Unlimited bandwidth

Man alive, I’ll try to compile this better in the coming weeks. I’m just blogging whatever I know so far about webhosting companies (webhosting monkeys, rather), so that other people can get their way around certain things too.

Whenever you see a webhosting company advertising “Unlimited Monthly Bandwidth” — rest assured this is never technically true.

It is impossible and very silly in the business sense, to provide this FREE “unlimited” bandwidth to any customer and their website being hosted. What if 599 of your 600 customers happen to have really, really, huge and popular websites? Someone has to pay for that server space…

You take a risk when signing up for such hosting plans, which are usually inexpensive. Chances are, you’re going to face problems if you do start getting more traffic. Chances are, your domain name is going to be “owned” by the webhosting company too. Initiating a domain transfer in future may prove to be, well, difficult.

It’s alright signing up for one of these cheap hosting plans if you have a small or personal website, or a website that doesn’t have too much traffic / does not use up a lot of disk space. I’ve heard that for the so-called unlimited option, you can presume you get about a gig’s worth of monthly bandwidth.

Should you sign up for such a plan, and subsequently really exceed your 1 gig of assumed transfer (perhaps 20 gigs and above) — what the hosting company will usually do is slap extra charges onto your billing account. Then they will tell you to “read their fine print”, when you question the customer service department on why these added fees are showing.

It’s better to choose a plan that *does* tell you how much monthly transfer you are getting — as opposed to this “unlimited” option — because it simply can’t be provided for free.

Next time you see “FREE” and “UNLIMITED!!” under a hosting plan, remember that this is just one of the multitude of tricks that webhosting companies call “advertising”, rofl.

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