Tutorial Thursday: Understanding Unlimited Bandwidth

Two weeks back I took you through the different types of hosting.

Over the next few articles I’ll cover Control Panels, Hosting Basics, Choosing your host and try to explain the various concepts that surround this industry.

To recap the earlier article, hosting can be divided according to price, by domain or size.

Considering size, hosting can be primarily classified as Shared Hosting, VPS and Dedicated Hosting.

The primary factors in any hosting plan is the disk space and the bandwidth you are allotted. Based on various hosting plans you can have disk space allotted from anywhere between 10MB to 50GB, with bandwidth varying from 500MB to 1TB (that terabyte).

Some hosts even go ahead and advertise that they offer you unlimited disk space and bandwidth. But, is Unlimited the right term to use? Infact, does unlimited really exist?

This week’s article intends to break the myth of the term unlimited.

Getting back to Basics

Disk Space or Disk Storage Space is simply the amount of data that you can store in your hosting account or hard disk or any storage device for that matter. It is usually measured in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) (1GB = 1024 MB).

Bandwidth is the amount of information or data that can be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. This is measured in terms of bits per second (bps) or Kilobits per second (Kbps). You now it measured in megabits per second (Mbps) and gigabits per second (Gbps) as well.

Why Unlimited doesn’t exist

unlimited can be defined as having no limits in range or scope.

When we consider disk space, it just cannot be unlimited, simply because it is limited by the total hard disk capacity. If we have a 200GB hard disk, there is no way you can fit in 300 GB of data! And unlimited is definitely not 200GB

When we are talking about bandwidth, let me explain it to you using my Pipe Example.

The Pipe Example

I’ll try to make it as simple as possible, but you’re going to need to have some basic math knowledge.

Assume that you have a section of a pipe of cross-sectional area of 10 square meters with length 1 meter that has water flowing through it. Let us assume that this portion gets emptied in 1 second. Hence, in one second we have 10 x 1 = 10 cubic meters of water flowing out. You can envision a 10 cubic meter container for the sake of illustration.

This 10 cubic meters per second is the upper limit on how much water can flow out in a second. You can get five cubic meters by reducing the flow of water, but you cannot get 11 because there isn’t any place it can flow out from!

Now assume that this pipe is sealed and fitted with 11 taps; each of which lets out 1 cubic meter of water a second.

If you open one tap, you get 1 cubic meter of water a second. If you open two, you receive two cubic meters of water a second and so on. Opening ten taps will let out all the 10 cubic meters of water that is held in the pipe in one second.
Now, if you open the 11th tap will you get another 1 cubic meter of water? The answer is NO. Simply because it doesn’t exist in that second.
Instead, assuming equal distribution, all the 11 taps will now give out (10/11) i.e. approx 0.91 cubic meters of water, i.e. it now takes longer to get you the same 1 cubic meter.

We can understand this pipe of water to be the network connection and the water to be the data. The taps are analogous to visitors to your site.
At any point of time you get only as much as the network connection can carry. The more the visitors you have the more there will be congestion on the network and the longer it will take each page to load.

What is the Unlimited that hosts mention?

When hosts talk about unlimited, what they actually mean is unmetered; i.e. they will not measure the amount of bandwidth or space that your site consumes.

The assumption is that you will never consume so much that the host will run at a loss. There are exceptions to this, but in those cases you won’t find them on simple shared hosting plans!

Is Unlimited… er… unmetered good?

When has unlimited of anything ever been a good? Remember that if you start to consume really wild amounts of bandwidth and disk space, your host will not like it and in all likelyhood just shut your site down.

So unmetered is bad?

Depends. If your site fits into the heavy usage site, then yes. But, if you’re running a small site, there is very little chance that your host will have a problem. Infact, he may actually be happy to take on ten more of you

I’ll close this article here. I do hope that I’ve been able to break the myth of unlimited bandwidth and instead point you to what is infact unmetered.

If you would like any questions or clarifications, please do comment below.