Does *Unlimited Bandwidth exist?

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TheeAndre

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Is *unlimited bandwidth (on hosting) real? I always wonder if this is really the case or its just a marketing term that providers use to oversell their capacity. Other providers who get capacity from the major providers have to oversell at a premium for them to exist. Some providers do provide *unlimited bandwidth and they have a limiting factor on the cap they add on the speed of the link. There is a major difference between *unlimited bandwidth on a 10MB link and *unlimited bandwidth on a 100MB link. If both links were used to capacity, there would be a limit to the maximum data you can transfer via the links.

SO, is *unlimited bandwidth real?


*There’s always a catch somewhere.
 
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From what I understand is that mweb you can download 24/7 without them complaining, provided you don't mind shaping during work hours and that you don't try to bypass the shaping.

Shaping I understand because businesses do need priority, so if you consider been shaped falls under unlimited bandwidth. Then yes it does exist.

From what I've read telkom also has unlimited bandwidth with throttling during the day. But once their network comes under strain, we'll see what they do.
 
TheeAndre said:
Do they throttle speeds on hosting platforms?
Click to expand...

Telkom throttles all international traffic by a set amount during the day, then at night its full speed.
Local has no throttling.
I can't remember the exact amounts they throttle by, but it's on this site just do a quick search.
 
shaunvw said:
Telkom throttles all international traffic by a set amount during the day, then at night its full speed.
Local has no throttling.
I can't remember the exact amounts they throttle by, but it's on this site just do a quick search.
Click to expand...

Dude he is talking about hosting not uncapped adsl accounts.
 
No, unlimited bandwidth is not real since it's a measure of throughput per time interval (usually second)

There is a major difference between *unlimited bandwidth on a 10MB link and *unlimited bandwidth on a 100MB link. If both links were used to capacity, there would be a limit to the maximum data you can transfer via the links.
Click to expand...

There's no such thing as "unlimited bandwidth on a 10Mb link". A 10Mb link means just that. The bandwidth is 10Mbps. People often get their terms mixed up it seems. Bandwidth = throughput per time = "speed".

Here's a quote from Wikipedia to help clarify things:

In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in gigabytes per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer..
Click to expand...

I think you are referring to uncapped hosting, which means you can transfer as much data as you want with the bandwidth you pay for. GB is the unit for amount of data transferred, Mbps/kbps/Gbps is for bandwidth. It's like mixing up km travelled and km/h. You cannot have unlimited speed.
 
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Well, if you look at it from a hosting point of view, there is no such thing as unlimited, ever.

Your host, who ever it might be, always has a limit somewhere! They just sell it to you as unlimited, banking on the fact that you'll never use as much.

You'll always get people with a 5MB static HTML page looking for uncapped hosting even if they wouldn't use 100MB data in a month.
 
As you suspected, there is unfortunately no such a thing as truly unlimited bandwidth. Your website will be hosted on a server (whether shared or dedicated) and every hosting server has limited capacity. What they really mean with 'unlimited bandwidth' is that they do not place a specific restriction on website traffic. At some point the server may nevertheless reach its limit in terms of resources and this will result in downtime.

It may be more accurate to refer to this as 'unmeasured bandwidth'.
 
Unlimited bandwidth is impossible, undersea cables have a bandwidth of over 1tb/s.
 
I agree with the posts above.

Unlimited bandwidth does not exist, and here's the reason why:

All hosting companies and resellers have limited bandwidth. Some have 10TB per month, while others have 100TB per server per month. For any additional bandwidth usage, these providers have to pay.

These busy websites often place strain on a server and affects all other websites hosted on the same server, causing slow speeds and even down time.

They will not allow a website to utilize (for instance) 1TB bandwidth per day.

Generally, all hosting providers have a 'fair usage' clause. If your website gets too busy, the hosting provider will contact you and suggest that you move to a Dedicated or VPS server. If you refuse, they will state that you are in breach of their fair usage clause and your site will be blocked.

This is the reality.
 
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