The bad news about unlimited bandwidth

Wouldn't it be great to have unlimited bandwidth and storage? Think of all the things you could do with a web hosting account that had no limit on transfer. You could give YouTube a run for its money, start up a search engine bigger than Google and Yahoo combined, back up the web just in case the Internet Archive missed anything, host the world's busiest bulletin board, run a million businesses, and still have plenty of room left over for personal projects.

Does that sound a little too good to be true? Well, there's only one tiny problem with unlimited hosting: it doesn't exist.

Unlimited bandwidth and storage don't exist either; at least, not in the way people usually imagine. If you see a plan for "unlimited transfer" you probably imagine being able to use as much bandwidth as you wish; in other words, infinite capacity for data flow, however much you throw at it. (And of course, common sense should tell you that providing infinite amounts of anything would pose a logistical headache.)

The hosting company sees it like this: they are not imposing any arbitrary limits on traffic or disk space per se; they are not entering any automatic cutoff numbers in their hosting management system, so their plans are "not limited." However, server resources such as CPU usage are indeed limited and the overall healthy and responsive functioning of the server must be maintained.

That means if you make the server too busy or overloaded for any reason (such as sending too much traffic or using too much disk space, for example) your site will have to be disabled. And if you look in the fine print of any hosting Terms of Service, you'll see a statement (however vague or specific) to that effect.

So now that you're sadder but wiser as to the nature of unlimited bandwidth, where do you go from here?

Well, if you're looking for web hosting, here are some companies that advertise more accurate and realistic amounts of traffic and storage, so that you know what you're really getting:

Cartika Hosting

LiquidWeb

MDDHosting

Pair Networks

On the other hand, if you're still looking for a real unlimited deal, I have a car to sell you with unlimited gas mileage. (Fine print: that means the car won't automatically shut down the motor if you exceed an arbitrary number. However, ....)