Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Unmetered bandwidth = Unlimited bandwidth ?

[Serious Sam]

Before you faint for seeing a WHT thread with those words in it, please read my post

Ok. There is this person on another forum, who "runs" a webhosting company. This is about bandwidth, and transfer.

From his post.

We offer fast, un-throttled, true burstable bandwidth. We do not place limits on your site's bandwidth (many hosts offer "unlimited" bandwidth but severely restrict the number of kbytes/second flowing out of your website). We work very hard to ensure that all of our customers bandwidth needs can be met under our $15/month plan, however we do have several important restrictions:

· No Pornographic Sites
· No download/File Archives
· No warez and/or illegal content

If we feel at any time that you are violating any of our conditions, we reserve the right to suspend your account, and you will not be refunded.

Adult, warez, illegal movie, illegal mp3, hacking, "download-only" or illegal content are NOT permitted. Such accounts are subject to deletion without notice and may not receive a refund! Your un-metered transfer is meant for the use of your website only. If you are serving illegal files of any kind we reserve the right to ask you to leave and to throttle your bandwidth while you remain on our server. We also reserve the right to cancel your account immediatly. We reserve the right to deny shell access to any user who we suspect of illegal activity. We reserve the right to cancel any account at any time. No SPAMMING! Any account sending spam either through our mail server or "spam-vertising" their website - even if not with our mail servers - will be deleted.

** NOTE: Clans that want to offer HL/CS etc patches as a mirror site, you have 2 options, either:
· put them up for your clan and firends only. (dont submit your site to csnation, or valve as a mirror, or advertise that you are, or will be hosting them in your news etc. untill at least 1 month after the release)
or
· we will set up a FTP server for our clients where you can download extra big files, or really popular files for 2$/file/month extra

Snippit from: Traffic TOS

Although we offer Un-Metered space and bandwidth, if we find your use is excessive, we will temporarly suspend your account, and then notify you. Then we will discuss further action. If it is a simple misunderstanding, we will let you know how much you are using, and help you find a solution, if it violates any of the TOS, then we will take the proper actions.

.... yadda yadda yadda.

I argue that his statement is misleading and he cannot offer unmetered bandwidth and transfer. It's simply like saying it is unlimited transfer when it's not.

He figures the average person will use 10gigs, and so I say;

"I run a site that has 10mb images, and recieves millions of views resulting in 400gigs of transfer". He says it is under their tos to suspend my site, even though they guaranteed me unlimited, unthrottled bandwidth and (him portraying) FALSE unlimited bandwidth.

I argue that his statement is misleading and he cannot offer unmetered bandwidth and transfer. It's simply like saying it is unlimited transfer when it's not.

Last time I checked, unmetered traffic/bandwidth was the same as unlimited traffic/bandwidth no?

[fshost]

NO, unmetered is when you can use all the trafic available on the pipe. So I can offer unmetered, on my 56k. Unlimited is when you could use all you want, and never run out. Which is nearly impossible unless you run LEVEL3.

[eddy2099]

Last time I checked, unmetered traffic/bandwidth was the same as unlimited traffic/bandwidth no?

Pretty much not the same. What accompanies the unmetered traffic is usually a fixed cap on the 'volume' of traffic can travel at any one time. Imagine a water pipe, if your utility company charge you one fee and tell you that you could use as much water as you one from that one pipe provided you use that pipe, they could easily have computed how much maximum you could use. Because of the diameter of the tube and the water flow rate, there is no way you can exceed the physical constraint.

Unlimited traffic usually means no cap, no limits which is an impossibility.

In fact, several reputable web hosting businesses do offer unmetered traffic on their dedicated servers and sometimes on their shared accounts with certain restrictions.

[VNPIXEL]

Although we offer Un-Metered space and bandwidth, if we find your use is excessive, we will temporarly suspend your account

That is the catch.

[alapo]

Their position seems resonable.

[Serious Sam]

From the person;

"unmeterd = you are not in set restrictions where when you hit x amount of gigs you get closed down, like omis site it. That was we can keep peoples sites running, let the people who need a little extra have a little extra, and those who dont need as much, arent hogging a lot of unused, usable and usefull bandwidth (as it is commonly referd to all over the internet and understood to be the equivalent to 'transfer' in this case)"

Last time I checked, bandwidth refered to the speed, and transfer to the amount of data?

[Hostkookster]

Yes, that position is reasonable - however....

Anytime that a host offers "unmetered" or "unlimited" bandwidth/data transfer you can almost guarantee that a customer whether they know it or not will use "more" than a host wants, sometimes this will mean it takes the server down.

I've been in the hosting business since 1999 and have done some research on this subject for myself and the company I work for. We were going to offer unmereted bandwidth with our plans however the more we dug into the "unmetered" "unlimited" scene we could see that it causes more headaches than necessary. I'm not going to point out specific names but we've monitored companies who have offered unmetered or unlimited plans. Typically (This is a general statement not meant to offend) we found that those who offered such plans had either poor service (Host didn't care) or downtime was very frequent because clients decided they could use as much bandwidth as they wanted thus using extensive system resources - it led to slashdottings, DDOS attacks..etc. Now, this was only the couple companies we monitored for several months, but based on that we decided not to go the way of "unmetered" bandwidth although tempting it was.

Let's ask some questions. Do any Well known WHT members who have been around 1, 2, 3 years know of any reputable and respected host that offers unmetered bandwidth and has a somewhat unblemished service record?
I myself have yet to find one. Feature Price anyone?

[eddy2099]

Do any Well known WHT members who have been around 1, 2, 3 years know of any reputable and respected host that offers unmetered bandwidth and has a somewhat unblemished service record?

Well, Rackshack has their Virtual Hosting account at Unmetered Bandwidth and I believe they have an unblemished service record. They too offers 10mbs Capped but Unmetered Dedicated Servers too.

[Hostkookster]

Guess I should have been clearer - Rackshack has their own DC. Expansion for them is not a problem. They have bandwidth coming out of their ears.

Same with Rackforce - unmetered T1.

Lets talk strictly hosting companies...

[hekwu]

---Although we offer Un-Metered space and bandwidth, if we find your use is excessive, we will temporarly suspend your account, and then notify you---

The REAL problem is at what point do they consider your account excessive? 10 gig, 20 gig, 30 gig, 40 gig, 140 gig? So they have an "untold" bandwidth amount for each website? They know what it is but their customers do not.... I'd rather know what I'm working with instead of wondering. Your luck is you introduce a new product or function on your site, market it but then find out your site was down for 1 day while you were out of town or something.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, some webhost are SPINLESS!!!!