Unlimited Bandwidth & Overselling

[Kanyon Thomas]

With competition mounting in the web hosting market, hosting providers have come up with ‘unlimited’ bandwidth, the key selling point of web hosting packages now-a-days. However, this is just a marketing ploy developed by the service providers since no web hosting company can offer unlimited bandwidth as bandwidth of the service provider, network and even the Internet itself is physically limited. But since this limitation faced by the web hosting company itself is incomprehensible and practically unreachable by customers, this expression is not totally unreliable.

In unmetered bandwidth, the hosting companies will not measure the bandwidth that customer uses. The hosting providers will not hinder the traffic to customer’s website by placing restrictions on the amount of hits you can receive or bandwidth you can use. For example, if you as the customer avail a hosting plan of 100mbps unmetered bandwidth, the top line speed would be 100 mbps. The hosting provider would control the speed at which data transfer takes place as 100mbps while the amount of data transfer is not measured or charged. Hence the user is not charged with bandwidth overages or extra charges.

With ‘unlimited’ bandwidth gaining much popularity and market, the detrimental practice of overselling bandwidth has also proliferated. Overselling in simple terms is the practice of selling more bandwidth than a web hosting company actually has. This irresponsible action leads to costly site outages that would be devastating to the customer’s business. Web hosting service providers should be responsible and constantly monitor their bandwidth usage and ensure that websites of all customers are up and running in order to prevent overselling.