Is Unlimited Bandwidth Fact or Fiction?
Many hosts, especially the free hosts, offer “unlimited” bandwidth. With all due respect to these companies and their attempt to look generous beyond belief, I must say there is not such thing as free unlimited bandwidth and what bandwidth is unlimited often has ‘strings attached’ so tread carefully before signing up to anything.
If your host says they will provide you with an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of bandwidth, this usually means either there is a limitation of some sort, or simply they assume you won’t be using much, and if you do – your site will go offline under some convenient pretext (this is more common with ‘free hosts’) The “limitations” I mentioned vary from host to host. The most common is ‘file size upload limit’, i.e. you cannot upload files larger than xxx MB. This way you can never really use huge amounts of bandwidth unless your site has a lot of traffic from visitors who browse your entire website, so no running a rival to YouTube!
If, however, there are no limitations of any kind, no daily nor monthly bandwidth control, most likey the usage is shared, this means if the entire server you are hosted on has a max. of 1000GB data transfer per month, and someone on your server has used 900GB, you and all the other users would have to make do with the remaining 100GB, for the rest of the month. Again, this is not true of all hosts but unless you ask your host, you will only find out the hard way!
As I said before, normally only free hosts would offer free ‘unlimited’ bandwidth, assuming that mostly new webmasters would use free hosts and do not yet have a good idea about it. Most new website developers also do not have a clue how much bandwidth their website will need and naturally they fall for the “unlimited bandwidth” bait, especially if told it’s free.
Essentially, free hosting is better when you’re starting out or trialling a design. As you’ve probably heard countless times before, you only get what you pay for, so when you’re not paying anything you have no grounds to complain.
If you’re looking for reasonably priced, quality UK hosting you can do a lot worse than consider Selfless Mind Hosting who have beginner packages from only £42 per year and that includes 5GB bandwidth every month. Additionally, you can get basic web hosting from only £2.34 per month from 1&1 one of the world’s largest web hosting companies.
If you are happy to have your site hosted in America there are dozens of hosts competing for your business. Some I would recommend are Easy CGI Web Hosting who offer 3.5GB of bandwidth on Windows servers for only $7.96 per month. If you prefer Linux hosting try Hostgator.com, IX Web Hosting or my old favourite Pow Web Hosting who offer an amazing 15,000GB bandwidth every month…that’s a lot!
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