Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth

Sunday, 16 January 2011

Disk space and bandwidth are one of the factors that most consumers look at when purchasing a hosting service for their website.  Of course a large number of these hosting companies are now offering "unlimited" disk space storage and bandwidth transfer.  What the average person sees when they read that is that they can literally continuously upload and download to their website without any fear of repercussions from doing so.  Of course this is not the actual truth, but many people like to believe that it is because the wording is the advertising that drew them in, in the first place.

What is unlimited hosting?

Of course to really gauge what "unlimited" is, a person would literally have to continuously upload and download content onto the hosting storage until they ran out.  Of course this may take a very long time, considering that most hosting services have so many servers and clusters of servers available to them that they would really not notice a terabyte of additional disk space used from one user.  The concept is simply that of an uncapped usage as long as it allows fair use between other accounts within the service.

It is important to remember with unlimited disk space and bandwidth that the servers are not meant to be used to upload and save a copy of music files, movies and other personal storage.  Bandwidth that is offered must be used towards building the website and providing content that is going to be shown on the website in the end.  Many of the unlimited hosting plans will be offered on restricted services which may make usage of the space and bandwidth means to cancel an account if the space or bandwidth was used incorrectly or against the law.  Not only that, but legal action may be taken against anyone that is breaking laws for copyright within their country.

The common thing to do with an unlimited disk space and bandwidth option is to simply use it like normal.  This would constitute normal use and could not get a customer in any trouble by using the unlimited bandwidth like normal.  Customers that are found to be misusing the resources may also have their resources cut or capped for using them incorrectly.  The process of then getting the bandwidth or server storage re-enabled may be long or have to be done after certain period of waiting or prerequisite grant.

It is very important to really take advantage of the unlimited services when possible but not in a way that could strain the servers and cause slow down and outage for others using the same service provider.  The unlimited storage may be used normally without restrictions without causing major strains and can really be beneficial to the overall system.  Otherwise, unlimited is simply a word that is being used to say that you are simply not being metered with your usage of the resources.  Taking care to only use what is needed will help to preserve the "unlimited" label.