Thursday, October 2, 2008

Be Careful with Unlimited Bandwidth Web Hosting Providers

By Ricardo d Argence

If you have a website, one of the most important things you need to know about is bandwidth. Basically, bandwidth is the amount of data you can transfer at one time.

The less bandwidth there is, the slower the pages take to load, regardless of the amount of visitors to the site. With more visitors, each visitor is going to have to wait his or her turn if you don't have enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone. When selecting a hosting plan, you have to consider the bandwidth you will need.

Anyone claiming to provide unlimited bandwidth or monthly transfer is not being completely honest. Nobody can have unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited Bandwidth is a myth.

I've never seen any broadband company offering an internet connection as unlimited megabytes per second. So, how could a web hosting company, which normally doesn't even own its own access lines, claims to customers that it will give them unlimited bandwidth?

With high bandwidth site that have unlimited plans, most of the time they will be disconnected. When they are disconnected, no refunds are given. Typically, the web hosting company states that the website has violated the acceptable use policy or else their terms of service.

When researching what source you will use to serve your website always read the terms of service for any hidden policies. More information about the so-called Unlimited disclaimer can be found in the fine text.

When getting started, monitor your usage for the first three to four months to get a good estimation on how much time you would need from your web hosting service. These factors must be considered while estimating. How many users will access your web site? How many pages to be access? How big are the graphic and HTML files?

More bandwidth is necessary when viewing multimedia files, running computer programs, and downloading files. There is a lot of bandwith required for flash web sites. THe most bandwidth is used when running virtual reality programs and full-length 3-D presentations.

Even though it isn't entirely precise it still allows you to work with something until your site has been up for a good amount of time and until actual statistics have been made. Do not fall for an unlimited bandwidth trap which some companies will toss out in order to lure you in.

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