The "Unmetered/Unlimited Bandwidth" Myth

Let's face it - nothing in life is truly free.  GeoCities, AngelFire, and Tripod all offer hosting services that are free to use, however you have to put up with limited bandwidth, poor speed, and those annoying popup banners and ads.  There's no cost to you - but your site visitors pay the price in the long run.

The newest "free" players on the block are the "Unlimited/Unmetered Bandwidth for $8.00" style vendors.  They all offer a seemingly great deal - unlimited bandwidth for an extremely low price.  This is almost always far from the truth.  Often, these bulk dealers oversubscribe their resources.  This is actually quite common in more things than web hosting.  Airlines often overbook seats on planes, your ISP has FAR fewer modems than subscribers, and even banks keep less money in their vaults than their customers have on deposit.  Normally, this isn't a problem for people - unless you are the one left standing at the ticket counter, or stuck waiting for an Internet connection.  Very few of these hosts will actually shut you down completely  - they will just throttle down everyone's available throughput to such low levels that it makes website navigation painful, if not impossible.  Imagine running your site off a 56k modem - that's the level at which some of these providers must go to in order to provide their "unlimited bandwidth" promise.  NETSource Hosting will NEVER oversubscribe it's bandwidth or storage capacities.  EVER!

Another popular tactic is to promise, but not necessarily deliver.  Take this fine print in the terms of service from one of our competitors:

"UNLIMITED USE POLICY
High bandwidth usage: *****.com offers an unlimited use policy by maintaining very large ratios of bandwidth per customer. In rare cases, *****.com may find a customer to be using server resources to such an extent that he or she may jeopardize server performance and resources for other customers. In such instances, *****.com reserves the right to impose the High Resource User Policy for the consideration of all customers.

HIGH RESOURCE USER POLICY
Resources are defined as bandwidth and/or processor utilization.

*****.com may implement the following policy to its sole discretion:

When a website is found to be monopolizing the resources available *****.com reserves the right to suspend that site immediately. This policy is only implemented in extreme circumstances and is intended to prevent the misuse of our servers. Customers may be offered an option whereby *****.com continues hosting the website for an additional fee."*

How is bandwidth unlimited, if they have a right to put a limit on it?  What exactly is a "very large ratio of bandwidth per customer"?  What exactly constitutes jeopardizing server performance?  How can you take any bandwidth and not have it limit the resources available to another customer?  How much are these additional fees they talk about?  How can they call this UNLIMITED?!?

At NETSource Hosting, we are dedicated to providing you with top-notch service, and the resources you pay for.  If we approach our bandwidth limitations imposed by our contract with our upstream providers, we'll simply negotiate for more - BEFORE it becomes an issue for our customers!  If you need additional bandwidth, upgrading your plan is simple - email us at sales@netsourcehosting.com and we'll provide you with a private link to upgrade your plan with no additional service charge!  You can also order additional bandwidth packages from our Add-On's page for one-time boosts of capacity.  We'll email you when you are close to your bandwidth limits to help minimize downtimes.

*The service agreement quoted has since changed.  They now offer 25GB of transfer - far from the "unlimited" plans they offered before.  They are still rather vague on other reasons for service interruptions.