Chances are you have already seen hosting offers like this: unlimited bandwidth for $3 a month. If you haven't, you'll probably see it soon somewhere. It may be unlimited bandwidth, mailboxes, space or whatever; I titled this tutorial "unlimited bandwidth" because it's the most common option.

Now you would be stupid not to sign up for this service, wouldn't you? Imagine that: UNLIMITED bandwidth. No matter how many visitors your site has, how popular it might become, you don't need to worry about your bandwidth because you can have as much of it as you want.

If you think that way, I don't blame you. I used to think the same. However, when I tried few of these "unlimited" offers, read and thought about them a while, I came to some conclusions. The most important one is: don't get lured!

There is never unlimited amount of anything. For example, typical hard disks are now 80 or 120 gigabytes. They will become bigger and bigger, but there is no "unlimited disk". If you run out of space, you simply need to buy another disk, that's it. With bandwidth it is about the same: an Internet connection for your host can have 10MB/s or higher throughput, but it is never an "unlimited" one. There is a point when you just can't push it further. So the truth about these offers is that they are talking about UNMETERED bandwidth. Unmetered means simply "we don't measure exactly how much you use it". And that's all.

Well, you might think: "Okay, it is unmetered then. Still good: they don't measure it so I can use plenty of it. They won't notice since they do not check it."

Wrong again. Think again about resource limits of the server machine your site is on. The computer probably cost $2000 or so (if it cost less, it will be slow as a cow), and the Internet connection may be something about $500 a month. Now there's the cost of electricity, technical support, collocation facility rental, and so on, and so on. So to make decent profit from your $3 per month, the company is about to put 500, 1000 or even 2000 people on the same computer. Other way it will simply not be worth it.

So there you are, hosted on a $3/month host with 1000 other people. Imagine that your site is becoming popular (or maybe you have big files for downloading), and you get more and more visitors. The same happens to other websites on your server. What's the result? Simply, the server is working more and more slowly. So does your website. Remember, the Internet connection, server CPU power, disk etc are not unlimited; the same amount of them must be divided between more and more page requests. Even if your site worked great when it had 10 visitors a day, you cannot expect that it will continue to do the same with 10.000 visitors. It simply will not.

So what is the hosting company going to do? They will select websites which eat up the most bandwidth (or CPU power), and tell them to go away. Don't believe it? Read carefully terms of service you agreed to when buying the host. Buried in fine print, there is a clause saying: "we reserve the right to cancel your account if it uses too much server resources". They will make good use of it, you can be sure. And don't expect a refund when they close your account. You will not get your money back, because you violated their TOS – by using too much of your "unlimited" bandwidth! That's how it looks like in reality. I didn't invent all this - it happened to me many times.

Of course, there are some real unmetered bandwidth hosts. They don't cost $2 or $3, but rather $100-$300 per month. If you buy them, you are usually the only person utilizing the server, and then you can really use its full processing power and bandwidth. For $5 or less don't expect anything even close to that.

Michal Pleban is a webmaster with many years of experience. His latest site is 11send: http://www.11send.com/ - a free website for transferring, sending & emailing large files easily.

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