How truly Unlimited and/or Unmetered is Bandwidth?

[WorldWideXS]

Agree H-Abdullah thats unmetered and unlimited

[M0neyMan]

There is always limitation even if the the Host says unlimited bandwidth.

this is *technically* correct...but then again they make 40GE cards now and i cant think of anyone on this board maxing that out

...so in a sense...kinda unlimited

[stingray]

I want to thank you all for your responses on behalf of all of us who are just joining the world of web hosting .
@ H-Abdullah ... you were brief and to the point. many thanks

[HostColor]

"Unlimited" is not appropriate to offer/use despite that many overselling Shared Hosting providers claim to offer it. "Unmetered" is different. it means that a certain VPS or physical server is tapped at some limitation. The most popular unmetered bandwidth service is "100 Mbps". It mean that the server is plugged in to 100 Mbps port and the host does not meter customer's traffic consumption. As Abdullah mentioned above you do not get burstable bandwidth and you'd not expect overage on unmetered bandwidth, because as customer you are tapped at the highest possible bandwidth port speed negotiated with the web host.

In metered bandwidth you are allowed to transmit a certain amount of bandwidth for a certain period of time (lets say 1 month). If you have used all of it, you need to purchase more!

[vikassaini01]

There may be Unmetered bandwidth in case the Host is getting Unmetered bandwidth from the datacenter !

But in most cases, Hosts purchase high traffic servers from DC instead of unmetered and sell them as unmetered.

Most of the time, it doesn't affect the enduser until the servers are heavily oversold.

Sometimes, clients gets confused by the word Unmetered. So, Hosts use unlimited word for the ease of clients.

[stingray]

......As Abdullah mentioned above you do not get burstable bandwidth and you'd not expect overage on unmetered bandwidth, because as customer you are tapped at the highest possible bandwidth port speed negotiated with the web host.

.... so , when someone rents an unmetered vps service on a 1 Gbps port , he/she should expect some form of capping from the provider so as not to push willingly or accidently high traffic as far as I can understand . This makes a lot of sense now .

[Desi_Boy]

this is called marketing tricks, how to trap customer . they take risk because they now not all peoples use more bandwidths

[HH-Abdullah]

.... so , when someone rents an unmetered vps service on a 1 Gbps port , he/she should expect some form of capping from the provider so as not to push willingly or accidently high traffic as far as I can understand . This makes a lot of sense now .

No. If a provider does this unless told when you are signing up, they are doing wrong with the client and should be avoided. If a provider is selling unmetered on 1Gbps port, they should give you access to that 1Gbps port, without any limitations, without any capping or anything.

[M0neyMan]

There may be Unmetered bandwidth in case the Host is getting Unmetered bandwidth from the datacenter !

But in most cases, Hosts purchase high traffic servers from DC instead of unmetered and sell them as unmetered.

Most of the time, it doesn't affect the enduser until the servers are heavily oversold.

Sometimes, clients gets confused by the word Unmetered. So, Hosts use unlimited word for the ease of clients.

I have never heard of a datacenter or ANY network for that matter to sell "unmetered" bandwidth...it's always 95th percentile.

"unmetered" doesn't get mixed in the equation until 3rd tier hosting and below.

[HH-Abdullah]

moneyman,

Maybe you should check again. Almost all the carriers and datacenters which offer bandwidth also offer unmetered ports. Unmetered and 95th percentile are two different things. 95th percentile allows you burst up to a certain speed for a certain amount of time in a month (36 hours) while on an unmetered port, you cannot burst.

Say you get a 10Gbps unmetered port from Cogent, they cannot bill you for extra bandwidth, right? You're committing to 10Gbps on a 10Gbps port, how can you burst more than 10Gbps? So even if you're using 10Gbps all times, you don't get billed for it because it is "unmetered". But if you're getting 1000Mbps commit on 10Gbps port being billed by 95th percentile method, you can use 1000Mbps all times, but you can "burst" more than 1000Mbps when required for 36 hours in a month, so it's called 95th percentile.