Icethunder – Your place for webhosting stuff!
When will people realize unlimited is just a marketing trick?
Well, today it’s another day for an article to my WH_Reaction category… . I usually start my day with a walk trough some forums I am a member of and try to find something interesting to read there. You would not believe how much important stuff you can find on those forums every day. It gives you the much needed know-how. By reading some interesting posts you might get an image of what’s going around web hosting and hosts at the moment. How the companies treat their customers and most of all you see what problems people have. You don’t only see what problems people have, but you also see the replies from other members of these forums who try to help those trouble ones out.
Today I have stumbled on this thread about a guy who has been asked to pay for the excessive amont of bandwidth he used in the recent month. According to the info he provided he used something around 2TB of bandwidth for some kind of project… . That’s a lot of bandwidth as you know and you would need to look very hard to find a shared host able to provide you even with 1TB of bandwidth/month in a shared environment. And if you would be able o find such a host, than you would need to pay lot of money for this package… .
But with the arrival of unlimited and un-metered plans into hosting business you could start to think, that your $5.99 package marked as “Unlimited bandwidth” or “Unlimited space” is truly real. But you should stop for a moment. In a shared environment you are limited by the resources available to you, because you are not alone at the server! And thus the host most of the time limits what you can and can’t use. Most of the time these limits are set in Terms of Service, Fair Use Policy or a similar document you agree to obey as soon as you sign up for a plan.
Sometime you sign up for a plan before the hosts actually starts to offer “Unlimited” and you will get the upgrade to unlimited, but you should always stay within the limits and you should never think you can really use as many resources as you wish. There are always limits and it’s always better to think before you actually run into some kind of trouble.
The guy from the forum thread has to pay $500 for the 2TB of data although the company tells you at the sign up page you have an “unlimited bw” to your disposal 
Thus you should not pay for anything above your BW, because you don’t know what the limit is, thus you don’t know when you are over the limit and when you are not….But always read the ToS or any other legal document stating what unlimited means in your case
Me advice, for those of you who feel they will need more than 50-60GB/month, is to place the resources hungry stuff to a some kind of file sharing service like Rapidshare, Megadownload etc. Try Google to find some more services This way you will be able to make the amount of bandwidth your site will need lower and you can still safely run your project/website without any worries of passing the 1TB of resources line 
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