There’s been a very ugly trend in the web hosting industry as of late regarding ‘unlimited’ bandwidth plans. Web hosting providers are advertising ‘unlimited’ bandwidth in order to seem like they can provide something they cannot. This is simply an IMPOSSIBLE task. When a customer then exceeds their cpu LIMIT as stated in the terms of service their service often gets suspended or even completely terminated (wait i thought you said it was unlimited?!).
The reason for the existence of these plans is that for the majority of websites who consume such a small amount of bandwidth, bandwidth seems unlimited because they don’t have the capability to exceed. If you’re never exceeding and there’s no problems, then the bandwidth does in fact seem unlimited. However, websites that have high traffic, i.e. online retailers that have plenty of graphics and customers will be affected by high bandwidth.
Keeping it Simple
Disk Space: The space on the server you have to completely store your website
Bandwidth: Amount you have to transfer web pages from the servers to your browser (FF, IE, Safari, Google Chrome) etc. that the visitor is using.
Think of a car, The entire car is the disk space. Some cars can hold 2 people, some can hold 8. The gas would be like the bandwidth. What affects your bandwidth would be the things that affect gas mileage. The more of those things you have on, the less mileage you get. Now imagine, an automaker advertising that they are offering cars with unlimited gas tanks, and gas mileage is a non issue. Sounds fishy doesn’t it? Now lets take the car for a drive with the Air Conditioning on until the gas runs out. We now go to the automaker and complain, and they simply say that according to the terms of service, we weren’t allowed to drive a certain distance anyway, so to remedy the situation, we have to buy a bigger car with a bigger gas tank.
OR, you exceeded your bandwidth so you now have to buy a bigger plan that allows more bandwidth and is much more costly because the webhoster lied that they could provide unlimited service.
Now What?
To avoid situations like these, simply estimate your bandwidth and choose the appropriate plan or our specialists can help you with this process. You may have noticed that HD does not offer an unlimited plan.
I’m starting a blog with the hopes of gathering a large following. As a start up It would be difficult to know what my bandwidth needs will be…hopefully alot. If there is an unforseen spike in traffic would I be prompted first by your company on the need to purchase more space or even another service to handle the increased traffic? I ask, because I’ve been advised by other (website owners) that any sudden and unexpected site traffic would/could be treated as an “issue” and thus the host may take the site down. Obviously if this were due to an unethical cause of the increased traffic i’d understand and support this…. But, if one is just plain successful and fortunate enough to received the new attention I would hope one could merely move over to the right hosting plan to handle the new traffic
Please let me know
Hi NEFTALI,
While a shared environment is an excellent place to start, if you are expecting a large following or spike in traffic, I would highly recommend our XenServer VPS plans. It offers on-demand scalability that will allow you to increase your CPU cores, RAM, storage space and bandwidth, all on-demand. The reason I recommend VPS first is due to the fact that upgrades from Shared to XenServer plans may take a few hours to migrate your site over to a new server.
Let us know if you have any questions. You can always submit a ticket at https://support.hostduplex.com or call us at 877.7.DUPLEX
Have a great day!
We also had a client who was running a contest for his Ten Millionth visitor to his site. He was awarding all kinds of expensive prizes and giveaways. This in turn created an explosive flux of unique viewers for him. While many other companies could have shut his website down entirely, we instead provided him the option of an upgraded plan to handle the added bandwidth.
-Jimmy
As a smart consumer, you should recognize that hosting companies are in a world with its own terminology. I knew ‘unlimited’ sounds like having no ends or limits in English; but that’s not the case when it comes to unlimited hosting plan.