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Why would someone need hosting with unlimited bandwidth?
What does unlimited bandwidth have to do with hosting? I see these companies advertising "unlimited bandwidth" and I don't understand why its necessary? Don't you get bandwidth from your ISP providers? Why would you need bandwidth from a hosting provider as well?
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9 Answers
Am not sure where you're coming from on this, but not all ISP plans are unlimited. There are lots of metered plans, esp for consumers and very small businesses who want to really keep their costs down.
More importantly, if you get your bandwidth from a hosting provider that can give you VoIP or other telephony-style solutions, they are better able to ensure quality of service and reliability. This is especially important if they can offer SIP trunks, which gives you all kinds of flexibility and options to add other IP-based services to VoIP. That's where hosted becomes really attractive, and helps businesses get a lot more out of voice.
Otherwise, you have the BYOB model - bring your own bandwidth - where the hosting provider only gives you VoIP. This can be a lower cost solution, but you're more vulnerable to the shortcomings of VoIP, esp if the service is running over the public Internet.
Unlimited bandwidth is usually a feature for website Hosting Providers. It means that you could provide a video streaming service on your website, for instance, and not be hit by charges based on utilisation. It's a bit of marketing term really as you'll always be limited by server and application speeds and almost all Providers will have a fair usage policy in place to prevent companies driving multiple Hi-Def video streams 24/7.
When you host a site/application on a web server that server resides in the data center of the hosting company. In that case, the use of bandwidth is referred to as the use of bandwidth by your application/video/website on that web server. So, if 100 visitors visit your site and each download a video and a web page, of total size x, then your server has utilized the bandwidth quote, 100x.
This is different from your internet connection/ISP's bandwidth quote for your plan.
However, the term unlimited bandwidth is a pure marketing gimmick. Try buying one such "unlimited bandwidth" with a hosting company and then starting a huge video site. They will block you or throttle you within hours!
Hope I was able to address this.
Cheers!
When it comes to hosting, unlimited bandwidth means that your “hosted server” is always accessible regardless of network traffic. Unfortunately, while one might be able to reach the server, there is no guarantee that the server can handle the load. Companies advertise “unlimited bandwidth” for the same reason a rental car company might offer unlimited miles during a car rental – to get your attention and beat the competition. Unlike the car rental agency, unlimited access to your hosted server IS a requirement. Consider a small business with a niche product. What happens if one day your product shows up on a popular television program and CNN mentions it as well? What if there is not enough bandwidth to support the traffic to the web server hosting the niche product’s sales site? Small companies do not want to host their corporate web sites in their basements or even in their office space. They host their web server with the hosting provider for that one day when the demand for their product grows unexpectedly. It would be very unfortunate for the business if less than half of the potential customers reached the site that day to buy your product because your hosting provider had too little bandwidth.
Hope this helps!
Benjamin, Great example. However I do have a different view point here.
First - Hosting companies who do not advertise unlimited bandwidth do not stop or block or suspend services the moment the bandwidth limit is reached. They simply charge for it at a predetermined rate. Which is accepted business practice as they are also charged on bandwidth in a metered way.
Second. On the other hand some hosters advertise that the cost of the package includes unlimited bandwidth. That is not possible. That is akin to saying that the car comes with no-cost-unlimited miles! (unlimited gas!)
Third. All hosting companies - big, small, good or bad - come with the facility to have as many visitors as you want. But I feel that there is a strong need for users to be educated on misleading tactics. There simply is no 'unlimited bandwidth' option. Everyone pays for the bandwidth, hosters, ISPs, fibre cable companies.
Regards,
Rudhir,
Good point of view! My response was to the original question and not a counter to your response.
Regards,
I don't think there is ever an 'unlimited' bandwidth and there is always a catch with 'unlimited' plans. Atum offers 2 terabytes bandwidth which is more than enough... take a look if you're looking for hosting plans. http://www.atum.com
Unlimited bandwidth means that the host have the resources needed to guarantee that you'll never use up more that what is available. They positively know that a new customer will never be able to attract so much traffic as to outrun their bandwidth, and if they do, they'll probably looking at having their own server.
There are also "unlimited" MySQL databases offers that count on the premise that the average user will never use more than one or two anyway.
The "unlimited" means not metered, it's not really unlimited, you can not overload the entire server, you should choose the hosting according to your actual requirement and get some hosting review first from such http://webhostpark.com
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