Bandwidth and its types. Unlimited. Unmetered. Metered.

So you are looking to host somewhere your first website. We’ll bet that you see a lot of different hosting plans sounding like car models, e.g. Sport, Turbo, Maxi, and all that stuff. You see that they offer a certain amount of RAM, CPU, storage, and bandwidth of course and it is quite difficult to understand at a glance what kind of bandwidth means what. 

BlueVPS team is going to tell you what they are and how to distinguish one from another. 

What is Bandwidth and how to calculate it?

Bandwidth is basically the amount of traffic your server can chew in a certain amount of time. Usually, we are talking about a calendar month. This includes either transferring data or receiving it. As you may know, the data is counted in Mbps meaning that if we choose for example 100 Mbps, that means it can transfer data at the speed of 100 megabits per second. If we combine all the seconds in the month and multiply by the speed that would be around 33 TB of data per month and that would be your monthly dose of traffic.

You might ask how much bandwidth you need for the first time. Our answer is that 100mbit of bandwidth should be pretty much enough for any kind of new website with little exception of media heavy websites that work with streaming media. 

How the amount of bandwidth affects your website? Easy. Imagine that you have a bottle with bottleneck of 10cm. You start pouring water little by little and it goes fine. Suddenly some fella decided to help you and started pouring into your bottle with a firehose. Your bottleneck is too little to catch all the water so it goes on the ground. The same with the bandwidth except users are the water. If your users consume more traffic than your bandwidth can handle they will experience lags and other various problems and eventually leave your website to look for a more responsive one.

Bandwidth and its types

Metered

Very often metered bandwidth works on a pay-as-you-go model. The provider monitors your traffic activity, without actually checking where it is going, and then charges you according to what amount of traffic you have used. This model was very popular at the dawn of hosting business but today it is usually used within countries with a very high price for traffic, for example, Hong Kong, Japan, and East Asia. Unless you want to host your website there, there are plenty of locations to choose from us.

Unmetered

Eventually hosting companies decided to implement certain packages of bandwidth for client convenience, which resulted in unmetered hosting. The main gimmick here is that amount of data transfer is unlimited but the speed is limited. This flat rate is much easier for customers to understand and they can predict their hosting bills properly. If you start to calculate you’ll understand that it is a certain trade-off. Not every server uses up to 100mbit of speed potential yet they buy it because it is convenient for them and costs less than paying for the metered traffic. 

Unlimited

Now the most interesting option is unlimited bandwidth. Genius invention by the marketeers. Probably every hoster out there uses this option to sell their services. It works on a psychological level. What appeals to you? Unlimited or fixed-priced food? You might not be able to eat even the full fixed-priced steak, yet unlimited might be offering practically the same steak but with a flavor of unlimitedness. The same goes here. But let’s get this straight. Hosters are not able to make it fully unlimited, because otherwise, they’ll go bankrupt. Some companies really do use this word to deceive customers that’s why you need to read very carefully what you’re paying for.

First of all, you need to understand where is the catch. It could be anything like data transfer restrictions or certain restrictions regarding the plugins you can install on your server or even software.

What to choose Unmetered or Unlimited

Yeah, yeah, you’ve probably heard this a lot of times but everything depends on your project and expectations from it. If you have read carefully the terms of unlimited bandwidth then give it a go. Unless you don’t know what to choose, just use an unmetered one, because the terms there are crystal clear. BlueVPS offers unlimited bandwidth for its VPS, and we must assure you that there is no catch. We don’t have secret trade-offs and you are free to install whatever you want on your server. This is achieved by our company know-how. If you have certain doubts feel free to ask about it our team via LiveChat. We work 24/7 and are always happy to help. Cheers!