Is unlimited bandwidth offer for real?

To survive in the fierce competition, some web hosting companies are acting extra aggresive in their marketing campaign. We are seeing more and more bandwidth offered with a lower price over the years and now (guess what?), big web hosting companies like BlueHost are offering *unlimited bandwidth*!

Unlimited Bandwidth – for real?

The right answer for the question is a “NO”.

After all, how can you offer unlimited bandwidth, when the bandwidth of the hosting companies, the server memory, the hardware for networking, as well as disk storage are physically limited.

The truth is unlimited bandwidth is only possible if the website hosting company possess their own internet broadband company. If they have own broadband company, then it is possible to offer their customers unlimited bandwidth per second.

So why do unlimited bandwidth hosting plans exist?

However, that’s not the full stop for our story.

To be fair, the bandwidth limitations we are talking about here are almost incomprehensible and would never be reached by a single website. Thus in practical, a hosting company could actually (very much) offer virtually unlimited bandwidth to its client.

Most websites only consume a very small amount of bandwidth and disk space. Web hosting companies that provide unlimited anything as a plan feature are banking on the fact that you won’t use very much.

This is the controversial area between truth and falsehood upon which marketing claims feed.

Should you fall for this marketing trap?

Yes, you can say that the “Unlimited Bandwidth Offer” is a marketing trick to get your business.

However, the web hosting market is very competitive. Although selling plans that pretend to be unlimited can seem dishonest, but it does not mean that the hosting company will not provide good service. (Again, using BlueHost as our example, is a very good web host in my definition.)

Further more, there’s a lot more to concern than just bandwidth offer.

While most people are concern about the disk storage and bandwidth capacity, your major consideration point on web host shouldn’t be the bandwidth or disk space.

What should comes into your concern is the server resources usage. This include usage of server CPU, RAM, as well as database connection. Without sufficient resources in these items – unlimited bandwidth or disk storage are plain meaningless.

So hey, next time when you’re shopping for web hosting services, remember not to limit your eyeballs only on the bandwidth/disk storage offers. Put an eye on the customer feedbacks regarding on server stability, server uptime, server load time and so on to measure on the server resources usage.