like Google and Yahoo could run their businesses on a $20 “unlimited” hosting account, instead of investing millions of dollars a year on their infrastructure.

Bandwidth is a measure of the amount of data that people download from your website. This includes web pages, graphics and text. If you have a lot of visitors who look at or download a lot of large files from your website, you will need a lot of bandwidth.

A web hosting account includes a certain amount of bandwidth. If you exceed this amount you have to pay an additional fee for each megabyte of data that your visitors download.

So web hosting with unlimited bandwidth would be VERY attractive for owners of site using a lot of bandwidth, who could potentially save thousands of dollars a month.

If fact, you might ask why sites like Yahoo and Google would spend millions of dollars on bandwidth if they could get unlimited amounts for a few dollars a month!

The Fundamental Flaw with All Unlimited Offers

There’s a built in Fundamental Flaw with these offers of unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
1. Bandwidth is not supplied free – Hosting Companies pay for it.
2. These Hosts promise an unlimited amount – Free.

Something doesn’t add up. Turns out that it’s a smoke and mirrors marketing trick.

The only reason that these people offer unlimited bandwidth is that they know that most sites will only use a small amount, and never approach their definition of “excessive”, whatever that may be. That’s why it’s offered – they’re betting that their clients won’t use too much.

Human nature being what it is, people will perceive that “unlimited” will be better than specified amounts of disk space and bandwidth offered by the companies who don’t use this marketing gimmick.

A Special Meaning of “Unlimited”

Here’s the catch. If you have an account that gives you unlimited bandwidth, you will discover that they have a very special definition of “Unlimited”.

Have a look in their “Terms and Conditions” document, and you’ll find that there will be a limitation clause. Here’s one from a company who loudly offers “unlimited bandwidth”

4(b) XXX XXXX reserves the right to immediately suspend or terminate SERVICES to a Subscriber generating excessive bandwidth to the server(s), or using excessive server resources.

So -you buy web hosting with unlimited bandwidth, but if you use more than a certain amount your account is shut down. And what’s more, they don’t tell you what “excessive” means. And they’ll shut you down if you exceed it.

Looks pretty misleading to us. And similar conditions exist on every “unlimited” site that we have checked.

I’m certainly not saying that you should not use a site that offers something “unlimited”. Just don’t choose one web host over another because one offers “unlimited something” and the other doesn’t.  It’s far more important to consider reliability, quality of service, and the availability of things that you need.

Lifetime Hosting

Another thing to be careful of is companies who offer “Lifetime” web hosting for a very cheap price.

The “lifetime” they refer to is not YOUR lifetime, but that of their business – which is often short. In many cases, they discover that their business model is not sustainable, and you either have to pay an additional fee after a couple of years, or have your account terminated.
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