What does it Mean when a Web Hosting Company says Unlimited

There are many low cost web hosting companies which try to entice customers by stating that they offer unlimited domain names, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, etc. While these things might lure many prospective clients, some web experts warn people that the term “unlimited” does not imply its literal meaning.

According to webmasters, if an affordable hosting provider gives “unlimited” disk space to its clients, most of the time, this means that users can expand their website and add as much as content as they would want, but not of these all at the same time. Sometimes the web hosting provider would be the one to decide how much the client can add content each time.

Because of the notoriety of the “unlimited” disk space can sometimes be used as a misleading marketing strategy, some discount web hosting providers have used another ploy to attract potential customers. This is done by saying that they can provide a whopping 1000 MB to anyone who will sign up to their company. Meanwhile, clients should realize that most websites (with graphics, videos, and text) would typically require a disk space of only about 10 to 20 MB.

Another way for cheap web hosting companies to lure clients is by offering “unlimited” bandwidth. But before anything else, clients should know the exact definition of this term. Bandwidth refers to any amount of traffic that is allowed to be transferred between the Internet and the website. Some experts would also define bandwidth as the speed of data transfer.

Clients can determine the amount of bandwidth that they would need for their websites by simply multiplying the page size (this includes the text, videos, and graphics) by the number of expected monthly page views. For example, if a website has an average page size of 40 KB and has 70,000 monthly page views, the bandwidth should be ideally 3 GB every month.

Web experts suggest that small websites typically require a bandwidth of not more than 1 GB every month. For those websites which expect fewer site visitors, it is ideal to choose low bandwidth plan which mostly comes cheaper compared to high bandwidth plan. Meanwhile, if users expect that their websites would have many visitors on a daily basis, they should choose high bandwidth plan to accommodate the larger traffic.

The network connections (both internal and external) will determine the amount of bandwidth a budget web hosting provider can offer to its clients.

Another term used by some web hosting is the “unlimited” domain names. While the term “unlimited” is true, this doesn’t mean that this is always free. Yes, clients can use domain names as much as they would want, but they might need to pay additional fees for this service.

According to web experts, there is really no such thing as “unlimited” hosting since it is impossible for the current technology to allow this. In the web hosting business, each amount of transferred data is being paid by the service provider, and this would be then passed on to its clients. In the web hosting industry, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

When in doubt, always check with your web hosting provider about what they mean by “unlimited”.