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Is There Such A Thing As Unlimited Bandwidth & Hard Drives?

Published Thursday, August 28, 2008 by bloggerblognet83280 | E-mail this post

This has been floating around for a few years now. Companies offering unlimited bandwidth and unlimited hard drive space. The answer to this question is an obvious no. There is no such as unlimited bandwidth and unlimited hard drives, therefore it's just a tactic that many hosts use which is called overselling. The majority of users never use their allocated bandwidth or space assigned, and many hosts take this into perspective when managing the plans they are offering to end users. Occasionally you may find that some users can and will use all the space assigned, for example anyone using an image hosting service or file hosting service can take advantage of the unlimited bandwidth and space feature and basically kill the server if the host allowed it. In actuality, most hosts also counter this by having a CPU clause or resource clause which would state if your site is using a certain % of the resources that your account can either be suspended, terminated or in some cases they would recommend upgrading to a dedicated server.

Unmetered vs Unlimited

There is a difference. Unlimited means there is virtually no limit, which is frankly impossible. Unmetered means that you will not be billed for any extra bandwidth being transferred but you still technically have a limit depending on the type of port connection you are on. You'll see some hosts advertising 10MBit port and 100MBit port. The difference being, if your server is maxing out the 10MBit port, it is still technically unmetered but your server WILL come to a crawl, until you find a way to drop the amount of traffic being transferred OR upgrade to a burstable connection, which you'll have to pay more for. Also, most hosts have a hidden clause where they state that unmetered traffic does not mean you have that entire 10MBit port for yourself, but it is actually shared among several servers, so you'll never be able to attain that full 10MBit port for your use.

Hopefully this explains the difference between the two, and will give you a clearer idea of how these terms are used and how it applies to your decision making when choosing a host.

More insightful articles and resource information can be found at http://www.dedicatedserversearch.com

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