Why you should ignore the Unlimited/Un-metered Bandwidth Debate

Check out any web hosting forum and you’ll soon discover the Unlimited/Un-metered Bandwidth debate raging in some thread or another. Its argumentative, it’s confusing so where does it leave the customer trying to make an informed decision about a web hosting plan.

Well believe it or not as a typical web site owner you are safe to ignore it. For years web hosts have tried to appeal to customers with bigger and better specs, having completely lost sight of the realistic needs of their customers, the result is this ongoing debate across web hosting forums. For example:

Fact: A typical website occupies between 10MB and 50 MB of storage space*. So why do you need 5+ Gigabytes of storage?

Answer: You don’t, even if you had an extensive web database you would unlikely to require this amount of space. Besides most web hosts don’t count database size or even mailbox sizes within your web space allocation, these are limited separately.

Fact: Less than 5% of web sites get more than 3,500 visitors a month*. An average site consumes 300KB of Bandwidth per visitor that means 3,500 visitors would consume 1GB of bandwidth. Unless you are expecting more than 35,000 visitors a month 10GB of Data Transfer is more than enough!

There are exceptions to the latter, for example a site with large file downloads, mp3’s, video files, or steaming media will use much more bandwidth per visitor. But many hosts exclude such sites from Unlimited Bandwidth Offers or place limitations on them in other ways.

Realistically though, these big figures and generous offers are akin to an all you can eat buffet. It’s a marketing pitch designed to attract your attention. Web hosts like these all-you-can-eat restaurants know what you are likely to consume, and they use subtle methods of limiting your overall consumption. Notice that in every all you can eat buffet, there is always plenty of cheap tasty “filler-food” like bread and pizza? Web hosts do the same.

What’s filler-food for web hosts?

[ ] File Type Exclusion: basically if you only allow people to upload HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP and other ASCII text files, then alongside that allow: Flash, JPEG, GIF and PNG files. Then no file is likely to be massive in size, therefore it’s not likely to use much bandwidth or much disk space.

[ ] File Size limitation, more proactively you limit the size of an individual file say to 1 MB, this way the file can be downloaded 1024 times and use only 1GB of Data Transfer. It also limits the amount of disk space you can use.

[ ] Bandwidth Throttling, this is where a host limits the speed of downloads from your web site to prevent you going over a particular limit, this can be advertised as “un-metered bandwidth”. The opposite of “throttled” bandwidth is “burstable” bandwidth and it’s something to check for whenever you an “un-metered bandwidth offer.

How should we feel about this?

Well first we have to accept that web hosts are often caught up in the race to offer more and more features for less and less money. They don’t really want to treat you like an idiot, you know just as well as they do that you not going to use 1 GB of web space. But they have to offer it, because there are people out there who are still turned on by these ridiculous figures.

Equally web hosts who offer such grandiose specifications have to then apply subtle limitations otherwise their services will be monopolised by a small number of customers, usually download, warez or porn sites who take advantage of their apparent generosity. This inevitably compromises the level of service to everyday regular customers who don’t have excessive requirements.

In conclusion, the debate surrounding unlimited or un-metered bandwidth is one of the web hosting industries own making. The message to consumers is really to look at your requirements in a realistic manner, make your decision on what you need, not the excess that is on offer.