Millions of people will cycle through web hosting opportunities and wonder whether or not they are getting a good deal. If you find yourself wondering whether or not you’re getting a good solution overall, you will need to consider what unlimited space and bandwidth truly means. This means a lot of things to a lot of companies. Even some free solutions are promising unlimited space and bandwidth, but that’s where you need to be careful. The web hosting world works within several different options, and not all of them are going to be advantageous to your page. Sure, you may find yourself wondering whether or not it’s going to work for you, but when you end up seeing the true meaning of what this is overall, you’ll end up chasing a different route. Don’t be fooled by what some companies are calling unlimited space and bandwidth, it’s going to cause you to see a huge push in the wrong direction.
Limited Hosting First
Some webmasters want limited hosting, because that means that there is a finite amount of space and bandwidth. That’s a good thing for those that want a specific set of tools and space to manage a small website. It’s also good for resellers that have clients whom may not understand web technologies. This is sometimes a good thing because it controls the space on a server. When you start getting into unlimited space and bandwidth, there are two major ways that this happens, and most people don’t comply with it overall.
The Truth Nature of Unlimited
For most web hosting companies, they’re going to tell you that you can get unlimited space and bandwidth. However, they are shared accounts. What comes down to is simple, you will have to deal with other people on a server. Companies will put 100, or even 1,000 websites on 1 server. They then close off the shell access, and do not allow you to write server level code. That doesn’t seem so bad, right? But the problem starts to rise when you realize that everyone is getting the same amount of bandwidth. Let’s assume that you were placed on a server that was claimed to be unlimited space and bandwidth, but your neighbor is the #1 fan site for something big like “Harry Potter”. That means that they will be getting a lot of traffic, more than you’re getting. What does that mean? That means that they will encroach on your server size and that will cause you to lose speed, and load times. If another site is getting in your virtual backyard, your page will suffer, their page will suffer, and you’ll find yourself wondering about the reality of unlimited space and bandwidth.
Popularity Has a Price
For those that are looking at getting a good hosting account, watch out for unlimited space and bandwidth because you may get very popular. Major podcasts, for instance have to pay a lot of money for extra data. Why? Because podcasts have mp3 files that are quite heavy. When you are really popular in that world, you will have a ton of bandwidth being sucked out per download. If you’re too popular, and the web host that you’ve managed to get an account with sees that, you will pay extra. Read into the fine print of any unlimited space and bandwidth account and you will see that there are provisions that will shut you down fast, if you get too popular in any way, shape, or form. Sadly, this is not something that is going to change at all.
When It Really Works
There are times when you will see that the moniker and gimmick of unlimited space and bandwidth will be 100% true. The way that this works is through setting up your own server. If a company offers this unlimited solution, look into whether or not you’re going to be on a dedicated server alone. If your page lives on that, then perhaps you will have the best bet of unlimited bandwidth and space. While it’s not truly unlimited, the chances are that you will not run out of space on a dedicated server. It’s a true rarity to see your site go down or your podcast run out of space and bandwidth if you look at a high capacity dedicated server. If you’re skeptical, just look into the low cost companies that are doing shared hosting and read through their terms of service. You’ll be very surprised with how bad things are in this world, especially when it comes to the idea of unlimited space and bandwidth. It’s just not that simple.
Check out our U.S Unlimited Hosting and Canadian Unlimited Hosting recommended hosting providers.